livvy dunne's boyfriend is good at throwing baseballs
intergenerational studies
One thing that I did not learn from the profile published Wednesday by GQ titled “Why the Algorithm Loves Gen Z’s ‘It Couple’ Livvy Dunne and Paul Skenes” is why the algorithm loves Gen Z’s ‘It Couple’ Livvy Dunne and Paul Skenes. One can make some obvious inferences. They’re white and straight and newly rich and only twenty-two. While I don’t know that the “movie star good looks” referred to in the piece truly bear out beyond the bounds of magazine feature flattery, she’s certainly pretty, and he certainly has a mustache. She’s tanned and highlighted to honey gold gleaming and the chain he wears leaves a cross dangled in scraggly hair upon a comparatively ghostly chest. Their height difference is a full foot1. Should anyone care about this? Do I? Paul Skenes, a right-handed pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, is one of the most promising young players in baseball and the 2024 NL Rookie of the Year. Olivia “Livvy” Dunne is a D1 gymnast and fifth year super senior at LSU who has amassed over 13 million followers across TikTok and Instagram and every post that she makes rakes in huge sums of money from sponsors including Crocs, Nautica, and Purina Pro Plan dog food. Are they interesting? Why does the algorithm love them? Can algorithms love? And what, by the way, is rizz? I’m one hundred years old. I’m a little baby. I’m A Lesbian Get Me Out of Here. But that LSU purple is pretty. I know too much. I have a lot to learn.
Things I did learn from the GQ piece: Dunne and Skenes share a golden retriever named Roux. They only met in 2023, when Skenes transferred to LSU for baseball and Livvy was already a well-established moneymaker for both herself and the school. Paul moves through the world with a grandfatherly reserve and quiet gruff that suits a young man christened with a name that fell out of favor decades ago. He’s not talkative, he’s not online, and he doesn’t like ice cream. But he stood out to Livvy on campus in Baton Rouge because he was tall and on Instagram because he refused to follow her back2.
As part of my study, I watched this video of Paul and Livvy trying to answer inane questions about one another. Which of my videos has the most views? (Paul did not know. He doesn’t watch her videos. Livvy seems to like that, which is to her credit.) How do I throw my sinker? (Livvy’s attempt at Paul’s sinker grip is not too bad and he gives her half a point.) What was I dressed as for my first Halloween? (Paul has clearly been made well aware that Livvy’s first Halloween costume was the number one baby classic, a pumpkin.) The video is dull yet charming and kind of, as a sensory experience, like a cross between when teenagers are holding hands on the city bus sometimes and when I overhear straight couples talking to each other at a concert or the dog park and they both seem kind of surprised to be interacting with the other at all.
When injuries forced teen Livvy to let go of her Olympic dreams, she set her sights on the less glamorous—but still televised—world of college gymnastics instead. It was at this point in her short history and ours, in 2020, that a series of events—perhaps! I’m just seeing some dots here and longing to connect them! I’m just exploring the possibilities of this troublesome world—consciously conspired to make Livvy Dunne famous. She’s eighteen, it’s time for college. COVID happens. TikTok explodes. She’s posting videos of herself doing cartwheels on the beach at her grandma’s house in Florida during lockdown. Those explode, too. She was ready for the attention; you can see and hear it in any video, this disarming self-certainty. She was homeschooled to practice gymnastics. She joined Instagram at age ten. This was the plan for her even before it existed, even before it could happen she was ready Then in 2021 the NCAA rules are changed to allow college athletes to make money from the commercial use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL). To date, no woman and only four men in college sports have made more NIL money than Livvy Dunne.
What’s so compelling to me about all of this is that Livvy Dunne isn’t the best gymnast on her LSU team. She’s not one of the best five. She’s okay. She’s been hurt a lot and never became what her childhood talent foretold. She’s obviously a gifted athlete who can do things with her body that would leave most of us in days of spasming agony after just imagining an attempt. Listen, this is not Livvy hate!!! I’m not one of the sad losers in her comments making digs at her gymnastics abilities in some mortifying attempt to neg the hot young woman who could buy and sell them and their extended families. In fact, I think it’s very cool and funny to be the most famous woman in NCAA athletics because of your posts.
The posts, by the way, are pretty boring. I mean, they’re fine, they’re cute. They’re boring. I don’t know about the Tiktoks because I don’t look at the web application. I’m not too good for it; when TikTok arrived I was chemically addicted to looking at too many websites already and felt it unwise to add another. This edict only feels more and more right for me all the time. So maybe she’s incredibly fascinating on TikTok but I tend to doubt that and, anyway, I think most of these people cross-post everything now, so what I saw on Instagram probably sums up the Livvy Dunne experience rather fairly. I did learn via ESPN that her sister shoots all the content for her and that does make the open mouth athleisure photoshoots more amusing. Livvy is charming, but it’s not this eye-popping star quality. She has, rather, that Yeah, I Was The Hottest Girl in Tenth Grade glossy allure that kind of lures you in with its flatness, so totally unwinking. That same je ne sais quoi of countless perky dental hygienists and body-con clad real estate agents world over. Even if none of this ever happened, if she was just Olivia back in New Jersey, it’s clear that running into her in the bathroom of a hometown bar would be a disorienting high. And in her kind of boring, kind of appealing videos she leverages this familiar personality type, this intoxicating lack of self-consciousness or irony, to maintain approachability—and salability—amid a meteoric rise.
It doesn’t feel especially healthy that a young person’s livelihood should be tied so directly to a public performance of self, right, but remember that’s true for everyone, that’s true all the time, a little, a lot, I mean—they’re looking at me, oh, they were watching you become something or fail to and, look, I would have taken the money if I knew how to get it. I would consider ruining my life for fame and wealth even now, today, when that life is so good and valuable to me in a way it wasn’t when I was twenty-two. I’d still have to think about it! And Livvy’s carefully constructed Instagram posts are not meaningfully less real than my own more done-undone, painstakingly disheveled ones. It’s complicated! Why does the algorithm love Gen Z ‘It Couple’ Livvy Dunne and Paul Skenes? Because she’s small and blonde and flying through the air with teeth out quite invitingly. He’s not really part of it.
Being a person, having a phone. Being a woman, paying your bills. “Influencing” as a career and lifestyle seems obviously bad, brain damaging, primed to convert even a truly original, thoughtful person into a boring cog bred to sell digestive supplements and leggings, just another painful shudder in capitalism’s bloody walloping of all pleasure and beauty from life. But then that’s also what I think about having to go to my office each morning to send emails. If we could all throw a baseball 102 miles an hour3 with movement maybe nobody would ever have bothered to invent “online” but as it stands we must work with what we have.
I am rather against mixed-height relationships of this nature for reasons of neck, back, and shoulder health and simply cannot recommend forcefully enough the experience of being in love with someone whose jeans you can wear and with whom all your parts organically line up right. But godspeed to them anyway.
A running theme throughout the GQ profile is that Paul has no interest in social medi—a commendable trait for a young man if not for the fact that his girlfriend’s entire life revolves around social media content creation. Still, Livvy, for her part, does not seem bothered by this at all and I support her. Perhaps all boyfriends should be offline.