Influencer Who Went Viral for Never Being in a Relationship in Her 40s Is Now Engaged to Her First Boyfriend (Exclusive)

Back in 2024, Mia Chard used TikTok to open up publicly about the difficulty of being single into her 40s. “I've been single my entire life,” she said in part. “I've never had anybody love me or desire me or want to be with me.” She formed a community of other long-term single people (who sometimes call themselves late bloomers) who resonated with her experiences.

Chard, now 43, didn’t know then that her TikTok account would lead her to her first boyfriend. She definitely didn’t know that it would lead to them getting engaged this November. 

Their romance began, Chard first told PEOPLE back in January, when Sam Perez — who Chard referred to on TikTok by his codename “Max” — slid into Chard’s DMs.

The 40-year-old tells PEOPLE now that he didn’t realize Chard’s account, where she posts under the handle @madmnc, was mostly about her emotional life. He saw videos about visiting a soda shop where he lives in Salt Lake City, Utah (Chard lives in nearby Layton) and thought she ran a food account. But he knew he wanted to get to know her.

He hesitated to message her for a few days “because I know being a woman on the internet can be hard or awful,” he says. “And I'm like, ‘I don't want to sound like a creep.’ But then after a couple days, I said, ‘Worst-case scenario, she tells me to kick rocks.’ ”

But Chard said she did not tell him to kick rocks, and after many dates, she had her first boyfriend. She shared their relationship with her followers for the first time at the start of 2025, and at the time, he didn’t think it was a big deal.

“But then I sometimes forget how much reach Mia gets,” Perez, who works in film and TV production, says. The first videos to feature him have millions of views. “I'm like, ‘That's the entirety of Salt Lake City watching this when you really boil it down. . . . A small country has watched our journey, which is unnerving.”

Around their first anniversary at the end of this summer, the couple discussed the possibility of getting engaged soon. “We both just knew early on this was going to be a person we were going to be with,” Chard, a social worker, explains. Couples in Utah often marry on a very quick timeline, but she says moving into the next phase of their romance was “more organic.”

“I think being older, there was way more confidence in my own timeline. . . . I felt a lot of reclaiming that and knowing that I didn't have to do what a culture dictated, that I just wanted it to be what we felt was right,” she says.

Once Perez bought Chard’s engagement ring, he didn’t plan a big proposal, but waited for the opportune moment. “It's like, ‘I don't know where it will be, but I know it when I'll see it.’ ”

That moment finally came when he was moving into a new apartment in Salt Lake that they planned to live in once they were married. 

“As we were moving in, Mia and her mom were helping, and that's when I was like, ‘Well, this is it. Her mom's there, who's her favorite person, and it's this house that represents new beginnings, and it was still empty,’ ” he says.

Perez dropped down on one knee just as they’d gotten lunch. “It almost looked like she short-circuited because I was just like, ‘Hey, this is something, let's do this,’ kind of thing. And then it hit her and she just started crying,” he says. 

Chard announced the engagement news in a Nov. 24 video on TikTok, where she sliced together footage she took over the course of their romance over Charli xcx’s “Everything is romantic.” 

“I feel a lot of gratitude for how lovely people have been,” she says. “And just as they were a part of the beginning of the story, it's been fun to have them be a part now.” 

Looking back on her journey, Chard says she appreciates even more now how much “luck and timing” go into finding a perfect match. She no longer blames herself for why she struggled to find a partner. “It's not always in our control and sometimes those moments are about timing and kismet, and you just have to grab it when you can,” she says.

In part because of her age and her time being single, she says she came into this relationship “much more secure I am in what I want and what I need.” 

“That has really shaped and formed how I view this relationship and how important it is to choose your partner and continue to choose them every day,” she says. She knows that “I can be alone, should I need to be,” which gives her extra security. 

“I don't want to accept anything less than what I think is the right fit for me, and for them,” she explains.

Chard has “overwhelming gratitude” for “the love that we've received, specifically for the love of the late bloomer community, because I know how delicate that can be.” She explains, “Being able to feel super happy for somebody and still want it for yourself, that's such a generous spot to be in. And I have felt so many people that I have built community with be so genuinely kind and happy for me, and I know sometimes that's a balance.”