An Australian makeup artist shares how a man stood her up after flying over 1,500 miles to Bali, Indonesia, for a first date in a viral video.
In a TikTok video that has since been viewed nearly 37,000 times, 29-year-old Jess Austen (@jesszautsen) explains that she was invited to come to Bali for a holiday trip by an Indonesian man she had met on the dating app Hinge.
“Originally I was going to do a ‘come to Bali with me on a first date’ video, but instead we’re going to have a ‘what the f**k is wrong with men’ FBI session,” Austen begins the video.
Austen explained in an interview with news.com.au that she had been conversing with the man via Instagram DMs for several months but never met due to their respective relationships.
The pair began talking again after both were no longer in relationships. In one of the exchanges, Austen explains that the man asked if she wanted to come on a trip to Bali, to which she responded with: “Yeah, super tempting.”
They then started planning dates and trips, with the man expressing excitement about “the idea of you coming.”
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After going on a six-hour trip, Austen says she didn’t hear from him but did not worry immediately as they planned to spend a week together. However, the man’s next messages revolved around pushing their date back until he eventually stopped replying and even unfollowed her on social media.
In the final seconds of her video, Austen reveals that she actually bumped into the man who ghosted her on her flight home.
“He was sitting in front of me so I saw him in real life and at least confirmed he wasn’t a catfish,” she was quoted as saying. “He ignored me, if he saw me – but how could he not? I was standing next to him waiting to get into my row.”
Austen said she would have preferred to have called him out, but she was left too embarrassed to do so.
“Feeling insecure, no words were exchanged,” she added. “He just started straight at the ground and didn’t look around once.”
Austen provides more details about her story in a follow-up video:
She told news.com.au that the man explained why he ghosted her after the video went viral.
“He told me that he’d met someone in Lombok and he felt so embarrassed because he’d asked me all the way there so he just disappeared,” she said. “I laid into him about how cowardly that is and that he shouldn’t have invited me if he was going with the intention of meeting whoever and going with the flow. There was clearly no importance set on meeting me even though he invited me. It was so cruel.”
In another video, Austen shares that the man has apologized and expressed his intent to be better:
