Jacob Samuel Mills Riglin had been waiting to ask Agnieszka Ewa Lal on a date for more than two years when, in January 2020, the moment finally arrived. Ms. Lal, who had jolted him with a sense of instant attraction when they first met, was, at long last, single. He had found out about her recent breakup the same way about a million other people did: on Instagram.
Ms. Lal and Mr. Riglin are social media influencers. Their first encounter, in October 2017, was at a work event at the Vana Belle Luxury Collection Resort in Koh Samui, Thailand. Ms. Lal was there to promote the resort. Mr. Riglin was there to take pictures. Both were on a fast track to accruing a million followers as travel content creators.
In the early 2010s, the newly launched Instagram had appealed to both as an outlet for publicly building their personas as young adventurers. At first, “it was just for fun, something people were starting to do,” Mr. Riglin said.
Each quickly found they were good at it. By 2016, Ms. Lal, who goes by Aggie, had enough followers to quit working as a production assistant on commercials and TV shows in Los Angeles and instead promote luxury hotels and tourism boards full-time. Mr. Riglin’s photography hobby had earned him enough internet attention by 2015 that Beautiful Destinations, a creative and content studio based in New York and Abu Dhabi, hired him to shoot exotic locales.
The life of an influencer was a likely path for neither. Ms. Lal, 37, grew up in Warsaw, Poland. Her parents, Anna Szydlowska Lal and Krzysztof Lal, were TV executives. But not the jet-setting type. “It was a rich childhood and we were blessed with many things, but we weren’t blessed financially,” she said.
Ms. Lal and her older sister spent school vacations close to home — a source of frustration for Ms. Lal, whose dreams of travel started in childhood. She was 18 before she boarded her first airplane, alone, to Australia. She had waitressed through high school to afford the trip, she said.
