Dating as a Small YouTuber is Mortifying

6 min readMar 31, 2021

Are you famous? How much money do you make? I wouldn’t call yourself a YouTuber. *UNMATCH*

You can be confident in your videos and still die from embarrassment when your Hinge match discovers your YouTube channel. Your online persona becomes their first impression. Will they subscribe to your love?

Dating Apps Have Low Success Rates

Let’s get this out of the way: dating apps suck, but we all use them. It’s hard to meet someone organically; so, we resort to Bumble, Tinder, and Hinge. But we tend to strive for new matches instead of developing connections with those we matched with yesterday.

To Declare or Not to Declare My YouTube Channel

At first, I nestled my YouTube occupation in-between my traditional job and freelance copyediting side hustle. So, it was there but presented as a passion project. I felt like I was doing myself a disservice. I should be proud of my content. I love discussing YouTube with others. And, my date should know that I post to the internet.

So when I returned to Hinge, I was very open about my YouTube. Besides, at the time, it was my only job; so, I’d have to type in that I was unemployed to keep it a secret. (Nothing is wrong with temporary unemployment, but I’d look lazy to still be unemployed months later.) Also, my past 2 relationships were with guys who weren’t supportive of my channel, so I didn’t want to get sucked into a round three with that negative energy.

Many conversation ice-breakers were about my YouTube channel. Fair. People are always curious about the entertainment industry. But some guys were blatantly rude. They would question its value and ask how much money I made. I felt judged. I felt like a loser. I spent hours on my videos, taking my channel very seriously, to have its quality diminished with a few words.

“Your assumptions about me” video thumbnail…a video I wish they would watch first

They Unmatched Me

My matches would search my channel within minutes. (I know because they would tell me!) Guys always click on my break-up storytime and/or swimsuit try-on-haul videos, then unmatch me minutes later. Yes, I know they unmatched me because of my YouTube channel, but there are really a million other potential sub-reasons that turned them off from me:

I wasn’t as attractive as they wanted me to be with my face and body;
They didn’t find my content entertaining or funny, so they couldn’t respect my work and, therefore, they couldn’t respect me;
My video topics and/or the way I speak made me sound ignorant, ditzy, and shallow;
They were embarrassed about their friends, family, and coworkers watching my content;
The comments I make in videos imply that I live and act a certain way;
Hearing me call myself a YouTuber with under 10,000 subscribers made them suffer secondhand embarrassment;
They only viewed my clickbait titles and thumbnails and assumed they were true statements about me;
Dating me was risky because I might expose them in a storytime video;
My clothing haul videos made me look “slutty” or “easy” (and P.S. thank you for unmatching me for that one, ya jerk!);
My flirty nature and swimsuit videos made me appear more sexual than I really am;
They didn’t make a personal connection with me through my videos, so they wrote me off early;
They thought I posted NSFW content on my Patreon;
They think that I over-document my life and spend most of my waking hours on social media. They may worry that our relationship would be totally online;
They think YouTube is easy so I’m lazy to only be doing that;
They think I’m self-absorbed;
They think that I’m a delusional clout-chaser;
They believe I have no other talents.

Because these ex-matches never disclosed their reason(s) in an exit survey — a feature that should really be added to the Hinge app — I can only assume it’s all of these reasons. And having my brain tell me all of these reasons on loop while I’m trying to fall asleep is incredibly unhealthy.

If they wrongfully judge me without getting to know me, it’s on them. If they have sexist beliefs, I don’t want to date them. But when a dating app offers you so many options, you need to be picky to narrow down your focus. Of course, I wouldn’t make it to the second round! And also vice versa, I fizzle out a lot of conversations as well in order to make time to strengthen certain connections. We’re all guilty of this, but it sucks when it happens to you.

The Popularity Complex

When it comes to measuring YouTube success, people always gravitate toward the subscriber count. (Even though video views and engagement indicate how much the channel makes with ad revenue and brand deals.) Riding at 8,000 subscribers in 2021 most likely doesn’t impress people when the YouTube algorithm usually recommends channels with at least 100,000 subscribers.

Logging into YouTube and always seeing the bigger channels makes people assume that YouTube is easy and/or YouTube success can always be achievable with hard work. This is actually a bigger issue beyond the topic of dating.

The funny but sad reality is that whatever idiotic, frivolous video I post at 8k subs would be considered genius content at 100k subscribers. I could be hanging spoons of peanut butter from my walls and people would say “well, she’s doing something right.” But for now, I am a cute nobody. (Yep, you better believe I still look good!)

What I Wish People Noticed

Most people are consumers instead of creators, so they don’t share my lens when viewing YouTube videos. I can’t expect all of these guys to observe all of my creative choices.

I wish they noticed that I dominate the first page of Google when you type in my name “Lesley Rowland.” My thumbnails are colorful, multi-dimensional, and pretty. (You can view all of them at once on my Video Tab.) My wide range of video topics reveals that I have many interests. My weekly uploads to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok show the time and effort I put into my business.

I also wished they recognized that my editing is intentional. What you may find annoying, weird, too much, or off-handed is purposely placed in my video to provoke a reaction. I’m riling up viewers to leave a comment — without being offensive or controversial, of course. Although my on-camera persona is very similar to my real personality, everyone acts “on” for the cameras. I’m happy, silly, and sassy, but I can relax and chill out too.

Ok. I’ll stop my brag session, but somebody had to say it! So if you’re reading this and have recently matched with me or another small YouTuber on a dating app, I hope you take a second look at my/their YouTube channel and see how fun it can be.