Dan and Phil are dating!
In fact, they’ve been a couple the whole time.
So many YouTubers make headlines for being awful people, for tragedies, or for sensational new stunts.
Now, after sixteen years, Dan and Phil are showing fans that love is real — and can outlast a lot of marriages.
Dan and Phil confirm that they’re in a relationship!
On the Monday, October 13 episode of their long-running YouTube channel, Dan Howell and Phil Lester decided to break fans’ minds a little bit — and confirm a long-held belief of many of their viewers.
“Alright, let’s get this over with,” Dan began the video, posing the question: “Are Dan and Phil in a relationship?”
To that, Phil replied with a simple: “Yes.”
The pair then joked as if that were the end of the video. And, if they had wished, it could have been.
But, especially knowing how many of their fans have spent the past decade and a half admiring their chemistry and speculating about their relationship, they opted to share more.
If you aren’t familiar, Dan and Phil are an inseparable YouTube pair who have been mainstays on the internet since 2009.
Back in the early days of Tumblr, before the platform shot itself in the foot to comply with egregious congressional overreach in the form of FOSTA/SESTA, their fandom was a hit.
There are just shy of 20,000 fanfics dedicated to their relationship (which was only confirmed this week) on one fanfiction site alone — with the earliest dating to 2010.
As is often the case with certain types of internet duos, long-term fans stick around for fellow fans’ creative works, for the duo’s dynamic, for their personalities — and for “crumbs” to feed their shipping.
Some people insisted that they were secretly dating. Others simply wished that they would date, or even just liked to imagine a romantic relationship between the two internet personalities. As it turns out, the first group was right the whole time.
‘We just ended up living together and here we are’
It was a full ten years after they met — in 2019 — that Dan and Phil came out as gay. They came out in separate videos in June of that year.
Six years later, Phil noted in their relationship reveal video that the fan obsession with their once-alleged entanglement might be “partly our fault.”
“We started filming YouTube videos together on the day we met,” he noted. The two had met on social media.
Dan chimed in: “We signed up to be professional entertainers to create content for you to enjoy.”
However, he shared that they “fell hard and fast” right away in 2009. “And here we are,” Dan continued, “almost 16 years later.”
Though they have now been together for longer than a lot of marriages last, they have never really put much of a label on things.
“We just ended up living together and here we are,” Dan noted. (The two moved in together in 2011)
Phil joked that they never said the words and thus are not “technically” together even now. More seriously, though, he shared that they are “partners in everything.”
Vitally, he stressed that “it’s not always perfect. Don’t get into your head that we are the ideal of human partnerships.”
Dan agreed, adding: “We have had ups and downs. Like anybody, if you’re a mess, we are a mess.”
Will this reveal impact their brand? That’s up to fans
“We are weird,” Dan added with a laugh. “We are a bizarre example of a relationship. Like, we’ve been attached at the hip 24/7 for 15 years.”
During that time, they have mused over whether to address things like their sexuality, let alone their relationship.
They worried about whether certain things were fans’ business.
Also, they acknowledged that their status as confirmed boyfriends could impact their comedy work — even if they don’t plan to change anything on their end.
“A big thing with sharing the details of your personal life is how it affects what you do,” Dan summarized. “Because Dan and Phil, the comedy duo and Dan and Phil, the gay boyfriends, it hits different.”
Congratulations to them both! And to the thousands upon thousands of fans who hoped — or even predicted — that this announcement would come one day.