Woman Details How She Found Love at a Home Depot, Says It 'Felt Like a Modern-Day Fairytale' (Exclusive)

Katelyn Ansari shares with PEOPLE how following a TikTok trend helped her meet her current boyfriend

Though various dating apps have attempted to create spaces for singles to meet each other, most agree that the best place to meet a potential partner is still in person. Surprisingly, Home Depot may have the best success rate.

TikTok creator Katelyn Ansari posted a video as she was scouting out her local Home Depot, hoping to run into a man she could flirt with — and it worked.

“I truly didn't think it would work,” Ansari tells PEOPLE. “I've been single for about two years and casually dated here and there, but legitimately every man I met on Bumble or Hinge was a no-go.”

Though she’d tried the dating apps multiple times, she admits that after a particularly heartbreaking experience, she swore them off and began trying to meet potential partners on her own. Ansari says she tried Scheels, the sporting goods store, before Home Depot, though she left “empty handed.”

“I had dated one guy I met online that, come to find out, was also dating several other girls,” Ansari recounts. “It wrecked me, I am such a relationship girlie and was completely blindsided by his actions."

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This is what sent her on her hunt for an “old-fashioned organic type of love,” leading her to take the advice of other women online. TikTok and other social media sites are filled with single women joking about going to their local hardware store, looking for a “hard working man” to date.

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Ansari’s initial video, showing her peeping around the corner at a man as she worked up the courage to go speak with him, has more than 5.7 million views. In it, she walks up to the stranger, who is browsing by himself, and says she needs to hang a big picture and she isn't sure how to go about it.

He hands her a hook that looks like it’s meant to hang plants from a ceiling, as well as some wire to adhere to the 20-in. x 36-in. picture ... which Ansari didn’t really have waiting to hang at home.

Though his knowledge of how to hang a big picture frame may be questionable, they exchanged numbers and she shared screenshots of their first text exchange, setting up their first date in a follow-up video. She’d asked her followers to help her pick out an outfit for the date — but she confessed to PEOPLE that the date was months ago, and now they’re officially a couple!

“I had tucked these videos away in my drafts because I'm a pretty private person these days and I wanted to make sure he was the man he claimed to be before I publicly shared our story,” she says.

But she and the man she met in Home Depot, whose name is Tryce Easter, have been together since their first date.

“I actually told myself ‘If he doesn’t bring me flowers [on the first date], he’s not it,’ because it’s a lost token of love to bring flowers on a date,” Ansari says. “Sure enough, he showed up with a cowboy hat, nice jeans, a button-up and flowers.”

“It felt like a modern-day fairytale. He’s made me start believing in love and romance again.”

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Since sharing the story of how they met, Ansari admits she’s been “in shock” at the response she's received.

“I've lived a majority of my adult life sharing my journey through social media but never to this capacity,” she says. “I had my little community and that was it. My anxiety has been through the roof if I'm being completely honest because I never expected … our story to go viral.”

And to the women who have started visiting Easter’s page since the pair hard-launched their relationship online, Ansari has a simple message: “I'm watchin’ you ladies.”