Love in the Bubble 295

Apply for The Saint — it might get you a girlfriend

Everyone wants a cute meeting story. It’s a guaranteed smile and chorus of cooing ‘awws’ when you’re introduced to her friends and she starts recounting how you rescued her from a shark or a burning house, while you sit there with a bashful smile. Meeting stories matter because they hold two stories at once: how you met each other, and how you both happened to be in that exact place at that exact moment.

It’s why I’ve never liked dating apps. It’s not just the endless swiping or the legions of people who ‘still don’t know what they’re looking for’. It’s that apps remove half the story. You’re attracted first, and then you try to build a reason to meet. But when you meet someone in real life, the reason is already there. You’re both in the same place for a purpose — the same party, the same tutorial, the same pub, the same club. You already have a foundation before the conversation even starts.

“I met your granddad on his honeymoon.” My grandmother always says. It’s not exactly true, but she delights in the horrified expressions present on everyone’s faces. She’s eighty-one; you can just say whatever you want at that point. My grandfather had just finished filming a series where his character had gotten married and took a holiday to the beaches of Malta, where my grandmother was working on a modelling contract. His opening line, my grandmother recounts, was to warn her about the sea urchins and then proceeded to brag that his shirt cost ‘only five shillings’. It’s cute, and you can see how she bursts into energy and her eyes sparkle as she recounts it.

But what makes the story amazing is the coincidence. She could’ve been sent to Beirut or Melbourne. He could’ve chosen Tunis or Nice. She could’ve gone for lunch instead of sunbathing. He could’ve lost his nerve. A million different things had to go right for them to meet.

And most real meeting stories feel like that: improbable, delicate, and very, very lucky.

My girlfriend and I met when I applied to write for The Saint. She happened to be supervising my interview — except she wasn’t even supposed to be there. She was filling in for someone else last-minute. The main interviewer hadn’t arrived, so instead of sitting there in silence like a lemon, I started talking. Afterwards, we kept bumping into each other around town: reeling, Aikman’s, jazz. All our usual haunts, yet somehow, we’d never collided before. Maybe we wouldn’t have, had the interviewer not been late, had she not been filling in for someone else.

When we talk, we realise how sometimes we were only a degree of separation apart — I declined a friend’s invitation to see a play last December — she was there; she took French lessons with a friend of mine last year. St Andrews is small, but it’s still big enough for two lives to run side-by-side without ever touching.

And yet, for once, everything aligned. A missed interview. A last-minute substitution. A conversation that shouldn’t have happened but did.

That’s why I love meeting stories. They remind you that the best things in your life aren’t always the ones you planned, but the ones you almost missed.

So if you’re wavering about applying, joining, showing up — do it. It might get you a job. It might get you rejected. It might get you absolutely nothing.

But sometimes — if you’re very lucky — it might get you a girlfriend.

Illustration by Elizabeth Lang