Romcoms lied to us. We all know it, and we’re still living by it anyway.
Somewhere in the 90s, Hollywood made a decision that has caused immeasurable damage to how human beings think about love. The widely accepted trope is: the best love stories are the ones where nobody is trying.
Think about every romantic comedy you have ever watched. The meet-cute is never intentional. She wasn’t looking, he wasn’t looking, they just happened to crash into each other — sometimes literally, because apparently physical injury is romantic when the lighting is right. After this “crash,” Cupid does his thing, and suddenly, they’re in love.
The whole architecture of the romcom fantasy is built on the foundational idea that real love is something that happens to you. Not something you go looking for, not something you plan, and definitely not something you download an app and create a profile for on a Thursday night when you’re tired, a little lonely, and you’ve eaten dinner alone four times this week.
The problem now is, we have absorbed this so deeply that it has affected our perception of what finding our person should look like to the point where we’ve made intentionality something to be ashamed of.
This is where the embarrassment comes from. From the mere admission that you wanted something and you went out to get it like a normal adult human being, instead of waiting for the universe to arrange a convenient collision. The app has nothing to do with it.
But while the romcom has a lot to answer for, we made things worse.
The movies were always fiction and we knew that, but that didn’t stop us from collectively spinning that expectation into some form of social hierarchy that places chance encounters on a pedestal and intentional search at the bottom.
“We met on an app” has become something people say quietly, with a slight wince, waiting to see if the other person is going to make it weird. And more often than not, the other person makes it weird. There’s usually a slight pause, a small recalibration, and sometimes, some variation of “oh that’s so normal now!” delivered with the enthusiasm of someone trying very hard to mean it.
Most of us have participated in this. We’ve either said it with the wince, received it with the pause, or even both. We are all, on some level, complicit in maintaining a stigma that, when you actually examine, makes absolutely no sense.
So Let’s Examine It
Dating apps have been faulted for their unromantic transactional nature and for reducing human connection to a photograph and a bio that says “I love to laugh.”
While we can agree that some dating app interfaces have problems, and the “I love to laugh” bio is a crime against self-expression, we’d also like you to consider the alternative.
What does the organic, accidental, universe-approved method of finding love look like? You go to places, stand there, and hope? Or wait to get set up by someone’s auntie who describes the person as “very nice and quite tall.”
Is the alternative of moving through life permanently hoping for a happy accident really a better option because it creates the illusion that you weren’t looking?
But being on an app, deciding you want a relationship, saying so explicitly, filtering for people who share that intention, and finding someone who also knows what they want, is the embarrassing option. This is the one we hide at family gatherings.
The logic is quite flawed. It has always been, and yet, here we are.
Every Love Story Deserves to Be Told
The couple who met at a house party and the couple who matched on Tova on a random Tuesday are, at their core, doing the same thing. They are two people, finding each other, and trying to build something beautiful. That is all that really matters.
The way people meet doesn’t determine the legitimacy of what they’ve built. So, relationships that start on dating apps are not required to prove themselves in ways that chance-encounter relationships wouldn’t be required to.
So tell the story — all of it, and without the wince, because the best love stories hardly ever start with meet-cutes that sound like they came straight out of a box-office-smashing romcom.
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