My girlfriend is an OnlyFans star – this is what it feels like

When I met my girlfriend’s family for the first time, they asked me about my education and upbringing, friends and family, but most importantly; my work. What my girlfriend Cathrine hadn’t told her conservative parents was that I did nude modelling on a platform called OnlyFans. “She provides for me and gives me a life I otherwise couldn’t afford”, I recall her saying as the news cast a painful silence over the dinner table. I joined the platform in 2022 after a bad break-up, and again in 2024, when I was 24, and needed some cash after quitting my job. I’ve always been sexually confident, and it was an avenue that was easy to go down; I earned well and felt sexy. I was good at it. I was exceptionally nervous about telling her parents; I was unsure if OnlyFans was even legal in rural Norway, which is where they’re from. Her parents were polite, but I could see a bomb had just gone off in their heads. Shorts Cathrine and I met through mutual friends and have been dating for 18 months. Very early on we had the “boundaries chat”. I expected her not to unreasonably want to see everything I was posting, who I was messaging and what shoots I was planning. But she never asked. “I really didn’t care”, she said when I asked her why she left me to it. “You started before I met you, as long as you don’t cheat on me emotionally, work is work, and I respect that.” As someone who has received my fair share of unkind backlash, I always found that people never fully grasped what it was like to be in a relationship whilst doing adult content. Here’s the crux: it’s just like being in any other relationship. Isla Moon, 28, became social media famous after posting outdoor-style adult content of herself on fishing boats and in the woods, and now has over 480,000 followers on Instagram. She, too, is an OnlyFans creator. But happily, her partner Andrew Stone said his parents were only upset he didn’t tell them sooner. “My parents were mostly upset we didn’t tell them we had moved into a new apartment,” says Andrew. “They are extra supportive and don’t judge at all; neither do my friends”. It might sound strange that family would be supportive of sex work, but adult content creators are becoming more common. OnlyFans has boomed over the last decade, with over 377.5 million accounts created since its launch in 2016; during that time, $30bn (£22bn) has been paid out to creators. Who wouldn’t want their child to benefit from a slice of that fortune? My girlfriend Cathrine received some criticism from her friends in the early days of our relationship. “I will be honest, some friends did ask me directly if I was with you just for money, but I wasn’t. What kind of person does that? I knew you earned a lot”, she said, recalling me whisking her away on business class to New York for a fortnight after two weeks of dating. “But so what? A lot of people earn a lot of money.” Henry Brayshaw, 29, and the fiancé of Annie Knight, an OnlyFans megastar, also feels frustration when people accuse him of taking financial advantage. “Because of the money, a lot of people think our relationship is a stunt and isn’t real,” says Henry. The couple are due to marry in October. Henry says he has nothing to do with Annie’s content and gets frustrated when people accuse their love of being fake. “People think I just sit in the corner and watch like a cuck [cuckold], but I have nothing to do with her work whatsoever. They [trolls online] think I’m a gold-digger, which is just not true.” ‘He was performing in a lot of videos that I wasn’t a part of,’ says Isla Moon of her partner, Andrew Lily Phillips, who became one of the UK’s most notorious porn stars after sleeping with 100 men in a day, met her boyfriend, Sam Slorach, 27, through Henry Brayshaw, his friend. Sam also felt the pinch from public perception, so Lily decided to take him out of the spotlight due to the abuse they received. “Ever since, I took off from that video people are always like, ‘You’re not happy, you hate your job, you’re doing this for money. You’re not in a real relationship. He’s fake. This is the PR stunt. He’s unhappy, like you,'” says Lily. When stripping down for millions of eyes online, it’s easy to see how a relationship with no boundaries or trust can quickly go south. “For a couple of years we were taking part in a lot of collabs with other creators”, says Isla. “[Andrew] can get hard quickly, so he became ‘the stunt dick’ for other people’s content, but it was quickly taken for granted. My consent was no longer acknowledged, and he was performing in a lot of videos that I wasn’t a part of.” Now, the couple have much firmer boundaries to keep them focused on each other. “In terms of Isla filming with other people, I say no to collaborating with another man if it’s something I can provide,” says Andrew. “She has that at home.” Jealousy can harbour when someone is watching from the bench. “Of course, there’s been jealousy; we’re only human,” say Annie and Henry. “We just say it and communicate with each other. We just talk it out respectfully,” Henry adds. Henry Brayshaw, 29, and the fiancé of Annie Knight, an OnlyFans megastar, also feels frustration when people accuse him of taking financial advantage Annie, who has been creating content for six years, established a worldwide name for herself before she and Henry got together, something he has “always been respectful” of. The duo were best friends for years before they finally started dating and recently decided to tie the knot. “Every woman in the industry I’ve met loves what they do”, says Henry. “The benefit of having a fiancée in the industry is unlike any other. We both respect one another; why would I hold her back?” “People assume that because of mine and Isla’s work, it means that sex isn’t special or it’s now meaningless. I really refute that,” says Andrew. “A lot of guys are probably just jealous and always bring up the fact that I must be a cuck and weak. It requires quite a bit of sexual openness and being comfortable with sharing and being in certain situations. But outside of that, it really is that when we film videos, it’s work.” I always used to say doing OnlyFans is doing what everyone else does behind closed doors, except you do it on camera. Many couples explore sexually and take intimate photographs of themselves – “Why not monetise it when you enjoy it?” says Lily. “We are like any other couple when the camera is off; work really is just work like everybody else”. “There’s a lot of head noise [that comes with the job]. That can be difficult to tune out”, says Henry. “But it’s just work, and at the end of the day I get to live the dream life with the woman I love”.