Isabelle Kube, a 29-year-old marketer living in Copenhagen, recently experienced one of the most exciting workplace wins possible: turning a coworker into an actual friend. It happened when Kube dropped “That’s common sense, I fear” into conversation. To the offline, the phrase may seem unremarkable, but to people on a specific side of the internet, it is instantly recognisable: a reference to a conversation between influencers and best friends Jake Shane and Brett Chody on Shane’s podcast Therapuss. The now-viral expression was born when Chody, a long-distance runner, shocked Shane with the knowledge that all marathons are the same length, adding: “That’s common sense, I fear.” Today, the phrase is a TikTok sound used more than 17,000 times and, to the pair’s joint fanbase, an instant signal that someone is one of them. When Kube said it at work, her colleague immediately got the reference, and they became fast friends as a result. “We bonded over the fact that our For You Pages are identical, and that we follow the same people,” says Kube. “Sometimes [when we’re talking], another colleague will be sitting there asking, ‘What are you guys talking about?’, and we’re like, ‘You’re not online enough.’”

Kube and her friend are hardly the only ones closely following influencer friendships. As the creator economy continues to grow, some of today’s most successful influencers are those who exist as part of a duo or larger friend group, sharing the texture of their friendships online: Dom Roberts and Maya Umemoto Gorman of Upstairs Neighbors, Brooke Averick and Connor Wood of Brooke and Connor Make a Podcast, and, of course, Shane and Chody. By sharing their friendships online, these creators build their own if-you-know-you-know lexicons, creating an even deeper sense of fandom. As the Therapuss soundbite shows, a single phrase can become a signal of belonging. Some of these friendships are followed so closely that, for pairs like Chody and Shane or Ride’s Benito Skinner and Mary Beth Barone, there are even fan edits, like the ones you might once have seen for a highly shipped couple. So why exactly are we so obsessed with watching influencer friendships unfold on our screens?

According to Kudzi Chikumbu, the former director of creator community at TikTok, this obsession isn’t entirely new. “Creator friendships have existed on the internet from the time that I started working on it,” says Chikumbu, who’s now the VP of creator partnerships at Tubi. Chikumbu points to groups like O2L, the mid-2000s YouTube channel that featured the likes of Connor Franta and Kian Lawley, as an early example. While TikTok similarly had the Hype House, former home of the D’Amelio sisters, Lil Huddy, and Addison Rae, the friendships that pop off online today are more likely to feature friends-turned-influencers rather than influencers assembled into a group, and thus, feel more organic to audiences. Plus, as Chikumbu points out, short-form vertical content brings you straight into creators’ worlds, making the overall experience more immersive. “You almost have this positively parasocial relationship with a friendship as if you’re one of them,” he says. “It’s like you’re getting to eavesdrop on a real friendship, but you’re also part of the friendship.”

Rebecca Jennings, a reporter covering the creator economy and internet culture, feels similarly. “It’s like this dream friendship where we don’t have to do any of the work, but we get to feel like we’re part of it,” she says. Jennings also suggests that, in 2026, friendship itself may have become aspirational. “Influencers have always been admired for flaunting what they have, and right now, something that a lot of people want and don’t feel they have enough of is friends,” she says. “Fewer people are getting married and fewer people are dating… So instead of being interested in romantic ships, audiences are more interested in these aspirational friendships they’re seeing on their feeds, which they feel like they can root for without it having to be the end-all be-all of their life in the way a romantic ship might be.”

If friendship itself has become aspirational, then fandom around influencer friendships can also become a route into real-life connection, as it did for Kube and her coworker. The same was true for Anjolie Ware, a college student in Georgia, and her now-roommate. Once mere mutuals, Ware and her roommate became closer friends over their shared love of Brooke Averick and Connor Wood. Fandom has always been a breeding ground for friendship – bonds formed via One Direction Tumblr pages come to mind – but Ware points out that the sheer amount of access we have to influencers makes this a different experience entirely. “[My roommate and I] have a lot of shared interests in music, too,” says the 20-year-old. “But because the influencers are posting content every week, there’s honestly something for us to participate in more often. It’s almost like its own cultural thing that we talk about more day to day.”

Like Kube, Ware jokes that she and her friend now speak a “coded language” as a result of tuning into the influencers’ podcast: a language of internet-isms that only really makes sense to fellow listeners. Ella Willabrand, a 29-year-old living in San Francisco, has had a similar experience. She and her now-best friend bonded when they both dropped phrases from Emergency Intercom, a podcast hosted by Enya Umanzor and Drew Phillips, into conversation, realising they were both fans of the pair. Willabrand is also a fan of Upstairs Neighbors and, last year, even made a new friend at the creators’ live show, where attendees were encouraged to mingle. “It was low-key like a church service,” Willabrand says of the night.

While it can be easy to dismiss the obsession with influencer friendships as overly parasocial, the reason for our preoccupation with them might actually be quite simple: it feels good to be part of something. If one influencer offers an entire world to escape into, then an influencer duo or larger friend group offers something even more engrossing. As Willabrand says, “It feels like you’re part of an inside joke alongside thousands of other people.”