Love In The Time Of Youtube

De’arra and Ken 4 Life are just your typical couple trying to live their lives. Except they’re doing it in public, for millions of fans.

- S.I. Rosenbaum

He noticed her right away when she came in the door: Big dark eyes and a ballerina’s build, her nails glistening blue-green in the lights of the Chipotle. He was a year out of high school, a gangly shy kid about to start a job at Home Depot, but he wasn’t too shy to go over and ask for her number.

She wouldn’t give him her number. But she liked him enough to give him her username on the messaging app Kik.

Later, when he wasn’t looking, she took a picture of him with her phone—from the back, sloped shoulders, hair poufing out from his floral ball cap.

BY 10 a.m., there’s already a line down the sidewalk, wrapping around the corner of the Roulette theater in Brooklyn: big kids in high school and even college, all the way down to little ones holding Mama or Daddy’s hand. They’re mostly still bundled up in coats and parkas on this early-spring morning, and the wind makes the VIP tickets in their hands tremble. Those tickets cost about $100 apiece. For them, it’s worth it, because they’re about to meet DK4L.

DK4L: That’s De’arra and Ken 4 Life. De’arra Taylor, 21, and Ken Walker, 22, are not singers or comedians or actors. What they are is a couple. They’ve been dating about three years, and they’ve been making YouTube videos together for almost as long. You’ve never heard of them, unless you’re one of their 3.6 million YouTube subscribers, in which case you’re obsessed with them.

To their fans, they’re as beloved as Beyoncé and JayZ, except that you never get to see Beyoncé and Jay-Z try to put on 100 layers of clothes at once, or fill a giant balloon full of soda and Mentos, or just walk around a mall goofing off. That’s DK4L’s shtick: doing random things—but doing them together.