We all know how the story goes — two people meet, reciprocate each other’s interest (!), go on a magical date (!!), fall in love (!!!), and then have a story to tell at parties and dinners that’s both parts “aww” and “boy does the highway look like a nice place to sleep tonight.”
If you’re anything like me, you’ve both seen and heard this story play out countless times, with countless variations. I have violently sobbed to the ending of The Notebook, memorized Billy Crystal’s New Year’s Eve monologue from When Harry Met Sally, and seen just about every other movie where someone is chasing their love interest to the airport. I’ve watched my friends meet their significant others and begged them to spill all the gory details of their first dates. A recent addition to my slight romance obsession is asking my friends how their parents met (100/10 would recommend doing this, there’s almost never a dull story). However, this latest development has led me to ask a question to not just my friends, but everyone my age:
Has Gen Z killed the “meet cute”?
For those of you who don’t know, a “meet cute” is when two romantic interests meet in a way that is, well, cute. This could be reaching for the same book at the library, sitting next to each other on a plane, or even working up the courage to simply say hello.
With the Internet becoming so present in our daily lives, it’s only natural that it would eventually affect dating. Even the 1998 film You’ve Got Mail portrays a young Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan meeting in a chat room and pursuing a relationship via email, an early picture of the online dating boom soon to come.
To discuss online dating and the “meet cute,” I sat down in my college house living room to dish with my roommates, Juliana and Sophia. Juliana has been my best friend since high school and met her boyfriend, AJ, on Tinder in the fall of our freshman year of college. Working as a barista at a local cafe, Juliana had always imagined that her job, rather than the Internet, might play a role in how she would meet the one.
“I guess I always had this ideal meet cute of me being the barista and the cute guy walking in…” she said. “And, like, consistently coming back to me and wanting to get coffee from me every morning, and associating that joy of having your first coffee of the morning with me, and eventually asking me out. Coffee’s a big part of my life, so I always had this ideal situation.”
Sophia, my other roommate, and fellow rom-com connoisseur, had her own “meet cute” with her ex-boyfriend in high school. “We had a free period at the same time in high school where we could go get bagels and I went along with people,” she said. “And I met him through that. He remembers our first time meeting. He took the bus home…his best friend was on it. He was sitting in the front and I was in the back. He remembers seeing me in the back and I was laughing or telling a story or something, and he asked, ‘Who’s that girl? She’s so cute and funny.’ And his friend was like, ‘That’s Sophia.’ I made him tell me that like a hundred times.”
While these stories both serve as prime examples of the “meet cute” genre, does meeting on an app remove the “cute” entirely? I asked Sophia if she would be upset meeting her ideal person on a dating app.
“No. I don’t think I’ve ever had an attachment to a cute story,” she responded. “I think all the memories within it are cute enough.”
Juliana shared a similar sentiment when reflecting on meeting AJ. “I think I never would have met him any other way,” she said. “So, while I wish that the stars could’ve aligned and I could’ve met my perfect person in a perfect way, I don’t think I would’ve met him if it wasn’t for Tinder….”
Perhaps the idea of “stars aligning” is one that cannot be killed by a generation or a multitude of dating apps. Like Sophia said, perhaps it isn’t about the meeting itself, but the memories that follow.
“The first time I ever talked [to AJ] was through a phone, which isn’t the most ideal,” Juliana said. “Still, I have that moment of walking up to the subway station and him turning around and looking at me. And that for me is still just as magical of a moment in my head even though we met online.” She paused, laughed for a second, then said “Embarrassing, but it’s still something that makes me smile, and something I’m excited to tell my future kids about.”
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