He makes you feel like you are the only one in the world’: NYC woman dates 2 Hinge men. When it’s time to pick one, she chooses the guy who takes the news better
Online dating can feel like running a one-man HR department. You’re sifting through profiles, managing multiple conversations, and trying to figure out who’s actually serious about a real relationship. For those who want something long-term, there’s another layer: how honest can you be about seeing more than one person, and how will someone handle it when you finally choose?
One New York City woman says she tried to do everything “right” while dating two people she met on Hinge: be transparent, choose thoughtfully, and follow her gut. Things didn’t go too well.
She dates two Hinge men and picks the one who handles her honesty
In a three-part TikTok series, which got over 17,000 views, Vi (@healwithvi) walks viewers through what she calls a messy Hinge experience. She explains that she meets one man on the app while she’s already seeing someone else.
“I was already dating another person,” she says, so she gives both of them nicknames: Zach and Nick.
At first, she says Zach feels like the obvious winner. He pursues her hard, sending a rose, messaging multiple times, and asking her out quickly. After their first date, he pushes for more time together, inviting her for coffee right away.
“Obviously, he was love bombing me from the start,” she says, but in the moment, it felt romantic. She keeps seeing both men for a couple of weeks and eventually decides she has to be honest.
Vi tells both that she’s dating the other. Nick, she says, gets very upset. Zach, on the other hand, reacts calmly.
“He’s like, ‘Oh my god, I totally get it. We just started dating,’” she recalls. That reaction makes her feel safe enough to keep things going with him. Looking back, she calls him “love bomber final boss” and admits, “He makes you feel like you are the only woman in the world.”
Love bombing and playlists
Vi says Zach sends flowers, takes her to concerts, and writes out a detailed list of all the things he likes about her, from her humor to their aligned goals. He even visits her Brooklyn neighborhood while he’s in New York, buys her a souvenir, and drafts a handwritten postcard telling her how glad he is they met.
Around this time, she notices he’s still active on Hinge and has changed his location to New York. When she asks whether he met anyone while he was there, he denies it and tells her he only switched it because he felt weird that she was openly dating someone else.
“I trusted him,” she says. Between the gesture-heavy courtship and the long messages, she assumes he’s just waiting for her to choose him fully.
Eventually, she does. After getting COVID-19 from the other man and spending a weekend with him that leaves her feeling unsure, she decides Zach is “the one” and breaks it off with her other Hinge date, Nick. She texts Zach to say she ended things and is ready to give their relationship a real shot.
Instead of celebrating, he pulls back. On a call while visiting his dad, he tells her he’s stressed and asks to talk about it later. “This is when I should have walked away,” she says now.
From there, she describes a familiar pattern: vague answers about commitment, talk of stress and work, and growing emotional distance. They have a “beautiful Christmas date,” then she suggests a short break while she travels. When they reconnect, he love bombs again—big flower arrangements, constant calls, romantic songs added to a shared playlist.
“It’s a cycle,” she tells viewers. “The big flower bouquets, the calls, the FaceTime. Then the distance.”
The DM from his girlfriend
The breaking point comes after what he frames as a difficult season. Vi says Zach loses a friend, travels to Northern California to see his dad, and then heads to New York for the funeral. While he’s away, she feels a shift. This is a man who used to FaceTime constantly, she says, but now he barely calls.
Her gut tells her something is wrong. “My intuition was right the whole time,” she says, but every time she voices concern, she says friends tell her to be more understanding because he’s grieving.
When they meet up after the trip, he breaks things off, telling her he needs to focus on grieving and can’t give her what she wants. She’s devastated but tries to stay kind, checking in on him over the next few months as more losses pile up in his life.
They stop talking by summer. She assumes that’s the end, until this year, when he starts resurfacing in her digital life. She notices he likes a reposted TikTok on her personal account, edits a shared note from their past, and adds new songs to their old playlist, tracks she describes as “romantic, I wanna come back to you songs.”
Then she posts a different ex, “Mike,” on TikTok and Instagram. She sees that Zach views the story. It feels deliberate enough that she finally texts him: “Hey, is there anything you wanna say?”
He doesn’t answer, but instead, she gets a “hey girl” DM from his girlfriend.
She finally learns the truth
According to Vi, the woman tells her that she and Zach live together now, and that she recently saw Vi’s name pop up. When she asked him who Vi was, she says he brushed her off as “a girl he dated a really long time ago,” then stormed off, locked himself in their room, and later called her crazy.
On a call, Vi learns that the girlfriend, whom she calls Mary, met Zach on Hinge in October 2023. That’s the exact period Vi remembers asking him whether he met anyone in New York and being told no. “He could have easily told me,” she says, especially because she herself was openly dating multiple people at that time.
Mary also tells her that the weekend Zach framed as a grief-filled funeral trip included a romantic New York weekend for the two of them. Vi believes that explains his sudden distance, the late-night “Diet Coke until 2 a.m.” story, and his refusal to formally commit.
“The whole time, it was about her,” Vi says. “He was dating her this whole time, and he lied to me every step of the way.”
Viewers weigh in
In the comments, viewers had strong reactions.
One person mocked the situation, writing, “BREAKING: Woman Simultaneously Dates Two Men For Months, Suddenly Decides She Wants A Boyfriend, Becomes Upset When Her Favorite Candidate Is Strangely Fine Leaving Things Exactly How She Set Them Up.”
Others pushed back hard on that framing. “The comments from men on this video are absolutely insane,” one commenter wrote, arguing that some men “can’t fathom that someone may be honest about dating two people at once” without branding her a stereotype.
Others focused on the emotional manipulation. “They really try so hard to make us think we are the bad/crazy ones when it’s them,” one person wrote on part two. Another called his playlist moves “actually diabolical,” especially given that he allegedly had a live-in girlfriend at the same time.
The Mary Sue has reached out to Hinge via email and Vi via TikTok messages.
@healwithvi The time I slowly lost my mind. To be continued… #gaslighting #cheating #breakup #relationships #fyp ♬ original sound – Heal with Vi
The importance of trusting your gut
Relationship experts warn that “love-bombing” or intense affection early on, rapid emotional closeness, grand gestures, and constant reassurance can feel flattering at first but later turn destabilizing.
When you get a large amount of attention, and then it suddenly disappears, it can leave people questioning their own instincts instead of the behavior in front of them. Over time, that push-pull pattern can create confusion, self-doubt, and emotional dependence.
Therapists also say that repeated moments of dismissal, avoidance, or vague explanations are often where intuition starts sounding the alarm. Most of the time, there will be a reason for those gut feelings, and it’s important to investigate them.
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