Some bad dates are easy to forget, while others are so awful that you can recognize the person responsible years later, even if they have no recollection of you.
This is exactly what happened to Tiffani Beste (@tiffaniandcompany), who recently found herself face-to-face with the man behind what she calls the “worst date I’ve ever been on.”
Beste recalls the encounter from her car at 2 a.m., shortly after returning home from a night out with friends. Her video has more than 26,000 views.
She explains that she and her girlfriends were celebrating a birthday when she spotted a familiar face at the bar.
“I see this guy, and I recognize him from someone I went on a date with like six, seven years ago,” she says.
She says she immediately turned to her longtime friend and asked her, “Do you remember that guy that I went on a date with who told me at the end of the date that he’s purposely rude to first dates so that he can gauge how they’re going to behave?”
Beste says the man deliberately treats his dates poorly to assess “what kind of woman they are” and “how meek and submissive they are.” He apparently divulged this tactic at the end of a “terrible terrible terrible date.” She says her friend remembered it immediately.
‘You were really not very nice to me’
She says she avoided interacting with the man despite repeatedly seeing him around the bar.
But when she and her group of friends moved on to the next spot, they crossed paths with him again. This time, he reportedly approached her and asked, “Hey, were you at the last bar?”
After confirming that she had been, he gave her a compliment: “I saw you, and I said to myself, ‘oh, she’s gotta be in a relationship, she’s just like so beautiful,’” Beste recalls.
When he eventually asked her out again, she says she reminded him how he had treated her years prior.
“I actually just have to tell you that you and I have gone out before and you were really not very nice to me,” she told him.
“No, I didn’t do that,” was his reply.
She says she proved it by providing his name and rattling off details from their encounter years earlier. She calls the date a “canon event in my life,” and explains that “When someone asks me, ‘tell me about the worst date you’ve ever been on,’ I tell them about this story.”
The man asks for a second chance
Once she convinced him, she says the man began insisting she let him make it up to her, noting that he was “quite intoxicated.” Beste rejected him, explaining: “I don’t need you to make it up to me, I don’t wanna go out with you again. Like, I’m good.” But she couldn’t resist confronting him, saying, “I just couldn’t let you sit here and hit on me knowing what I know.”
Beste says after she got home, she searched her phone and found that she still had his phone number saved under his name, and that his area code matched the place she remembered him being from.
“This is definitely him,” she says.
The original date
For anyone wondering just how bad the original date was, Beste delivered the details in a follow-up video.
Apparently, she’d driven 35 minutes to meet the man at a bar only to discover he lived within walking distance. She says he barely acknowledged her throughout the date and didn’t ask her any questions. Instead, she says he chose to watch sports.
At some point, he invited her back to his apartment. She says a female friend “[burst into] the apartment like she is the police.”
The three went to another bar together.
Eventually, Beste decided to call it a night. He walked her to her car and dropped his bombshell: “I like to kind of be rude to women on first dates because I like to see how they’re going to conduct [themselves], like how they’re gonna behave.”
She says she wishes she had left much earlier but says she lacked experience, chalking the entire night up multiple times to being 25 and “stupid.”
Was the man negging her?
The man’s alleged dating strategy is characteristic of “negging,” a manipulative dating tactic that involves undermining another’s confidence through backhanded compliments, insults disguised as “constructive criticism,” and other subtle or not-so-subtle put-downs.
Psychologist Mark Travers presents research suggesting that negging could mask a sense of insecurity. He cites an experiment in a 2023 Forbes article that found that people were not only more likely to use backhanded compliments to convey status but also more likely to use them as a shield if they perceived a threat to their own status.
He concluded that those “who are hypersensitive to rejection” may use this manipulation tactic more often to even out what they perceive to be a power imbalance.
Fortunately, the only person who failed this man’s dating experiment was him.
@tiffaniandcompany
Subplot News reached out to Tiffani Beste via TikTok direct message.
