Issue #15: Doing it for the Meet Cute

Does it matter how you meet your partner (plus, is your relationship doomed if it started on an app)?

Feb 09, 2023

Roses are red, violets are blue, we first locked eyes on Tinder, but admit it and I’ll kill you.

One evening last month, I logged in to Hinge, scrolled down to the bottom of the ‘Account’ menu and removed my profile for good. While I’ve paused and deactivated the app over the years, this more permanent action represented the final nail in the coffin, ending a toxic on-off relationship spanning almost a decade.

I’m not the only one. While once upon a time the month of Valentine’s Day might have prompted a spike in dating app downloads, the backlash has officially begun. Research from Bored of Dating Apps, an offline dating events platforms founded by journalist Jessica Evans, has found 63% of its users have deleted their respective app(s) in favour of meeting in person. Not everyone saw it coming: in 2019, a third of couples met online (in the UK, with similar proportions for the US), and the same researchers predicted this would rise to one in two come 2035. But along came the pandemic – and afterwards, a newfound zeal for in-person meets. Now the app du jour within the hubs of London and New York is ‘offline-dating’ Thursday, which markets itself as much around in-real-life (IRL) social events as it does in-app matches.

If this trend towards IRL meetings does continue, I feel a bit sorry for those who did meet their partners on ‘The Apps’. One close friend exchanged essayistic messages with her long-term partner-to-be during the beginning of January 2021, leading to a lockdown-friendly evening walk along Southbank one dark, rainy Sunday. More recently, another friend arranged a rooftop drinks date with a local while spending a summer in Brooklyn… they’re now married and expecting a baby. Likely, these partnerships began in the painfully-cliched way most app interactions do: a double-tap on a heart icon, a quip about an avocado. But they soon blossomed, offline, into something unique and special. Will such couples – nevertheless – be at the mercy of their offsprings’ ridicule forevermore (or will the kids be dating in the Metaverse by then? TBC).

What remains true is that ‘meeting on a dating app’ is at the bottom of the hierarchy when it comes to romantic origin stories – with some couples resorting to lying about how they met. This in-joke inspired the name of dating podcast and Instagram account We Met At Acme (Acme being the name of a notoriously hard-to-get-into NYC bistro, akin to Dorsia in American Psycho).

What’s in a Meet Cute?

If ‘we met on Tinder’ is an un-ideal line to deliver at a family wedding, ‘Meet Cutes’ are the opposite. ‘What’s that?’, you might ask – a question which is a dead giveaway, by the way, that you didn’t pay enough attention while watching The Holiday. A Meet Cute, as Kate Winslet’s character’s octogenarian mate Arthur explains, is a romantic or sentimental scenario in which a potential couple meets for the first time.

Say a man and a woman both need something to sleep in and both go to the same men's pyjama department. The man says to the salesman, "I just need bottoms," and the woman says, "I just need a top." They look at each other and that's the 'meet cute.'
- Arthur Abbot, The Holiday

Online dating culture has made the ‘Meet Cute’ even rarer. Less than a decade after apps emerged, the average couples’ ‘How We Met’ story was reduced in length by half:

In a recent research paper, Michael Rosenfeld and Sonia Hausen of Stanford University and Reuben Thomas of the University of New Mexico reviewed data from a long-running study by the University of Michigan on how US couples meet. Among their findings was that it now takes people fewer words to tell the story of how they met. In 2009, the average respondent used 67 words to describe how they met their last partner; by 2017, they needed just 37
- Quartz

My maternal grandparents met at a local dance hall in Liverpool. How quaint is that? My married-for-30+ years parents met, somewhat less auspiciously, at a Marbella nightclub, but even that story beats: ‘I swiped right on your mum’. And sure, Netflix have tried its hardest with online-dating inspired love stories, like well-meaning-catfish film Love Hard, but it’s hard to get sentimental about this kind of meeting, with 1998’s You’ve Got Mail the exception that proves the rule.

Looking beyond the origin story

My challenge is: do we place too much weight on origin stories, for better or for worse? It’s not that Meet Cutes aren’t inherently romantic. Last year, I had a month-long fling with a stranger I locked eyes with on a Lisbon street corner – and the Way We Met was the perfect complement to what we both knew, for various factors, would be a short story. But how significant is the fact you, say, once reached for the same bag of Maris Piper potatoes in the supermarket when one of you burns the same kind of potatoes in your shared oven, three years later? I suspect, not very.

There’s also the risk of eking out a fling beyond its sell-by date, in a bid to honour the romance of the initial meeting. This story from my friend, Wall Street Journal reporter Katie Deighton, made me laugh with its relatability:

Katie Deighton @DollyDeighton

@ChezSpecter I once had a fling with an American boy in Florence, we said our goodbyes on the train to Bologna (he was continuing on to Berlin) and I did everything I could to keep this dream alive until it turned out he couldn't understand my accent over the phone so we stopped talking lol

I suspect even long-term lovers appreciate the thrilling notion of falling in love with the police officer who pulls them over for speeding; or bonding in an office elevator over a shared love of The Smiths; or falling in love with their favourite A-list actress when she wanders into their curiously-niche travel bookshop. But those are the plots of, respectively, Bridesmaids, 500 Days of Summer & Notting Hill – not the stories of how the best couples I know met (many of whom found each other, yes, on an app).

As I’ve got older, I’ve come to appreciate these stories for what they are: not a blueprint for how the best real-life relationships begin, but a separate fantasy altogether – much like the one where I run off into the sunset with Adam Driver. ‘Meet-Cutes’ are almost sweeter to enjoy, without wondering if and when you’re going to have yours.

Long-term romance is found not in the Meet-Cutes (or, topically, in how you mark Valentine’s Day) but in the small moments. The soothing reassurances about the burnt potatoes. The regular check-ins; the private jokes that make sense to no one else; the airport pick-ups; the £5 tulips; the cups of tea; the times you listened; the mutual agreement to don thermals and brave the elements on a dark, rainy Sunday night in lockdown. Take it from a friend who fell for the woman who purchased his old flat; they met by film-worthy serendipity when he went to pick up some post that had been sent to his former address. ‘It’s definitely a rare meeting story,’ he tells me, ‘But it's just a sweet starting point that doesn't affect the rest of the relationship, and my desire to keep it going.’

So, back to the whole offline dating surge. I think it’s been a long time coming, for a number of people (presumably, extroverts will fare better at in-person singles’ events compared to the shyer introverts whom apps initially catered for). But there’s nothing wrong or inferior about apps, as a means of meeting. Much like other social mediums, they are what you make of them: you can filter, swipe & banter your way to the wrong partners (as, candidly, I have time and time again), or you might just go in with the right energy, pure intentions and a little bit of luck, and end up meeting The One.

For those who have met their partners this way – or will do so in future – I reckon it’s as good an origin story as any other. And if you still desperately want to experience a Meet-Cute for yourself? That’s what Richard Curtis films are for.

The Coulds

‘How We Met’ stories are one thing – but for a deeper exploration of romantic relationships, love and everything in between (perhaps, for a topical Valentine’s Day viewing), try the below…

❣️ Modern Love (everything)

The popular New York Times column chronicling candid relationship stories, Modern Love has since been adapted into an Amazon Prime series and a podcast. Check it out on your medium of choice:

🎬 Splendour in the Grass

You never forget your first love… warning: this 1961 Elia Kazan film, starring West Side Story’s Natalie Wood & Warren Beatty, will make you weep.

📚 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

We’re still on the theme of first love – but this time it’s in the form of a magic-realism inspired novel set in Colombia, chronicling a decades-long love triangle. One of my favourite books – and one to curl up with on a cold winter’s night.

‘He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past’ - Love in the Time of Cholera

After last week’s hate mail to winter, I’m feeling revitalised after a four-day holiday in Gran Canaria with my friend Rachel. She surfed; I did yoga classes and practised my Spanish; then we balanced it out beautifully by enjoying ice-cold cans of Dorada Pilsner & deliciously tangy, flame-red, lime-flavoured crisps (the latter sadly not available in the UK) while sunbathing on the beach. In other news, I’ve been enjoying back-episodes of Off Air with Fi & Jane for a PodBible review feature I’m writing (this one with Elizabeth Day is fantastic); reading Annie Graham’s 100-word writer interviews (such a clever concept) on her Substack

the micro mashup.

and thinking about stoicism after reading Natasha Bird's brilliant piece in the latest print issue of ELLE (also available on Apple News).

What’s your favourite Meet-Cute story (personal, anecdotal or fictional)?
If you have a partner, did you meet in a ‘cute’ scenario? Does it bother you either way?
Do you think there’s still a stigma around meeting on a dating app – or are we past that now?
Have you ever put pressure on a romantic pairing to work out, simply because of how you met?