Ashley Gutierrez was not looking to start a movement. The Arizona law student simply sat down, opened TikTok and began talking through an experience that had been weighing on her a relationship that looked promising on the surface and slowly revealed something else entirely. More than 12,500 views later, she had struck a nerve that thousands of women immediately recognized as their own.
Her video drew a clear and useful distinction between people who are fundamentally harmful and those who carry habits damaging enough to quietly derail a relationship anyway. What Gutierrez encountered, she explained, was the latter a younger man who came across as warm, engaged and easy to talk to. It took time before a different picture began to take shape.
The 3 red flags she almost missed
The first thing that gave her pause was his Instagram account, where he followed nearly 5,000 women. On its own, the number might seem dismissible. In the context of everything that followed, it felt like an early signal she wished she had weighed more carefully.
The second red flag was a pattern in how he showed up or didn’t. He was communicative and attentive in the beginning, but dates began disappearing from the calendar with increasing regularity, always attributed to work. The explanations arrived smoothly and often, which made them harder to push back on and easier to accept longer than she should have.
The third was the way he framed his own emotional unavailability. He pointed to past trauma as the reason he struggled to commit, which Gutierrez found she could understand until she noticed that his primary coping strategy appeared to be frequent trips to Las Vegas. The gap between the explanation and the behavior told its own story.
She ended the relationship in a thoughtful message that named what she had observed. His response was brief, pleasant and entirely unbothered. He wished her well and moved on without addressing anything she had raised.
What she found after it ended
After the breakup, Gutierrez’s best friend suggested she search for him on Are We Dating the Same Guy, an online platform built specifically for women to share and compare experiences with the men they have dated. The group originated as a Facebook community in New York City and has since expanded into a widely used resource, credited with helping women avoid scams and, in some cases, contributing to the identification of serial predators.
What she found there stopped her cold. There were multiple posts about him written by women she had never met, describing experiences that echoed her own in ways that felt too specific to be coincidence.
A community that turned recognition into relief
When Gutierrez posted her TikTok, the response came quickly and in volume. Women who had encountered the same man began appearing in her comments, some with sympathy, some with disbelief and many with an unmistakable sense of relief at finally finding confirmation that what they experienced was real and worth naming.
The collective reaction captured something that has become increasingly familiar in the way women approach dating in the digital age. Online forums and social platforms have quietly become an informal but powerful layer of due diligence a place where individual experiences, once isolated and easy to dismiss, become patterns that are much harder to ignore.
Are We Dating the Same Guy has become one of the more visible expressions of that instinct, giving women a structured space to share what they know, ask what others have seen and build a kind of collective memory that no single person could maintain on her own.
Why the story keeps spreading
Gutierrez’s video resonated not because it described something rare but because it described something familiar. The specific details the Instagram following, the canceled plans, the smooth emotional deflection were recognizable enough that thousands of women felt seen by them.
What her story ultimately points to is less about one man and more about what becomes possible when women compare notes. The information was always there. The community just needed a place to put it.
