NEW YORK — This Valentine’s Day, 22-year-old Hannah Smothers will not have a date. Instead of feeling alone, Smothers became curious and creative.
She meticulously curated posts on her Instagram account to see if she could convince friends and family she had a boyfriend, when she did not.
“I really just wanted to see if I could pull it off and people would fall for it,” Smothers told PIX11.
The New Yorker is also a sex-and-relationship editor for Cosmopolitan.com and decided to use the experiment as research.
“I guess I’ve learned my friends will believe pretty much anything I put on Instagram,” Smothers said.
The entire ploy was pulled off with just a few staged photos.
“The first post was just a picture of brunch and there wasn’t anything in the caption about a boyfriend, or a boy even,” Smothers said. “The next one was flowers and I just said, ‘someone not gross sent me flowers.'”
someone not gross sent me flowers
As the posts with vague captions continued, the curiosity of her friends and family peaked. Finally she admitted, the boyfriend didn’t exist.
“I wanted it to make a weird point about how you don’t need a boyfriend to get a lot of likes on Instagram or have a good time on the weekend or have a good Valentine’s Day,” Smothers said.
