In February 2022, 29-year-old Priya was working on the shop floor at Hollister on Regent Street. Nursing a terrible hangover, she had considered calling in sick, but made it to the last 20 minutes of her shift when a guy walked into the shop and asked her where the graphic T-shirts were. After noticing her accent, he asked if she was from India, and the pair got talking after he revealed that he went to a Hindu school. "He asked for my Instagram, and it was instant after that," Priya says. "Sam* and I spent all our time together. It was definitely love at first sight."
It is the kind of meet-cute that many of us have spent our lives fantasising about. Saccharine rom-coms where the couple lock eyes reaching for the same book in the library, or get tangled in each other's dog leads at the park, have long populated our collective imaginary. Recently, social media accounts like @meetcutesnyc have racked up millions of followers. Three in four single people in the UK would prefer to meet a future partner in real life, according to research from dating app Inner Circle.
Priya and Sam are now engaged to be married. But stories like theirs are becoming increasingly rare. Research published by Stanford University last year showed that a whopping 55 per cent of heterosexual couples - and an even higher proportion of gay couples-met online in 2022. But has the normalisation of apps closed us off to love at first sight, now that we have a designated space online for romance? What does shutting off that possibility do to our brains, and what does this mean for the culture when we've grown up believing love at first sight to be the ultimate form of attraction?
Split-second attraction
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