While love has a month dedicated to it, most of the time, it rarely arrives on schedule. For Ram Mancelita and Alvin Yu, the content creator duo behind RamVin, love appeared four months early, on a Halloween night.
They didn’t meet for the first time that night. They’d floated around each other’s orbits through mutual friends and social media. But on this particular Halloween, they met as two single men and went on their first date not long after.
“We never stopped dating since then,” Alvin said. He’s a banker, a traveling one at that, as he playfully dubs himself in his personal Instagram page. It’s where he first started his content creation journey, spanning almost a decade now.
Ram was also a content creator first before he became one-half of RamVin. He worked as an IT sales professional for a few years before pivoting to entrepreneurship. Now he runs a chicken shop as well as the digital media company Sugbo.ph.
“When we started doing couple content, our mindset was always that our relationship would never revolve around social media,” said Ram. “We don’t need validation from likes, views, or comments to know what we have.”
They started their joint pages back in July 2025, and they have since seen enormous success. Their brand has amassed over 100,000 followers across platforms in less than a year, with videos reaching more than a million views, some even crossing the three-million mark.
“At that time, there weren’t a lot of Filipino same-sex couples creating content together,” Ram said. It’s not like the channel was created with a specific market in mind. Really, it just started with a trend that they came across and wanted to do.
But it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to click ‘post’, especially for Alvin.
“At that time, I wasn’t fully out yet,” he confessed, having come from a family where his sexual orientation was not something fully accepted, even discussed.
That hesitation says something bigger about the space they were stepping into. The Philippines often presents itself as friendly toward the LGBTQ+ community, but that openness can be misleading. Beneath the surface, legal protections still lag behind the visibility and presence of queer Filipinos.
Sure, there have been steps locally to make the lives of queer men and women easier, but a decades-long stagnation of the SOGIE bill makes the foundation of these local efforts weak and fragile.
Add the persistent culture of resentment towards queer people, particularly through deeply-ingrained hate speech, and you leave young men like Alvin afraid to be open about his relationship.
Nevertheless, they conquered their fears. Now they’ve reached new heights not just in their content creation but also in their love for one another.
“When we first started dating, love felt like excitement and discovery,” Ram reflected. “Today, love looks more like [a] partnership. Supporting each other’s dreams, having difficult conversations, making sacrifices.”
Alvin has helped calm Ram’s always-on-edge tendencies, teaching him to slow down. Ram appreciates how he has been changed by “being with someone who consistently chooses kindness and understanding.”
For Alvin, Ram exceeded his expectations. “I honestly thought this would be like any other relationship I’ve had in the past. But I was wrong. Ram showed me what it means to love unconditionally,” Alvin said.
Coming from a conservative family, he was touched by how Ram “naturally and proudly” introduced him as his boyfriend to everyone he knew. “That kind of acceptance and love inspired me to give my all in the relationship as well,” he said.
It’s a case of leading by example, something they say they do with their content. Both Ram and Alvin are quick to shun the idea that they are “spokespersons” for their community. They’re just sharing their authentic selves with the world.
Still, they manage to turn their platform into a space for meaningful LGBTQ+ discussions, addressing and debunking negative comments in a calm, educational manner.
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“If we’re going to give attention to a hateful comment anyway, we might as well use it to educate,” Ram said.
They don’t take these jabs personally. “Social media has always been secondary to our relationship,” Alvin said.
Because before RamVin became a brand, there were just Ram and Alvin. Two single men who met at a Halloween party, from vastly different worlds, who couldn’t stop dating each other after they started.
Should the content and the brand all go up in smoke one day, those two will still remain—possibly married, possibly with children. They may not know exactly what the future holds, but they know they will continue to love each other as they always have. And that, for now, is enough.
Photography Summer Demol
