The Laptop Boyfriends Can’t Stop Watching YouTube in Bed

“It was a surface-level sort of intimacy where it was trying to include me in their world, but not in any real way,” Weeks says. “Not in a way where they’re talking about, like, their family.”

Of the three men, Weeks says Irish Step Dancing Finance Guy left the best impression. “I found that one kind of charming because it was this innocent childlike wonder,” she explains. “This is like, little kid shit. Like sure, I’ll watch Irish step dancing and we can bang in between breaks, whatever. Doesn’t sound so bad to me.”

That said, things can degrade even further when the laptop enters the bedroom. YouTube has joined sleep and sex on the short list of activities that occur between the sheets. “The post-coital cigarette is a lost art, so now it’s the post-coital vape and YouTube,” says Weeks. In Gaffney’s relationships, he believes “it was the time and place in which I consumed that was the issue.” He imagines his romantic partners “probably would’ve wanted to do things sexually and that opportunity wasn’t afforded to them because I was watching YouTube.”

Nadia, 30, lives in Paris with her software-engineer husband, who is also 30. She first became aware of his YouTube obsession while watching the Netflix reality-competition series Culinary Class Wars together. Bafflingly, he could identify esoteric gastronomy techniques and recognize chefs from restaurants he’d never even visited. “He just knows so much,” she says. “And I know it’s all from YouTube because he’s not, like, reading cookbooks frequently.” (Nadia asked to go by only her first name for privacy.)

Similar to Weeks, Nadia finds her husband’s YouTube habit childishly amusing. “I have the same reaction as when I see an iPad kid,” she says. “Oh, it’s a laptop boy. I’m not offended by it. I think it’s whimsical and cute and not something that I would think to do unless I’m really sick.”

Alex Forrest, a 28-year-old actor and comedian who lives in Brooklyn, has become more aware of his YouTube habits since moving in with his girlfriend last year. “If we’re just chilling in bed, I’ll do laptop time at the end of the day,” he says. “She’ll just be, like, reading, and then I’ll be watching a video about White Castle.”

According to Forrest, being a laptop boy is a force of habit. “ I think it’s a comfort thing at this point,” he says. “I feel like I’ve been watching YouTube for so long, literally since I was like eight years old. It’s like an old friend.”

In some relationships, sharing your algorithmic niches is a way to get closer. For Forrest, that meant sharing his deep passion for movies and TV, while also leaning into his girlfriend’s love of musical theater. “When you’re in a relationship, you learn to care about the stuff that the other person cares about,” he says. In practice, this means watching multi-hour-long bootlegs of live productions of Into the Woods together. But then, every so often, “she’ll get a video essay about the Jake Gyllenhaal Prince of Persia movie from 2010, so it kind of goes back and forth,” he adds. “It’s like when you’re dating, you wear each other’s clothes sometimes.”