The Romanticization of the Organic Meet Cute
And why there’s no shame in not having your relationship start with one
“We can’t tell our future imaginary kids that we met on a dating app,” I said to my partner on a random Wednesday afternoon.
I can’t remember if we were talking about dating apps, or kids, or the future in general, but I can remember the conviction I felt as I said those words. The reality is that we might not even have kids (the key word above being “imaginary”); I’m unsure if I can or want to be a mom, and even though he does want them, he doesn’t want them now, which we both agreed allows us to let the big question remain unanswered for as long as we can afford to do so.
The conversation stayed far away from the heaviness of this topic, though. My partner, observant as always, asked why I was so adamant about the way we met. I explained how unromantic it sounded: imagine telling your kids, the fruit of what’s supposed to be the love of a lifetime, that you matched on an app? Where’s the introduction? The buildup? The climax? The meet cute?! Important components to every story ever told. It might be the writer in me that feels the need for everything to be a good story.
Dating apps are the complete opposite of a meet cute, and of a good story. They’re calculated, impersonal and superficial—pointless more often than not. And forget storytelling for a bit; they’re plagued with ways to fill us with self-loathing, as well as a general loathing toward humanity. They can turn me into my worst self, mindlessly swiping left simply because this one doesn’t look like a model in his first photo, or because this one isn’t my type, or because this one looks extremely cringe in that video where he’s singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” at karaoke. This one lives too far, according to the GPS location—oh, but this one lives too close, which could be a problem when things fall through, and then we’re doomed to run into each other at the local pharmacy while looking like I might be carrying the plague with me.
None of this is remotely as romantic as a meet cute. The idea that love could be waiting for me on the flight I’m about to take, or in the laundry room of my building, or in the pub while I’m having a sophisticated glass of wine, is alluring. Meet cutes are unexpected, improvised, and somehow intimate—the vulnerability of seeing each other in motion, without the chance to retype a sentence or put on nicer clothes. The thrill of a moment that can last for days, even weeks, as it replays in my head over and over again. The feeling that this could change life as I know it. You know what I’m talking about.
But let’s put aside how dating apps have robbed me of my precious meet cute. My point, on that Wednesday afternoon, was this: There is nothing more unromantic than meeting someone online. Your new favorite romcom, even when up-to-date, never skips the meet cute—and matching with a random stranger online doesn’t qualify as meet cute material, not even in 2025.
I have always been a romantic, and I know my partner is too. So I was surprised when, instead of agreeing with me, he shook his head left to right.
“So you’re gonna invent a fake story about how we met?” he asked with a laugh.
Yes. I was proud of this: what a brilliant idea! Slightly quirky, and even if our imaginary kids were to ever find out that it was a lie, it wouldn’t be until we were both too old for them to get mad at us anyway. How cute, the way we tricked them for forty years (I’m being very hopeful here) into believing their parents met at a bookshop when they both reached for the same piece of feminist literature.
I thought I could convince him of the excellence of this idea. But he hit me with another head shake.
“Meet cutes are nice,” he said, to which I immediately wanted to scream “Exactly.” “But I’d rather our imaginary kids grow up seeing how much we love each other, and care about each other. That’s more important than if we met at a bookshop or not.”
He won the debate there and then.
It’s been a few weeks since we had this conversation, and his words still echo in my head at random times during the day. They’ve made me re-examine the ways I’ve always condemned and given less legitimacy to all relationships that start on dating apps, even my own. It made me question if I felt the same way this time.
Do I believe our relationship is less real, less valuable, because we didn’t meet at a cute cafe while queueing for croissants? Do I think we, somehow, love each other less because we decided to start dating based on how good we looked in our Bumble photos? And most importantly: Do I think we won’t last just because the universe didn’t physically put us together in the same place at the same time?
I started pondering all those other times when I’ve met men in real life. The relationships that started organically, as people like to say. The meet cutes we had, and how I thought that that meant something. We had a traditional love story beginning, and therefore it was meant to be. It was going to work out this time, not because we were more compatible, or more attracted to each other, or because we’d been to therapy and started working on our own personal traumas in order to build healthier interpersonal relationships—but simply because we had met the right way. The universe was conspiring in our favor, and that was romantic. What else did I need?
Well, turns out you do need a lot more than that for a relationship to have longevity. Unsurprisingly, those relationships ended the same way that my dating app relationships had: quickly and painfully, or sometimes very undramatically. Come to think of it, most of them didn’t even last as long as my “inorganic” relationships did. They were all good meet cutes, worthy of being used in the next big Netflix romcom (like that one time I interrupted the singing routine of a guy in the laundry room of my student accommodation during lockdown, and the rest was history)—or even better, in the book that will one day make me famous (once again, I’m being hopeful here). But when it comes to love, to build a relationship based on communication, and mutual respect, and the conscious decision of choosing each other every day…when it comes to all of those things I now have in my current relationship, I must admit that none of them are thanks to the way we met.
I guess we still have to see if we’ll make it together to that big “Do you want to have kids, then?” conversation. But if we succeed, or if we don’t, I’m positive it will have nothing to do with our unromantic origin story.
Siham Lee is a Chilean writer, nowadays living everywhere and nowhere. She has a MLitt in Creative Writing and spends most of her time writing and editing short stories. You can also read her personal essays on her Substack Sammyshuman, where she explores the nuances and difficulties of living abroad and being a writer. In her free time, she enjoys lighting a hundred candles, rewatching the same old romcoms and working on the first draft of her first novel, all at the same time.
 | A guest post by
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Hi Siham, I officiated at hundreds of weddings in the 1980s as a liberal member of the clergy. My couples came to me because they were interfaith, interracial, atheists, agnostics, nones queers for a “union” and basically didn’t have a religious home.
We crafted a ceremony together that reflected their worldviews. Our first meeting was a planning and ‘getting to know’ appointment. I’d ask them to tell me their love story, how they met etc. “We met at the zoo, at a coffee shop or another public setting.”
When they’d begin to wind up their story, and we’d made a connection, I’d ask them how they really met. Inevitably, they’d share a look and confess it had been the personal ads. This was before online apps. Sometimes, one of them would pull out a wallet and show me the actual ad that brought them together.
Then I’d normalize their meeting by telling them how many of my couples had two stories, one they told their families and outer circles and another they kept to themselves and those in their inner circles. My hope was to take the sting of shame out of meeting by way of match making ads.
I don’t know if this altered how they told their story in the future, and of course I never outed them, but it did make for a more intimate ceremony.
My husband and I met on a dating site (before apps, after personal ads) and have been married for over 17 years. Everyone, including our kids, knows how we really met. Everyone, including our kids, responded with some variation of "of course you did" because they KNOW us.