Gina Penelope, 25, had just moved to Texas from Mexico when she needed help with her immigration case. Not able to afford hiring a lawyer, she came up with a way to obtain free legal advice — dating an attorney.
“I researched on LinkedIn a lawyer in my area that could help me and then ‘bumped into him’ for a week straight at his local Starbucks until he asked me out,” Penelope confessed in a now-viral video, which has been viewed more than 1.6 million times. “We dated for about a month, in which he helped me out so much and I got my legal procedure resolved.”
“Mastermind,” a track from Taylor Swift’s new No. 1 album “Midnights,” is inspiring legions of women to admit how their relationships actually came to be. They’re posting their confessionals to TikTok — #Mastermind and #TaylorSwift — while a 7-second snippet from the song plays in the background.
Swift sings, “What if I told you none of it was accidental? And the first night that you saw me, nothing was gonna stop me,” over various posts of women admitting to their devious ways.
In one video, with over 3 million views, 24-year-old Sarah Young admits that when her boyfriend of 18 months broke up with her, she went to great lengths to get him back. It seemed like they were destined for each other when they reconnected on Bumble. In reality, Young had sat outside his apartment with her radius set to 1 mile, swiping for 45 minutes until they magically matched on the dating app.
“I said it was fate and now we’ve been together for four years and our wedding is in July 2023,” she said of their rekindled relationship.
While such staged run-ins have been branded “insane” and “highly manipulative” by some on social media, others are marveling at what some women have engineered.
Katie Johnson was at a college party four years ago when she met a cute guy named Kurt. Wanting a reason to see him again, she sneakily stored away the travel mug he had brought with him, so she could give it to back to him at a later date.
When they hung out again, Kurt mentioned he’d lost his favorite mug — and Johnson swooped in to the rescue.
“We laughed, and he was amazed I had what he was looking for the entire time,” she said.
They started dating, and after a few months, she told him how she’d taken the mug intentionally. The incident became a running joke in their relationship.
Penelope, who got the legal advice she needed, admitted she may have taken it a bit “far” when she landed her lawyer in 2019. She investigated his social media profiles to figure out where and when to bump into him, leading some to accuse her of stalker-like behavior.
“I’ve received a lot of backlash and criticism in my comments [with people] trying to compare the situation if the roles were reversed,” she told The Post. But she notes that she would have backed off if the attraction wasn’t mutual, and that the dynamic is just different when women pursue men.
“As long as we [live] in a patriarchal society, women do not make men vulnerable in the way men do women.”
Relationship expert and podcaster Kate Leggett said the trend highlights vulnerability and fear of rejection that women have.
“Instead of going up to someone and being secure in yourself and in your desires, and saying like, ‘I want to take you out on a date,’ we have to do this like really weird, indirect [way],” she explained to The Post.
Penelope sees it in a more positive light and believes there’s a sexist element to the negative reactions.
“At its core, it’s simply funny,” she said. “I believe the backlash comes from the incredibility that women can and put themselves in positions of power, or find a way to have the upper hand.”
Johnson says you can’t argue with the method’s effectiveness: She and Kurt are still together.
“[We’re] very much in love over four years later,” she said. “We like to look back and laugh.”
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