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 her recent breakup the same way a million other did: on Instagram.
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 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, worked in the television industry. But they weren’t 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.
