Last week, Danielle Walter, the self-proclaimed “brunette Carrie Bradshaw of San Francisco,” posted the update her 2.1 million Instagram and TikTok followers had been waiting for: She was “officially a girlfriend.”
In the photo, Walter, 32, grins in a red dress and matching lip. She holds a bouquet of carnations and hunches slightly as if humbly accepting an award. There’s enough glitz to mistake the announcement for one further down the lifestyle-influencer pipeline — a proposal or a pregnancy — but for Walter, it’s the culmination of a romance with a mystery Brazilian hunk she’d been teasing all summer long.
In 2025, we couldn’t help but wonder, what happens when a dating influencer couples up?
Strong reactions, that’s what. Loyal fans cheered in the comments after years of watching her tumultuous love life online. Others speculated that the boyfriend was a ploy for engagement by Walter or was chasing clout himself. Even Netflix’s Millionaire Matchmaker herself, Patti Stanger, weighed in, asking why Walter hadn’t introduced him yet. Amid the praise is a growing chorus of skeptics — too loud to ignore, unless you’re Walter herself.
Like Sarah Jessica Parker’s “Sex in the City” character, Walter is a dating diarist. Except Bradshaw answered to her editor. Walter has the internet, and it talks back. “EVERYONE SHUT UP MY SHOW IS ON!!!” one woman wrote in the comments to one of her recent videos.
Walter is just like us — looking for love. She built her following the old-fashioned way: through “get ready with me” (GRWM) videos — in which she unabashedly mentions her “nervous poops” before a date — and debriefs filmed in pajamas from bed. Last year, Walter quit her job in tech sales to go full time on social media.
In June, she let everyone know she’d met a man at the gym — “the Brazilian,” she called him. Over the following weeks, she serialized their relationship on Instagram and TikTok. On their first date, she recorded a confession from a public restroom: “This may be my husband.” After their fifth date: “Without a shadow of a doubt, this is my husband,” followed by a silent scream. After only a month, Walter brought the Brazilian home to meet her family.
“I can’t put into words how good he is,” she says in one video. Over and over, viewers watched her gloat with a limited vocabulary, reciting how “seen” and “safe” she feels between longing sighs and adoring stares. She supplemented by uploading montages of herself applying makeup to “There She Goes” by the La’s. One commenter called her account “the Hallmark Channel of IG.” Other creators parodied her videos, mocking her textbook display of puppy love.
Walter has not revealed the Brazilian’s identity, though she does routinely call him a “man of God.” Walter is openly Christian and attends a megachurch in San Jose. However, after she soft-launched his tattooed arm at Outsidelands in August, the internet sleuths took off and outed him as a life and body transformation coach based in San Francisco.
As Walter’s following has grown, so have the number of haters, who call her annoying and complain about everything from her clothes to how much perfume she sprays in her videos. There’s an entire “snark subreddit” devoted to gossiping and complaining about Walter — views of which are up 312.5% in the last 30 days to 3.3 million, according to a screenshot of the moderator viewership dashboard shared with The Standard. The forum’s 6,000-plus members call themselves the “Walnut Army,” named after a video in which Walter referred to her community as “walnuts.”
Some bring classic snark — “It’s giving 1770 bar wench,” one said of Walter’s red dress in the girlfriend photo. “I’ve been a silent walnut until now, but I’ve finally CRACKED!” exclaimed another. Others are more thoughtful, urging Walter to exercise discernment and not jump into a committed relationship so quickly.
“I’m scared for D. He reminds me of literally every guy I dated before my husband,” one walnut shared. “It feels like we’re watching the beginning of a true crime documentary,” said another.
The Walnut Army’s biggest gripe is with Walter’s perceived lack of dating competency. They see her as a gross misrepresentation of what it’s like to be a young professional woman dating in 2025. “Walter is so far removed from who we are,” said one of her OG snarkers, who goes by the handle Brave Single Girl. “That’s what drives my involvement on Reddit — trying to expose that this is fake.”
Days before the girlfriend reveal, Walter posted a rare Instagram story addressing the parade of negative comments. (She is known for actively not engaging with her community.) From the front seat of a car, her dog Charlie panting behind her, she reminded her followers that they don’t see the full picture. Then, instead of answering questions or providing clarifying details, Walter dismissed her critics, saying that leaving nasty comments is “weirdo behavior.” Walnuts said she lacked accountability.
Angèle Christin, an associate professor of communication at Stanford, who studies online influencers, hypothesizes that Walter is at a crossroads in terms of where she takes her account next: “There are hard questions being negotiated behind the scenes about moving forward as a content creator and also a human being with ups and downs. She will have to decide how to reconcile these different aspects of her life.”
Brave Single Girl said that if she could advise Walter directly, she’d tell her, “Get off the internet, seek out real Christianity, and get a therapist.”
For now, Walter has resumed her scheduled content — a Verizon ad posted hours after Charlie Kirk’s assassination and a slew of New York Fashion Week vlogs in the following week. But the photo of her standing proud as a girlfriend shines on her grid. She paired it with Léon’s “Lift You Up,” a synth-heavy track that, as one pop culture writer put it, “conjures the feeling of calm after the storm, even if that calm might still be emotionally fraught.”