A match made in… DMs?!
For these famous faces, shooting their shot on social media paid off — well, most of the time — and led to love stories that have stood the test of time.
From Kelsea Ballerini’s clever opening line to Nick Jonas laying it all out there, see how these stars kicked off their relationships — or friendships — with the click of a keyboard.
Bobby Flay and Kristin Cavallari
Bobby Flay and Kristin Cavallari.
Cindy Ord/Getty; Charles Sykes/Bravo via Getty
Kristin Cavallari welcomed Bobby Flay to a recent episode of her podcast Let’s Be Honest, where the Laguna Beach alum asked the chef if he would ever — or if he had ever — slide into DMs.
“I have but never in a way that would be like … actually, I want to talk to you about this,” Flay said.“You and I had a situation where I was coming to Nashville for literally one day for a meeting and I was like, ‘Who do I know in Nashville?’”
“I DMed you and I said to you — now, I know what words I used specifically because you reminded me — ‘I’m going to be in Nashville for one night, can I take you to dinner?’ And you literally said something to me like, ‘I’m already dating somebody,’” he continued with a laugh.
“Or it was like, ‘I’m over dating right now,’” Cavallari added.
“No you said, ‘I literally started seeing somebody!’” Flay said. “And I said, ‘I just want to go to dinner with you.’”
“It was like foot in mouth,” Cavallari remembered, sharing that they did end up going to dinner and “had the best time.”
Flay split from writer Christina Pérez in June while Cavallari and TikToker Mark Estes broke up in September after seven months of dating.
Simone Biles and Jonathan Owens
Simone Biles and Jonathan Owens.
Carmen Mandato/Getty Images
Simone Biles and Jonathan Owens first met through the dating app Raya in 2020 with the Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast making the first move.
“He would say I slid into his DMs,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “I saw him and I was like, ‘Oh, he’s pretty cute,’ so I said hi … and then I saw that he was in the Houston area, so we started chatting a little bit, and then we went to hang out a week or two later.”
In 2022 the pair got engaged and in 2023 they were married.
Lizzo and Chris Evans
Lizzo, Chris Evans.
Chris Saucedo/Getty; Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Back in 2021, Lizzo revealed that she had drunkenly messaged Chris Evans on Instagram.
“Don’t drink and DM, kids…. for legal porpoises this is a joke,” she wrote in the caption of a video shared to TikTok. The screenshot showed that she sent the emojis for dashing away, a woman playing handball and a basketball to The Avengers star.
Lizzo later updated fans sharing that Evans did in fact respond, writing, “No shame in a drunk DM,” with a kissing face emoji. “God knows I’ve done worse on this app lol.”
Their hilarious exchange didn’t lead to love, however: Lizzo confirmed her romance with Myke Wright and Evans tied the knot with Alba Baptista in 2023.
Dylan Sprouse and Barbara Palvin
Barbara Palvin and Dylan Sprouse.
River Callaway/WWD via Getty Images
After first meeting at a party in 2017, Dylan Sprouse thought it was time to shoot his shot with the model.
“She followed me, so I was like, I guess I’ll give her something. And I slid into her DMs,” the Suite Life of Zack & Cody alum told W Magazine in 2019. “I was like, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you’re in New York for very long, but we should hang out if you want to. Here’s my number.’ And she didn’t message me for six months.”
Palvin eventually did respond; things went well enough that she flew to meet Sprouse in China, where he was working, and by June 2018 they were officially dating.
In 2023, the two announced their engagement and shortly after they tied the knot.
Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner
Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner.
Bruce Glikas/WireImage
Before the two finally met in person, Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner had mutual friends who had been trying to get them to meet. After following each other on Instagram in 2016, Jonas slid into Turner’s DMs “one fine day, out of the blue,” she shared.
In 2017, the two announced their engagement and in 2019 wed in Las Vegas before celebrating their marriage again in Paris a few weeks later. The two went on to welcome two daughters together, but in Sept. 2023 Jonas filed for divorce.
Holland Taylor and Sarah Paulson
Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor.
Victoria Sirakova/Getty
Holland Taylor and Sarah Paulson first met a decade prior to reconnecting on social media in 2015.
During a January 2019 appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, Paulson reflected on how their relationship came to be.
“It’s a long story. We met a very, very long time ago. I was with someone else; she was, too,” Paulson recalled on a 2019 episode of Watch What Happens Live . “We sort of breezed by one another, and then started following each other on Twitter, and then …”
Billy Eichner, who was also a guest that episode asked, “Holland Taylor slid into your DMs?”
“She actually did,” Paulson said. “Yeah, it’s pretty great.”
In the years since, the two have stepped out together on numerous occasions: supporting each other’s projects, attending award shows and even dressing up together on Halloween.
In a sweet birthday tribute to Taylor in 2024, Paulson began by calling her longtime partner “my world.”
Ricky Martin and Jwan Yosef
Jwan Yosef and Ricky Martin.
Lionel Hahn/Getty
Ricky Martin first noticed Jwan Yosef on social media in 2015 through his work as an artist.
“I’m scrolling and I see this beautiful piece of art and I’m like, ‘Whoa, how cool! Who’s this?’ Then I start checking and all of a sudden I’m like, ‘Ooh, ooh,’ ” Martin, who is an art collector, shared on Radio Andy in 2017. “And then I wrote to him.”
The two talked for six months, Martin shared, about “art and life and general” — “nothing sexy,” he said. From there, he flew to London, where Yosef was living at the time, to meet him and the two began dating.
The pair wed in 2018 and later welcomed two children together daughter Lucia, born in 2018, and son Renn, born in 2019. (Martin is also dad to his twin sons Matteo and Valentino, born in 2008.)
In 2023, Martin and Yosef announced they were divorcing.
Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra
Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Nick Jonas.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty
Several years before they actually started dating, Nick Jonas reached out to Priyanka Chopra via Twitter DM to indicate his interest: “I’m hearing from a few mutual friends that we should meet.”
It wasn’t the smoothest first move, he recalled to Vogue: “She responded day of with a message that said, ‘My team can read this. Why don’t you just text me.’ ”
He got her digits for some less supervised chatting, but the two didn’t really kick things into high gear until 2018 — and from there, they went from dating to engaged to married within months and before the new year, were husband and wife.
In January 2022 the two became parents to daughter Malti Marie.
Vanessa Hudgens and Cole Tucker
Cole Tucker and Vanessa Hudgens at Netflix’s “tick, tick…BOOM!” New York premiere in 2021.
Monica Schipper/Getty
After meeting on a meditation Zoom, Vanessa Hudgens had a feeling Cole Tucker was someone she’d like to know better — and didn’t hesitate to tell him so.
“If I want something or someone, I’m going after them,” she said on The Drew Barrymore Show. “I fully just slid into his DMs and was like, ‘Hey, it was nice to meet you.’ I think there is no shame in making the first move.”
By the end of 2022 the pair was engaged and in December 2023 tied the knot in Tulum. A few months later, Hudgens debuted her baby bump on the red carpet at the 2024 Oscars and the couple welcomed their first child together in July.
Winnie Harlow and Kyle Kuzma
Kyle Kuzma and Winnie Harlow.
Pascal Le Segretain/amfAR/Getty
Model Winnie Harlow revealed on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that boyfriend Kyle Kuzma first reached out to her via DM — but that she never saw it.
“I got a DM a year prior from my boyfriend, and I never seen it,” the model revealed to guest host tWitch. “I don’t know what the glitch in the system with Instagram is, but that never came up for me!”
“A year later, at the top of quarantine, he DMed me again. He posted a picture of me in an outfit and I was like, ‘Oh, hi!’ … and he shot his shot. He slid into the DMs,” she continued, according to TMZ.
“That was cute, and I was like, ‘Oh hey, how’s quarantine been?’ ” The pair began FaceTiming and the rest was history.
Sarah Hyland and Wells Adams
Sarah Hyland and Wells Adams.
Randy Shropshire/Getty Images for MPTF
“I was following him. We had tweeted each other because I thought he was funny and he was a fan of the show,” Sarah Hyland told Jimmy Kimmel about meeting her now-husband Wells Adams. “I was like, ‘This is really awesome. You’re being very forward and it’s sexy and not aggressive but very confident and sexy,’ and I liked that.”
Mandy Moore and Taylor Goldsmith
Mandy Moore and Taylor Goldsmith.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
Mandy Moore can thank Instagram for introducing her to her husband Taylor Goldsmith, frontman for the band Dawes. “I took a picture of their album and posted it on Instagram,” the This Is Us actress told PEOPLE. “Somehow, Taylor saw it and sent a note to me. We started emailing back and forth, then we went on a date and the rest is history.”
Madelaine Petsch and Travis Mills
Madelaine Petsch and Travis Mills.
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Riverdale star Madelaine Petsch first met her now-ex, actor-musician Travis Mills, when he was up for the role of Jughead, but the romance didn’t take off until they reconnected online.
“He messaged me on Facebook in January of season one and congratulated me on the show. He had auditioned for Jughead,” she told Cosmopolitan in 2017. “I think we just randomly had mutual friends, so we added each other.”
“We kept in touch very rarely, not even that much, from January to February, and then the day I got back from season one in February I was bored in L.A., believe it or not,” she continued. “I was like, ‘What am I gonna do?’ I got my hair cut and he texted me like, ‘Let’s go to a movie!’ We hung out.”
The pair split after three years together in February 2020.
Demi Lovato and Emily Hampshire
Emma McIntyre/Getty; Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Schitt’s Creek star Emily Hampshire appeared on Demi Lovato’s podcast, 4D with Demi Lovato, and reflected on the “funny” story of how they first met.
“You slid in my DMs and you said, ‘Hey girl, I like you on the show. We should kick it sometime,'” Hampshire recalled. “And then you said below it, ‘And by kick it, I mean go on a date. I find you attractive.’ You made it clear it was a date. And I loved that because I was like, ‘Sometimes that’s confusing’ … I’m decades older than you, so ‘kick it,’ I was looking it up.”
“You also said that!” said Lovato. “You were like, ‘I’m decades older, I don’t think we’ll find the same things funny.’ I was like, ‘Mm excuse you’ and I sent you a really good meme.”
Although Lovato’s move didn’t end in a romantic relationship between the stars, they were able to form a friendship out of it.