Sometimes, the most authentic connections begin with a little artifice.
In high school, Olivia Brent had an ex who wouldn't leave her alone. Her solution? Get a fake boyfriend to get him off her back. "It was a very quick, gut-panicked reaction," says Brent, who was 17 at the time. When her ex showed up at their school football game, she turned to Tyler, a guy in her social circle sitting next to her on the bleachers.
"I said, 'Oh my god, hold my hand. We have to pretend like we're dating,'" Brent, now 33, recalls.
"What?" he said.
"Roll with it. I'm freaking out."
For the next month or so, the two committed to the bit: talking more often on the phone, coordinating their stories, and figuring out how to make their sudden romance convincing to mutual friends and, most importantly, her ex. What started as a temporary arrangement eventually became a very real, 17-year relationship. And now, it's a marriage that's been going strong for 10 years.
Courtesy of Olivia Brent
If that sounds suspiciously like the plot of a rom-com, that's because fake dating — with a friend, enemy, or a complete stranger — is one of the genre's most reliable tropes.
In "
Off Campus," a shy student and hockey stud feign a relationship to get the attention of her crush. In "
Anyone But You," two flings-turned-enemies pose as a couple to get through a destination wedding. And now, "
The Love Hypothesis" is the latest to join in on the cliché, with Lili Reinhart starring as a student who enters a pretend relationship with a young professor.
On screen, the appeal is obvious: pair two people who insist they're not into each other, give them an opportunity to act like they're in love, and wait for the inevitable tension to kick in. But what happens when the trope leaves fiction? We talked to couples who fake-dated their way into the real thing — how it played out, what they learned, and the unofficial rules for pulling it off.
How These Fake-Dating Couples Found Love in Real Life
Pretending to be a couple might sound simple enough — until you have to keep up the act, or, say, run into your fake boyfriend's very real ex. That's exactly what happened to Jade Parnell, who fake-dated her longtime friend (and now partner of seven years) in 2019 on a two-week vacation in Budapest, Hungary. At first, their arrangement was mostly for their own spontaneous amusement. Then, somewhere between boarding the plane and landing, they realized there was one complication they hadn't anticipated.
"His ex-girlfriend from a number of years ago was also in Budapest," Parnell recalls. "He was like, 'Well, the odds of us bumping into her in a random large city is pretty low.'"
As it turns out, the odds were not that low, and they ran into her at a bathhouse. Suddenly, their innocent game of make-believe had stakes.
"It felt to me more real," she says, "because this is someone who's going to hold you more accountable. It feels more legitimate."
The more they committed to the act, the more convinced Parnell became of their potential to be more than friends. "Calling ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend . . . it just felt so easy," she says. So easy, in fact, that afterward, she suggested they stop pretending. "I was like, "we should just continue to do this." (And they did.)
Courtesy of Jade Parnell
In the movies, fictional couples can seemingly kiss, hook up, and push the boundaries of their arrangement while insisting it's all for show. In real life, however, things can get a lot messier. This is why Maia Fraser was careful about avoiding mixed signals and one-sided heartbreak when enlisting her friend to be her pretend-boyfriend for one night in an attempt to ward off creepy men at a bar.
"I was very concerned about me potentially getting upset because I developed feelings and he wouldn't," she says. So, she established clear boundaries: he could put his arm around her waist, occasionally grab her hand, and generally look the part — but that's where the performance ended. "I didn't open any sexual doors at all," she explains. There was no kissing, no hooking up, and no sneaking off together in private.
With those boundaries in place, she didn't have to second-guess herself or let physical intimacy complicate her situation. However, after the night ended, when there was no longer a charade to maintain, her friend admitted he'd liked playing the role — and wanted it permanently. Two and a half years, they're still together. "I honestly think it's because I didn't allow for those emotions to get mixed up at the same time of the fake dating."
Courtesy of Maia Fraser
It's easy to assume that every pretend couple must have secretly liked each other all along. Otherwise, why even agree to play the part? That's certainly the movie version. But for Brent, the experience itself sparked something she hadn't seen coming: feelings for someone she'd never considered romantically.
While she and her now-spouse had grown up together, to her, their relationship was purely platonic. That is, until the fake intimacy began. The hand-holding, late-night calls, the small decisions they made to sell their romance created a version of their friendship she'd never experienced before — as well as a glimpse of what it might be like to be more than friends. To her surprise, she liked it.
"People are like, 'Oh, it's just movies. It's just fantasy," Brent says. "But it is a real love story. My 33-year-old self is still as madly in love, if not more than my 17-year-old self was."
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Jenna Ryu (she/her) is a writer who covers relationships, friendships, mental health, fitness, and beauty. Most recently, she was the lifestyle writer at SELF, where she reported on the latest wellness trends and launched the magazine's first friendship advice column, Asking for a Friend. Her work has also appeared in Outside Magazine and The Washington Post.
