Tana Mongeau got engaged to Jake Paul over the weekend while celebrating her 21st birthday. Did either of those names mean anything to you? What if I put it like this: The YouTuber who put on that famously disastrous convention is now engaged to the YouTuber who put his neighbors through hell? Still no? Okay, strap in.
Tana Mongeau is a YouTuber best known for the time she tried to throw a convention for her fans — TanaCon — and it went up in flames. (Metaphorical flames, though many attendees reported getting severely sunburned after standing outside in the hot sun waiting for an event that would never happen.) She threw the event after she was not invited to VidCon, an annual event for fans and creators, in 2018. Both events took place in Anaheim, California. VIP tickets cost $77 and came with a gift card full of stickers and condoms. The event was shut down after a few hours for overcrowding. “We just ended up driving home with nothing but broke bank accounts and sunburns,” one attendee told me. Mongeau tweeted she wanted her former Disney Channel star Bella Thorne to take her back at the beginning of June. It did not happen. (Mongeau used to be in a relationship with Thorne, who was also dating rapper Mod Sun simultaneously; Mongeau then briefly dated YouTuber Brad Sousa, until he cheated on her, an event she detailed in a 20-minute video.)
Jake Paul is a YouTuber, too. He’s the founder of Team 10, an incubator for social-media stars. (Jake is not to be confused with his brother, Logan, the one who drew international ire after posting a video of an apparent suicide victim he found hanging from a tree in the woods in Japan.) Last year during a Team 10 live tour stop in New York City, Paul performed his song “Jerika,” an ode devoted to his then-girlfriend Erika Costell. (In the song he compares her to a chicken thigh.) The couple even sold merchandise branded for their relationship. Days after the show, Paul posted a video claiming he and Costell had gotten “married.” Months later, Paul admitted the entire relationship was for show and comparing it to the WWE, “people know that’s fake.”
Naturally, then, Paul began dating Mongeau earlier this year. It appeared to be entirely for publicity: Their first video together, “Mukbang In Bed With My Rebound Jake Paul,” felt very much like two famous people glomming onto each other for mutual benefits. (In a mukbang video, somebody eats a ton of food while talking to the camera. Mongeau calls Paul a “friend” in the opening shot.) That video popped up after Mongeau posted a selfie that fans deduced was taken in Paul’s bed. All this happened around April and the couple have appeared in several videos together since, including one where they got matching tattoos of seven tally marks, one count for each week they’d been together. (Paul and Costell also got matching GOAT tattoos while they were “dating.”)
Which brings us to their engagement. On Twitter, Mongeau tweeted early Monday morning that Paul had proposed and the two are now engaged.
She quote-tweeted somebody questioning if the announcement was legit insisting the proposal was real. Over on Instagram, she posted videos of a diamond ring on her hand and a cake, with a fake ring on top, that reads “will you marry me Tana?”
Later on Monday, Paul tweeted saying he had proposed. For whatever that is worth.
So is it real? If you trust Jake Paul and Tana Mongeau … then yes. If you’re skeptical, and honestly past precedent means you should be skeptical, then maybe no. Earlier this month an influencer got engaged via a whirlwind branded scavenger hunt that had been pitched to marketers weeks before the big event. Paul and Mongeau have made their livelihoods living out their every drama and life moment online. Staging a proposal, or rushing into one purely for the clout, wouldn’t seem like such a crazy idea.
