There used to be a version of love that started out by accident. You’d meet in the elevator of your office building or in the aisle of a grocery store, reaching for the same box of cereal. Maybe you’d spill a drink or miss a flight or lock eyes across the room and decide, for no real reason, that your life had just changed.
Growing up as a ’90s baby, I was sold this fantasy through rom-coms and my own parents, who met working on the Seaside Heights Boardwalk. I thought love was just something that happened to you. Accidental, cinematic—the best love stories began with inconvenience. Now we meet people the same way we order takeout. Modern love stories start with a well-lit photo and a prompt about how you spend a typical Sunday or if you prefer the window or aisle seat.
Dating apps have replaced the fantasy I was raised to believe in. The moment we match with someone, nearly everything there is to know about them is right in front of our faces. Their school, their job, their hometown, their political or religious beliefs, whether they drink or smoke or want kids. Dating has never been more accessible or efficient, but in the process, it feels like we have lost some of the mystery. It’s hard to believe in romantic accidents when everything about this is intentional.
There’s no slowly getting to know someone, just a pre-screening before you’ve even shared a drink. And don’t even get me started on the instinct to google someone before a first date. By the time you actually sit across from each other, you already know where they work, where they vacation, and what they looked like in 2017.
People love to soften the story and say “we met through friends” or “we just happened to be at the same place” because we want meaning, not logistics. One feels romantic and the other sounds like an instruction manual. No one wants their love story to sound like a transaction. “We matched” doesn’t leave much room for magic. Sure, it’s efficient and practical and honest, but it doesn’t feel like the kind of beginning you tell people years later when you’re trying to explain how it all started.
Psychotherapist Esther Perel talks a lot about how modern dating exists outside the natural rhythm of our lives. She says we carve out two-hour windows to sit across from strangers and decide whether they’re worth seeing again before they’ve ever met our friends, seen our routines, or witnessed who we are in motion. Everything becomes hyper-intentional, hyper-analyzed, hyper-self-aware. I think that’s part of why dating feels so exhausting now—because we’re trying to force intimacy before anything has had a chance to build on its own.
I get comments all the time telling me I’m not going to meet my future husband at a bar, that I need to date more intentionally, that love isn’t just going to magically fall into my lap...and maybe they’re right. But lately, dating has started to feel like the main event; we’ve started to organize our lives around the pursuit of partnership instead of actually living. I don’t want dating to feel like a second job anymore, so after two years of trying to optimize my love life on apps, I’m choosing to take a different approach.
I deleted my dating apps because I’m on a mission to bring back meet-cutes (shoutout to Ainsley Green). Who’s to say I can’t meet my soulmate while reaching for an iced coffee or ordering a drink at my local dive bar? I want to meet people while I’m busy being a person—while I’m laughing too loud with friends, browsing the shelves at my favorite bookstore, or sitting in a café writing this exact essay.
I don’t want to build a life around finding the right person. I want them to find me.
Get How to Find Love in the Cereal Aisle right here.
A version of this story previously appeared in the Probably Oversharing newsletter.
