


Last May, Eli Rallo posted a TikTok showing her grabbing a coffee at a Barnes & Noble Café and making a Bed Bath & Beyond run before setting up her new workspace.
“Hi, my name is Eli, I’m 23 years old and I’m writing a book and I want to do it together,” she said cheerily while the “Sex and the City” theme song played over the footage.
Plenty of young women living in New York City dream of walking in Carrie Bradshaw’s Manolo Blahniks — it’s a cliche at this point — but Rallo might actually be doing it.
Now 24, the East Village resident has become a hit on TikTok and Instagram, with viral posts speaking on “rules for first dates” — it’s a Thursday, you pregame with 1½ glasses, you don’t become a pen pal leading up to the get-together — and “the death of the chill girl.”
She has a book — “I Didn’t Know I Needed This: Rules for Falling Into and Out of Sex, Dating, Love and Ghosting” — due in October from HarperCollins lifestyle imprint Harvest.
“Each chapter is stocked with a different list of rules,” Rallo told The Post.
“It goes through the entire cycle of a relationship, from being single to being single again. So you get everything from flirting and dating apps to serious relationships and breakups to friendship and self-love and self-reliance.”
The New Jersey native first gained traction on TikTok during the start of the pandemic. Home from the University of Michigan, where she graduated from with a degree in theater and playwriting in 2020, she started posting videos of what was inside her family’s massive glass snack jar.
In the years since, her social media presence has evolved to feature everything from memes involving the Kardashians or Bernie Sanders to her cute outfits — with Versace or Ferragamo tagged as her shoes’ designer, again conjuring Bradshaw — rants about public school gym class and lists offering advice and irreverent ins and outs.
Recent ins have included “Spin class and wearing your hair up” and “3 legged dogs,” while outs have included “Dating apps & car rental places” and “Fig Newtons (geriatric).”
The random assortment of content — and Rallo’s candidness about everything from her breast reduction to her struggles with disordered eating — has landed her 657,900 TikTok followers, 109,000 Instagram followers and a talent manager.
“When I first came across Eli’s content, I found it to be completely addictive,” Rallo’s manager, Amanda Marzolf, told The Post of what compelled her to sign the social media maven.
“There was something so raw and relatable about her storytelling abilities that I found myself being drawn back to her content again and again.”
Her followers are equally enthusiastic.
“Her content is like catching up and getting advice from a best friend. One who would call you out when you needed it but also not judge,” Amber Dunham, 26, an accountant in Illinois, told The Post.
“She is brutally honest and doesn’t beat around the bush. If something is messed up she’ll say it, if something is phenomenal she’ll make sure you know. She is authentically herself. Someone who is that sure of themselves and is that confident clearly knows what they’re talking about,” Dunham added.
Rallo’s success has rankled some — there’s even an active, anti-Rallo Reddit forum dedicated to questioning her credibility, with some users hurling the ultimate Gen Z insult, referring to Rallo’s advice and posts as “cringe.”
Rallo told The Post that she’s conscious of only giving advice on things she has “experience with or experience adjacent to.”
And while she’s blown up on social media, Rallo — who graduated with a master’s in journalism from Columbia in 2021 — insists she’s not an influencer.
“The only thing I would ever influence anyone to do is feel good about themselves,” she said.
“If that happens to mean that they like something I was wearing, and they want to buy the same thing and they also want to see if it makes them feel that way, then so be it. But my intention is never influencing.”
But she’s definitely making her presence known. She has appeared on Tamron Hall’s talk show, was invited to last year’s Tonys and has met many of her idols, including Drew Barrymore, Tina Fey and Cheryl Strayed. The latter will be featured on an upcoming episode of Rallo’s “Miss Congeniality” podcast.
As for her love life, Rallo recently celebrated her two-year anniversary with her own Mr. Big: a boyfriend known to her followers only as Scorpio Boy.
For all her openness and advice-giving, she doesn’t get into the details of her relationship.
Her forthcoming book, she says, isn’t really about finding Mr. Right. In typical Gen Z fashion, it all comes back to looking inward.
“It’s mostly about our relationship to our self through the lens of our relationship to others,” Rallo said.