I Tried The Tea App So You Don’t Have To—Here’s What I Found

Imagine the time, heartache, and cute date night outfits single women could save if they could read the reviews on men before going out with them? Well, there’s now an app for that…but can we trust it? For weeks, social media has been ablaze about the Tea Dating Advice app: a forum that helps women vet men by sourcing ratings from other women who have dated or know them. The app also enables you to run reverse image searches to see if you’re being catfished, complete full background checks, and verify whether or not a person is on sex offender registries. On the surface, it sounds like Chika Uwazie shared similar sentiments, saying that the vetting process in dating should start with your discernment and not an app. “I understand the premise of why the Tea app was created, but I also feel like as women, we have to do that inner work of listening to ourselves,” she says. “I just feel like when you start to see red flags or things like that don’t add up, instead of asking the whole world, leave. There’s another man out there for you that you don’t have to do all these things with.”

In addition to using your inner compass to sleuth out the bad apples, Uwazie encourages women to take stock of how a man shows up for you. “I tell women to look for consistency, look for how he treats others. All of that will tell you what type of man this person is,” she says. 

Since the uptick in the Tea app’s popularity, there have been copycat apps popping up like TeaOnHer—a rival app designed for men. White predicts there’s a world in which apps like this will devolve into platforms for mud slinging. “A lot of people get their feelings hurt while dating and want to try to regain control of the situation by talking shit,” he says bluntly. “It’s just like if I went to a bank and I didn’t like the attitude or the tone that the teller gave me. I can go on to Google reviews and give a shitty review. It’s the same. Now, am I saying that what people are putting on this app is not true? No, it’s true to them, but it might not be the full truth.” White adds that, unlike Google reviews, there’s no opportunity for the person being reviewed to respond or give their interpretation of the relationship, which creates an unfair representation.

The idea of writing Yelp-ish reviews for men is nothing new. This concept has been done before by private social media with groups like Are We Dating The Same Guy on Facebook, which has since received a slew of defamation lawsuits. The Tea app has already encountered the same fate, as it’s already been hit with several class action lawsuits following two data breaches. 

“The app will be gone sooner than we know it,” says White. Uwazie, who also works in the tech space, thinks it will take a lot more violations for Apple to step in and shut the app down, but believes it’ll start to mimic the Lipstick Alleys of the world. “I don’t think it’s going to be a game-changing app.” Nevertheless, she doesn’t think we’ve seen the last of dating forums like this, and that people will ultimately make their own decisions whether the information they find about a potential bae is positive or negative. “I don’t think it’s solving anything.”

So, is the Tea app really an empowering dating tool? It depends on who you ask. While I applaud the app’s mission of rallying women together to protect one another, I don’t think compromising my personal data was worth finding out what I already knew. The app has a strict anti-bullying policy, and states that you can’t make fun of men or you could face banishment from the app. From first glance, I can see that these rules aren’t being strictly enforced. I read some cringeworthy reviews on everything from men’s baby mama issues to their penis sizes. As a first-time user, it was hard to distinguish fact from fiction. This, coupled with the never-ending privacy concerns, is one of the reasons I’d probably tell my friends to use official background checks over the platform. 

As a dating coach who develops strategies to help women get their guy, White thinks women will be better off fine-tuning their inner trust. “Women have a beautiful, and I would say even stronger, intuition than men have. We have to start trusting that. Start using that instead of using [your] brains, because our brains actually will find a solution or a story that we want, not what is true.” Uwazie echoes this idea, making it clear that the right men will leave little room for second-guessing. “The best way to know if a man is actually serious about you, is that you’ll never have to call me.” 

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