When Lisette Pylant went on a date at Truxton Inn the evening of August 7, 2017, she didn’t think it would lead to love. She was right about that.

Then again, she never expected that it would bring her several new friends, national television appearances, and a seemingly permanent change to her Google search results. But that’s exactly what happened after her date went viral.

Pylant live-tweeted the wild ride of discovering that her date, Justin, had scheduled five subsequent dates in quick succession at the very same Bloomingdale bar that night, and how the women found, warned, and ultimately befriended each other. The thread racked up retweets at lightning speed. DCist covered the story the next morning with the headline “Idiot Man Schedules Six Dates In One Night. Hero Woman Brings Them All Together,” and we were far from the only media outlet to write about the hullabaloo.

“If you had told me when I tweeted this that, within 72 hours, my face would be on the same [web]page anywhere as two of the most powerful leaders on Earth, I might not have done it, because I don’t think it deserves that level of attention,” says Pylant, reflecting on the experience more than four years later over the phone. “But I also don’t think that’s within my control.”

Her main motivation for tweeting about her experience? After she had met two of the fellow women, they determined that three dates wasn’t a casual scheduling mishap — it was the guy’s plan. “None of my friends are going to believe me,” she remembers thinking. “Like, this is so wild. And so that’s when I started tweeting it.” (Pylant had the other daters’ permission.) She had no idea when she started her thread that the number of women meeting up with Justin at Truxton Inn would double.

To Pylant, though, Justin himself was somewhat beside the point. “My intention was not, ‘Let’s go after this person and ruin their life,’ ” she says. “My intention was very much like, ‘I’m really sick of this treatment and I feel like I’m not the only person that’s experiencing it.’ ”

Clearly, she struck a chord. She was fascinated by how inclined people were to believe the story without skepticism. (For what it’s worth, Justin has never denied what happened, though he characterized his drinks with the women as “pre-dates.”)

Once the tweets were out in the world, though, they took on a life of their own. Others could interpret them however they wanted, sometimes in ways that felt entirely foreign to Pylant.

“I had a couple of people reach out to me about doing books and movies afterwards,” she says. “The thing that kept coming up for me is that people really wanted to shape the story at the time around the romantic aspect of it. And for me, that was just really never the story … It’s about finding solidarity and community and also just respecting your boundaries.”

Perhaps fittingly, then, being part of a viral dating story had almost zero impact on her own dating life. Shortly after the whole incident and entirely separate from it, she started dating a friend she’s known since college, who remains her partner. The only ripple effect in that realm of her life was that, for the first six months of their relationship “we couldn’t go out to eat anywhere in D.C. without someone coming up to us and being like, ‘Are you the girl from the thing?’ and then people asking him a bunch of questions,” she says

But it did lead to some major changes in her professional life. Thanks to the connections she gained from the journey of virality, she started a new job.

“I didn’t expect to be in a position to have all the opportunities that I was given after that experience,” says Pylant. “Just to see the way that a lot of people treated me after that because of the attention that I was getting was interesting … A lot of people after that experience definitely treated me a lot more positively than they had before, which was difficult for me to reconcile.”

Recently, friends started reaching out to Pylant to discuss another viral dating story that reminded them of hers: the saga of West Elm Caleb. In late January, a TikTok user in New York posted about a man named Caleb ghosting her. Other women chimed in, saying they had similar encounters with the same guy. What began as a moment of connection for women with a shared experience quickly curdled into something more nefarious — a nationwide digital search for all the minutiae about his life to get him fired and otherwise face public shame. (This isn’t the first time TikTok and its powerful algorithm have incentivized users to turn random people into subjects of deep investigation.)

As West Elm Caleb reached peak virality, a Google document dubbed “Caleb’s List” began circulating digitally in D.C. Titled a “safe dating directory,” it called out specific, nicknamed men (using monikers like, to use a made-up example, “Bloomingdale Bob”) for ghosting and other generally immature behavior. The shared document stated at the top that its intent was to “warn women about dating these individuals – NOT to dox these individuals to the entire city.” Some critics pointed out that, while potentially hurtful and off-putting, the actions outlined in Caleb’s List were not actually about safety. The document soon shuttered.

Pylant says that she noticed during her viral moment how quickly people conflated acting like a jerk with abuse. “I feel like we’re treating situations like mine or situations like West Elm Caleb like this kind of Me Too-proxy, and I don’t think that those things should be equated,” she says. “I think the reason why women are talking about it is because they’re searching for some type of acknowledgement that other people are experiencing the same thing, a sense of public accountability.”

For Pylant, she had five other people who shared her experience. All six of the women who met at the Truxton Inn remain in touch, bonded by that evening and the following media storm.

“I haven’t even gone on vacation with some of my friends, but I’ve traveled with these girls” to New York for interviews and to Austin, Texas to visit the headquarters of a dating app, she says. Some of the women, including Pylant, have moved away from D.C. but “it is definitely fun to keep up with folks and see what they’re up to,” she says. “There are definitely times when we have all reunited in our group chat to discuss various pop culture moments or things in each other’s lives that are exciting.”