I’ll Never Date an Influencer Again

Julia was a part-time nurse, part-time influencer. We matched on chaotic, thrilling and disappointing meat grinder known as tinder Tinder here in Tampa and I was initially hesitant to meet her. She was surely beautiful, a fitness buff, with long brown hair and hazel eyes. We talked and she was down to earth and had a good sense of humor.

But her social media presence was a slight concern. She was quite flamboyant, and bathed in adulation in an ocean of thirsty commenters. It wasn’t that I didn’t admire her beauty or have a problem with a woman posting these pictures. I’m not jealous in the least.

What I did worried about, was how this interaction can change a person. This type of high octane social media presence is proven to amplify narcissistic behavior and thinking. I know firsthand because I’d already developed a following from writing. The dopamine hit one gets from thousands of highly engaged followers can be utterly intoxicating.

I clicked through to her linked Instagram profile and saw she had more than 300,000 followers, and was doing promos for swimsuits and products. I was impressed. I figured, “Why not meet her? At least she is running a business with this account. It’s not just for the admiration.”

We hit it off and kept seeing each other. Within a few months, she quit her nursing job to become a full-time influencer, and it was understandable: She brought in more than $100,000 that year on the side. In turn, she began to resent nursing and dealing with administrators and healthcare baggage.

But as she leaned into full-time influencing, I began to feel the squeeze. For example, if we were going out to dinner, she had to get ready as if she was going on set to film a movie. So many times, I’d grimace in the other room and say, “We are running late for dinner. Please hurry.”

We had the pre-dinner photoshoot, the mid-dinner photoshoot, which sometimes involved having a waitress take a picture of us in a busy restaurant. I would be fairly embarrassed. Although I also had a large digital footprint at that point through writing, and shared much of my life in writing, this felt different. It was so much more visual, and felt like I was throwing myself into the maw of the paparazzi and putting my privacy in a blender.

I did understand her drive in a way that many men wouldn’t. With online writing, there’s a constant calling to push content and keep your stats up. It’s no different with a social media influencer. They get anxious if they haven’t put pictures or videos up in a few days. The stats page cries out in pain for them to act. And for every picture you see, many, many more are taken.

Julia was also understanding of me in a way that others weren’t. With prior women I’d dated, there was occasionally a negative connotation to me having a social media presence. Sometimes, women assumed it meant I was getting hundreds of messages from girls and that I wouldn’t be trustworthy or reliable on some level.

I’ve read several blogs and opinion pieces by writers about the scourge of dating a male influencer. Danielle Cohen wrote in The Cut, “There’s something distinctly attractive about a man who feels so uninclined to broadcast his thoughts that he hasn’t even created a space for himself to do so.”

I’ll give that her criticism leans towards the more obnoxious internet men, who throw themselves into every cycle of digital drama, and litter the world with their comments and thoughts without any care or concern. That isn’t me. Regardless, dating a man who is visible and outspoken is a different thing. Julia was understanding.

Why things began to fray

We couldn’t get past the aforementioned need for constant photoshoots. We could never to disconnect from this digital world. In her defense, she switched to doing influencing full time and felt stressed to get sponsors and push content.

She also became suddenly insecure about her appearance. She was only 29, but felt like her entire value proposition was anchored in how she looked — which was true to some extent with influencing, unfortunately. She felt like she was competing with teenagers in a youthfulness competition.

It heightened her paranoia. She feared any minor sign of aging or wrinkles. She began getting Botox and fillers, which was fine and her right to do. But I worried she was on a downward slide with her self-esteem and body image. It didn’t help that she was doing promotional events where she met with actual followers in person, and she felt this huge pressure to be as pretty in person as she was online.

The crazy thing? Having been to these events — nobody (man or woman)looks the same in real life. Everyone is still plenty beautiful, but how can any mortal compete against heavily filtered photo that are handpicked among hundreds. It’s an unfair standard to set up for yourself.

This was also around the time we began bickering over trivial matters, the type of stuff you’d look back on years later and say, “Why the heck did we fight over a coffee maker of all things?”

I’ll take the blame too — because I was losing patience for the Instagram-culture bleeding into our lives, and the need for photoshoots and superficial concerns. I knew that going into our relationship. I was dating an influencer. But these minor squabbles became a death by 1000 cuts.

The big fight came when she saw a woman leaving flirty comments on content I’d written — which occasionally happens and is usually totally innocent. I’m far from being a sex symbol.

But I got triggered because her posts were an absolute oasis of thirsty dudes, who left detailed dirty remarks, and poems professing their love for her. It was hundreds of guys commenting on every post and sliding into her DMs, and I said nothing. Why? Because it didn’t bother me. I trusted her. I’m not a suspicious person.

Yet the moment some long-time reader says, “Hey, love your new profile pic :)” it becomes World War III. The double standard triggered me and we got into a nasty fight over it. I should have been more understanding to the stress she was under, and found a better way to turn down the heat.

This then turned into her resenting me for not writing about our relationship enough. Because the internet was so central to her identity, it felt almost incumbent upon us that we continually express our affection publicly and on social media. But it was also a mistake for me not to involving her more in my writing.

To some degree, every couple needs its own culture and language, that emerges from the shared life and spaces they inhabit. This is also called a “relational culture.” It’s the inside jokes and phrases that only you two get.

This relational culture is enhanced or damaged by a couple’s online presence. Specifically, when the online presence begins creating a separate culture and identity that the other person doesn’t understand or relate to, it creates relational distance.

A 2007 study by Dr. Seth Gillihan followed newly wed couples for 18 months and found that those couples that grew more alike over that time, tended to be much happier. The couples that became less alike, “Faced steep drops in marital satisfaction.”

I suspect Julia and I weren’t meant to be together, but our end was hastened by the ways we managed our digital presences. What could have brought us together eventually pulled us apart.

Dating an influencer, male or female, can be challenging in ways that you wouldn’t anticipate. Bring your own share of patience to this ever demanding force in someone’s life. And know that their motivations are often career-oriented, not self-indulgence. Above all, don’t let jealousy trickle into your world or it will implode quite quickly.

My long-time partner, Laura, is far less online than me but I involve her in my writing all the time — intentionally. I bounce ideas off of her and have her review drafts. She is aware of and also part of many stories, as my long-time readers have seen. Through Julia, I learned that when we start to resent the other person’s online presence, you can easily start living a separate life that takes up more and more space. Which is why it’s so important to be proactive in involving each other in these spheres of living.

Laura loves watching horse jumping shows online. I will sit with her and ask questions, and try to involve myself in her little niche world, just as she does in mine. It works great for us. Our relational culture is doing quite well, and we have many inside jokes from it that nobody would understand. And best of all, we don’t have to deal with any thirst bots.