It wouldn’t be hard to make the case that Olivia Dunne (you probably know her as Livvy) and Paul Skenes are the archetypal Gen Z power couple. She’s the gymnast-slash-influencer reshaping the way college athletes can profit off their own labor. He’s the generationally talented Pittsburgh Pirates ace who throws three-digit heat and won last season’s National League Rookie of the Year award. They’re the pride of Baton Rouge and Pittsburgh, respectively, but the truest measure of their influence lives online, where they nurse a rabid social media following in the millions. (To be fair, most of those millions are Livvy’s.) But their relationship nearly derailed in the early going for one perhaps surprising reason: “He wouldn’t follow me back on Instagram,” Livvy recalls. It’s a breezy winter night in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and we’re meeting at a restaurant they like that’s not far from LSU’s campus, where they met as students just a couple of years ago. It’s a slow enough week in their busy schedules, all considered, but still a heady time: Livvy’s staring down the back half of her final gymnastics season, while Paul’s in town for a few days, clearing out his rental house before heading to Pirates spring training in Florida, and after that to his must-watch sophomore season in Pittsburgh. They share a couch in the center of the dining room. He sits ramrod straight in technical fabrics, while she’s fresh out of practice in a tank, sweats, and a perfect February tan. They present a striking contrast—she’s petite and muscular, he’s a foot taller and built like an oaken door—but each is tuned into the other as we speak. They’re not overly cuddly in my presence, but Livvy tells me that she thinks Paul’s love language is physical touch. And where Paul is all quiet confidence, Livvy is perhaps Gen Z’s premier merchant of rizz—slang, mostly for those under 25, for “charisma.” To wit: The LSU gymnastics team added security measures after an unruly, practically drooling crowd of teenage boys gathered to wait for her to appear after a meet in Utah. (If your brain is particularly internet-addled, you might recall that a then 10-year-old aspiring football player named “Baby Gronk” once went viral for getting “rizzed up” by Livvy. If that combination of words means nothing to you: congratulations.) Given all that, it’s not that Paul didn’t want to follow Livvy back, he explains. He had an Instagram account—what college kid doesn’t?—but rarely used it. Classic no-distractions athlete stuff—but Livvy could hardly understand it. “I was like, Who is this kid and why won’t he follow me back?” He was basically the only living soul on LSU’s campus not consuming her content: She has more than 5 million followers on Instagram, and 8 million more on TikTok. This was early 2023, midway through their junior years in Baton Rouge. Paul, a recent transfer from the Air Force Academy in Colorado, was marching toward a College World Series title in June, and then to becoming the first overall pick in the MLB Draft later that summer. Livvy, meanwhile, was the most followed college athlete in the country—and, in the wake of new rules allowing student athletes to profit from the use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL), among its best compensated. He knew who she was, at least. “Frankly, everybody knew,” he says. Not so much the other way: “She didn’t know who I was.” “No,” she concurs, but admits that she “would see him around every now and then. I was like, Who is this tall, mysterious man that never smiles?” But college can be a small world, and one of Paul’s best friends was dating one of Livvy’s teammates. They all concocted a plan to meet up at a Morgan Wallen concert in Oxford, Mississippi, where the baseball team had traveled to play Ole Miss. Though sparks didn’t exactly fly there either. “He was shy,” Livvy says now. “Kind of reserved” is how Paul puts it. “Reserved, yes,” Livvy replies. “But I had ambition to get to know him.” Her pursuit would require patience. Their schedules were one issue: College baseball teams typically play three-game weekend series, and Paul had earned the coveted Friday-night starter slot, reserved for a team’s ace pitcher, while Livvy spent her weekends traveling the Southeast to gymnastics meets. “I could never actually watch him do his thing because every Friday that he would start, we were competing,” she says. Plus there was his no-Instagram habit. But eventually, Paul got the hint and asked Livvy out for ice cream. (This was strategic on his part: He doesn’t particularly like ice cream but knew “I’ve got to have something in my hand while we’re talking or whatever.”) Livvy knew almost right away: This was good. “Our first and second date, I was like, Oh, I really like him,” she says. She started scheduling hair appointments she didn’t really need every few weeks over the summer, flying from home in New Jersey back to Baton Rouge just to be able to see him. (“I saw right through her because her hair kept looking the same,” Paul says. “That’s not the right thing to say!” Livvy counters. “My hair looks better.” Paul, chastened, plays the good boyfriend: “Your hair looks amazing every night, every day. It just always looks great, especially now.”) Two years later, Paul and Livvy, now both 22 years old, have already reached heights most extremely famous people don’t hit for another decade or two. How did so much happen so quickly? As recently as 2019, Livvy was little known outside gymnastics circles, while Paul was a high schooler in Southern California drawing recruiting interest for his prowess not on the mound but behind the plate, as a catcher. And now they’re…here. Flying private, cheering each other on, plotting out a life together that looks limitless. He’s about to embark upon the most anticipated sophomore season for a pitcher in decades; he caused a minor crisis in Pittsburgh this offseason when he said that he hadn’t yet given too much thought to signing long-term with the Pirates. Livvy, meanwhile, will pack up her things in Baton Rouge and take them—along with her 13-plus million followers—wherever she’d like to go next. Since there’s currently no major professional gymnastics league, she’ll be starting fresh out of college—something in sports, she thinks. And whenever the fans get a little too loud, or the spotlight too bright? Well, it helps that they’re both dating perhaps the only other person on earth who knows exactly what that feels like. If Livvy occupies a stratosphere all her own, straddling the worlds of social media and college athletics, it’s not by accident. By the time she was 10, Livvy had mastered maneuvers she’s still doing today, as a Division I gymnast. And she was, from her tween-hood in suburban New Jersey, a technologically savvy kid. She opened her first Instagram account at nine but didn’t use it the way most of her peers did. “I was always very fascinated with watching what grew on social media—looking at the algorithm, looking at how people react to one thing, how you lose followers if you did another thing,” she says. She decided early on what she’d do with her life.“I wanted to go to the Olympics, compete for the USA, and make the USA National Team and wear the USA gear and just go to different countries and stuff,” she says. “I figured that would be cool.” Of course it would have! And she was well on her way: Most months, she’d travel to spend a week with other elite young gymnasts at the Karolyi Ranch in Texas, grinding out long days training with the sport’s most decorated coaches. All the while, she was building a following: Thanks to an astute understanding of social media, by the time she was in high school Livvy had amassed an audience one hundred thousand strong, the bulk of them gymnastics fans. But the Karolyi Ranch closed amid scandal in 2018, and years of intense practice had taken a serious physical toll, primarily in the form of two broken ankles. She began to wonder if there was another way, and decided to pursue college gymnastics rather than elite international competition. “It was cool to me that people got to travel and be on TV and do all these cool things when it came to the Olympics,” she says. “But I was like, I wonder if I can still do cool things like that but not have to go to the Olympics to attain those goals and those cool things.” Helpfully, by the spring of 2020, a way of doing exactly that had emerged. While spending the early days of the pandemic at her grandmother’s place in Florida, Livvy began posting to TikTok clips of tumbling routines she performed on the sand. Much of America was stuck inside in the late winter of a gray plague, and here was this five-and-a-half-foot dynamo tumbling down the beach at sunset in paradise. It was an inspiring vision from another planet. “I was just flipping around at the beach and it blew up” is how she puts it. Like, six-figure-follower growth—every day or two, for a while. Livvy couldn’t do much with her newfound audience her first year at LSU, which was mostly lost to the pandemic. But by the time she returned as a sophomore, the NCAA had permitted athletes to earn NIL money by inking deals with sponsors—and the beautiful varsity gymnast with a zillion followers was at the top of every brand’s list. She’s signed with Nautica and Vuori, and has appeared twice in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. (Traveling to Puerto Rico for one of the shoots meant she missed a day of practice; team rules dictated she therefore had to sit out a meet.) For those of us who majored in beer studies, it’s hard enough to imagine supplementing schoolwork with an NCAA Division I athlete’s workload—practice, recovery, travel, the whole deal. Piling hours a day of brand-conscious content creation on top of that? All of a sudden you’re less a college student than a person with two jobs who’s also working toward their degree at night. Perhaps unsurprisingly, little about Livvy’s college experience has been standard. She was a bona fide celebrity from basically the moment she set foot on campus; in part for security reasons, she’s taken all of her classes online since her junior year. She’s currently taking advantage of the fifth year of eligibility granted to athletes whose careers were interrupted by COVID, which makes her a graduate student. (She majored in interdisciplinary studies and is now studying technology management. What’s that? I ask. “Managing technology. I don’t know. It’s mostly presentations. I’m learning about AI and the benefits of it right now.”) Of course, the point was never to have a regular college experience. She didn’t have a regular high school experience either—she opted for homeschooling to support her gymnastics pursuit. And, anyway, the LSU team bar themselves from going out in-season—that’s the sort of discipline that helped them win a national title last year. The point was to advance as far as she could with gymnastics, and then use that to handspring to whatever comes next. Gymnastics, she explains, “is a niche community. It really is. And it’s definitely not as big as baseball, but I wanted to be able to make my brand bigger than just going to the Olympics.” Mission accomplished. Paul’s own slingshot trajectory was somehow even more compressed, the journey from “Who?” to HIM traversed in seemingly a matter of months. He was a well-regarded high school ballplayer—primarily a catcher, eventually also a pitcher—who committed to play, and eventually to serve, at the Air Force Academy. The idea that he’d play pro ball? That was way off in the wild blue yonder. The way he thought about it at the time was: “I want to go fly planes and kill bad people, and if baseball opens up, then I’ll do that.” As late as his sophomore year of high school, Paul had been five ten and 150 pounds. But he’d shot up nearly a foot and found a second home in the weight room. His fastball was now sitting in the high 90s during his increasingly dominant outings as a pitcher, leaving him with a tough choice. Staying at Air Force past his sophomore year would mean he’d have to stick around all four years, even if he was drafted by a pro team before then. His coach more or less insisted he transfer, he remembers, so immense were his gifts. “He was like, You either stay here and when you get drafted, you walk across the stage in your flight suit, and every time you pitch you’re a recruiting ad for the Air Force, or you go somewhere that’s going to make you the first overall pick.” Paul’s response? “Yeah, dude, whatever. That’s not going to happen, but I get what you’re saying. And then it was like, Okay, it happened.” He transferred to LSU and its vaunted pitching program, where he dominated, striking out nearly two batters per inning, taking home a boatload of national awards, and leading LSU to a College World Series title in June 2023. By July the Pittsburgh Pirates made him the first overall pick in the draft, and he spent the summer dancing through minor-league towns like Bradenton, Florida, and Altoona, Pennsylvania. He opened the following season with the Triple-A Indianapolis Indians, joined the Show in May, and threw six innings of no-hit ball in his second-ever big-league start. He moved into a town house in Pittsburgh with his friend and Pirates teammate Jared Jones, who couldn’t help but notice the historic nature of what Paul was up to. “You look at like the all-time great pitchers that played for 10, 15 years—none of them start off that good,” he says. (Paul isn’t yet a Hall of Famer, Jones tells me, when it comes to doing the dishes at home.) Paul, not exactly an extrovert, gets practically chatty when we start talking ball, unspooling paragraphs about the difference between minor- and major-league hitters, expanding the zone, and learning to deal with the length of the pro season. “It’s like casinos and insurance companies,” he says at one point, animatedly explaining the value of putting the ball in the strike zone. Livvy cracks up, surprised at his loquaciousness, and interrupts him: “You lost me.” Paul, a little bashful, tries to explain. “Casinos and insurance companies make a lot of money on playing the odds. We”—meaning pitchers—“need to do the same thing.” Pirates fans were thrilled at how quickly their new ace was advancing—and so was his girlfriend. “I’m actually very happy he flew through the minor leagues,” Livvy says. “Because some of those places were brutal.” (Let the record reflect that Paul Skenes here described Altoona as “beautiful.” Smart kid.) When Paul hit the bigs, Livvy quickly settled into a new identity as perhaps baseball’s highest-profile superfan. She was mic’d up for the TV broadcast when Paul earned the start at the All-Star Game (practically unheard of for a rookie), catching one of her superstitions on tape: “Before every pitch I have to yell, ‘Let’s go, Paul,’ ” she explains. At home, she and their dog, an “English cream” golden retriever named Roux, load up the MLB app to watch his starts. Before his debut, she gave him a black Gucci tie to wear to the ballpark. It’s now reserved, he says, “for special events.” He wore it to the All-Star Game, he explains, but is otherwise saving it “for the postseason”—his next goal being to return the scuffling Pirates (76-86 last season) to the playoffs, a promised land they haven’t reached for a decade. That’s the aim in part, because, having put together one of the most dominant rookie campaigns in baseball history (170 strikeouts across 23 starts; third in NL Cy Young Award voting), individual achievements might be hard to summit next season. “I came out of the last game in New York, and I went up to our game-planning coach, and I was like, ‘I just made it hard on myself,’ ” he remembers. “He’s like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And I’m like, ‘I’ve got to top that next year.’ ” Still, it’s good work if you can get it. Paul met Tracy Morgan the other night, he tells me—the comedian was at the dinner where he picked up his Rookie of the Year award. “He said, ‘I thought life couldn’t get any better than working at Yankee Stadium. Then I became a movie star and it got a lot better,’ ” Paul paraphrases. Swap movie star for generational ace, and you’re getting somewhere. Livvy and Paul’s relationship is shot through with professionalism: There’s just too much on the line for both of them to deviate from their schedules. Even when they’re together, they give each other space: He’s up early to work out, while she does schoolwork and creates content; when he comes home, she heads out for four hours of practice. Livvy’s mom, Kat, is struck by this quality. “I think that’s kind of unique to see at their age: two people who allow each other to be successful independently, and not come with insecurities,” she says. Paul does the cooking—steak (rib eye, ideally, though “I’ll do fillet too”) and sometimes burgers. Livvy takes the lead with Roux. Life is quieter here in Baton Rouge. “Whenever we come back to Louisiana, it’s like the first time we met,” Livvy says. Though she acknowledges, with all the changes in their lives, that “it’s crazy that I’m still a student.” With Paul spending six-plus months a year in Pittsburgh or on the road, they’ve gotten accustomed to fitting visits into tiny gaps. The other weekend, Livvy tells me, she flew with her team to Arkansas for a meet, got back to Baton Rouge at midnight on a Friday, and woke up at 3 a.m. to head to the airport, catching a flight to New York to be with Paul when he received his Rookie of the Year award, Saturday. Back to Louisiana, Sunday; practice, Monday. Sixteen hours with each other—worth it. Paul, still a little itchy in the spotlight, has the benefit of a girlfriend who basks in it. “She’s been dealing with all the notoriety and all that longer than I have,” he says. He’s doing his best to learn from her. “I view it as, it’s not my job to take pictures with these people, it’s my job to throw, and them wanting to take pictures is getting in the way of that,” he explains. “But she always handles everything very well—she’s very comfortable to be around for other people who come up and ask to talk, that kind of thing.” He’s got his limits: “I mean, she never says no to a picture. I say no to them.” Paul, meanwhile, tries to help Livvy ignore the noise and negativity of social media. “He doesn’t care about what anyone thinks of him,” she says. “He knows what he’s doing is right. He’s not online.” He’s still iffy on Instagram, so he outsources the management of his own account to an expert: Livvy. What comes next is something of an open question. Livvy seems a safe bet to write her own ticket—she’d like to keep working with the Livvy Fund, which she established to help female athletes at LSU snag the NIL deals more likely to be given to their male counterparts. Florida seems like a good place to put down roots, she thinks. (“I don’t want my New Jersey residency; the taxes there are crazy.”) But for a few more days, at least, they’re here in Baton Rouge, where they’ve got history, and where people treat them politely and mostly leave them alone. Toward the end of our conversation, talk turns to plans for tomorrow—one of their last days together in town. Livvy’s been fussing at something on her phone; when prompted, she explains that she was going to ask Paul if he wanted to do something together. She hesitates to explain: “I don’t want you to say no if you don’t want to do it.” Paul, though, wants to sort it out. “Yeah, let’s do this now,” he says. “What is it? Right now. Let’s talk about this now.” Livvy gives in. She was thinking, she says, that because Paul won’t be in town for Valentine’s Day, they could spend the day making pottery together. “You’re very analytical,” she says, “and I feel like it would be fun to see your creative juices flow.” “Oh,” Paul says, surprised but charmed. And then, to me: “I thought she was going to say an escape room.” “No,” Livvy replies. “You would like that, and I would be stuck in that room forever. I would never get out.” So it’s decided, the ace says to the gymnast. “Let’s do an escape room to pottery tomorrow. I like it. Good plan.” Sam Schube, a former editor at GQ, is a writer and editor in New York. A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of GQ with the title “Mr. & Mrs. Rizz” PRODUCTION CREDITS: Photographs by Roe Ethridge Styled by Michelle Cameron Hair and makeup by Wendy Karcher Tailoring by Ksenia Golub Prop styling by Suzonne Stirling Produced by Katherine Prato Productions