A year into the pandemic, a lot of people are experiencing dating app fatigue. On TikTok, one guy set up his own search for a wife. They got married last weekend.
As BuzzFeed details, 24-year-old Gunnar Michels posted to TikTok last month, announcing that he wanted to “marry someone from TikTok.” He even had a plan: He’d fly them out to Las Vegas to tie the knot. Michels said he was taking this leap of faith because “People take life too seriously.”
Three days after that post, 24-year-old Danielle Elleinad sent in her TikTok application and she quickly became a commenter favorite. In the video, she was already wearing a wedding dress and apparently lives in an ambulance. On Jan. 23, after they reportedly FaceTimed, Elleinad announced that Michels had picked her and that they’d be married on Feb. 14.
They both went on to document their respective bachelor and bachelorette parties, as well as the road trip to Las Vegas.
Michels said on TikTok that this experience has been “such a fun, crazy road.” He also spent some time thanking all the people who documented it; Michels is a videographer himself, and a couple weeks before the TikTok wife search he posted a video to YouTube about getting a tattoo with a Tinder match that was also framed as a “stranger” experiment.
Elleinad was a little more realistic about “happily ever after.” She told BuzzFeed: “I do care about Gunnar for sure, but love is a strong word.”
While the extremely online are probably counting down to a milkshake duck scenario, or the reveal that this was just a stunt, this also signals that TikTok could fill the dating reality show void of the last year. Around the same time Michels’ first video went viral, a 24-year-old woman who’d previously announced she was taking applications for her first kiss documented the event on TikTok.