Max Areeg, a single mom and TikTok creator from Southern California, shared a story that many of her followers could barely believe. A matchmaker had reached out to her months earlier wanting to set her up with a divorced single dad. She never followed through. Then, without any planning, she ended up sitting right next to that same man at lunch during her daughter’s cheer competition.
Areeg, who has over 610,000 followers on TikTok under the handle @maxareeg, said the whole thing started when a woman messaged her on Instagram claiming to be a matchmaker. The two got on a 45-minute call.
The matchmaker asked about her deal breakers, what she liked, and what she did not like. At the end of the call, she was given the man’s first name and a photo. He was divorced with two kids. Areeg thought he was cute but life got busy, and she never agreed to go on a date.
So she had his photo in her phone the whole time he was sitting next to her
Months later, at her daughter’s cheer competition, she noticed a man in the crowd. There was no ring on his finger. She thought he looked familiar but did not think much of it. The group ended up at a restaurant nearby, and after a long wait, they were seated right next to him.
His daughter, it turned out, was on the same cheer team as her daughter. They all introduced themselves, had a casual conversation, and then he left with his daughter. That is when something clicked for Areeg. She grabbed her phone, scrolled back to February, and found the photo and name the matchmaker had sent her months ago. It was the same man. “There’s no way,” she said in the video, describing the moment she made the connection.
What made the situation feel even stranger to Areeg was that she had been holding a photo of this man in her phone the entire time they were having a normal conversation at lunch. He had no idea a matchmaker had tried to set them up, because she had never agreed to the date.
She described feeling like “such a creep” in the video. Later that same day, a fan came up and recognized Areeg from TikTok, which prompted the man to look her up and follow her on social media. She ended up giving him her number before the day was over.
A month after posting the story, Areeg began sharing updates that suggested things had moved forward. She posted a video getting ready for a first date with a single dad, which her followers quickly connected to the matchmaker story. She later posted a date night update saying she was “seeing where things go.” For women who have been through the exhausting process of dating app horror stories and why men get called out, Areeg’s story felt like a refreshing change of pace.
The man has since been identified by her followers as Dylan, a TikTok creator who runs his own account as a single dad of four. Dylan has his own following on the platform and has posted about his life as a single parent, including recently sharing that he and his kids moved into a new home together. Areeg has built her entire TikTok presence around documenting her life honestly, including her divorce, co-parenting, mental health, and now dating again.
Many women who follow her have also shared their own experiences online, with some pointing out the biggest red flags older men show when they enter the dating scene after a long relationship. Her matchmaker story went widely viral, with the original video pulling in nearly 200,000 likes and hundreds of comments from people who were stunned by the odds of the whole situation playing out the way it did.
Published: May 6, 2026 05:19 am