Is it a missed connection or is it disconnection?

Meet-cutes, IRL encounters, and romance in the age of TikTok.

I am the kind of woman whose friend text her this week saying, “people want long term relationships, and you want revolution”. I am the kind of woman who does not care for engagement rings whipped out of freshly-pressed chinos. I am the kind of woman who doesn’t prioritise romantic love over platonic love. I spend my days eye-rolling about the negative impact that Disney and one too many cliché soaked rom-coms has had on modern dating. Yet, I am also the kind of woman who daydreams about “how I met my partner in the real world in the wildest you’ll never believe it way” type of stories, that seem so unlikely in the decaying cavity of dating apps.

Maybe it’s my worldview. The belief, faith, and trust in magic and whatever exists beyond our human comprehension. The meaning-maker in me. The part of me that swoons over synchronicities and tracing back the big moments of my life to the astrological transits that were running concurrent. The erratic texting between B and I, when one of us has an it-can-only-be-otherworldly, “no way this actually happened”, moment. I find it incredibly diminishing when someone throws gloopy porridge over your wonder by saying that your experience was probably just a coincidence. Why can’t it be magic? Experiencing something so acutely beautiful that even your brain which is responsible for regulating your whole damn body can’t make sense of it. There’s so much romance in feeling into the unexplained magnificence of something without trying to rationalise or prove its existence.

I know that finding love on a dating app in this economy is a chaotic and unbelievable feat and while love is love wherever you happen to find it, you can see the momentary awkwardness when you ask some couples how they met and they declare, “we actually met on Tinder”. You’d think that the name of a dating app is our version of being branded with a scarlet letter, as it often musters somewhat of an embarrassed response. For most of us, whether we admit it or not, there’s a cultural romantic hierarchy.

We live for the stories of these big unexpected encounters and meet-cutes, as if the way in which you meet someone proves its meant-to-be-ness. The movies taught us to run to someone’s departure gate six seconds before their flight leaves to tell the entirety of Heathrow Terminal 3 how desperately in love you are. Ballads are sung about chance sightings with perfect strangers that prompted a summer long love affair across Europe. Books penned about glances between the closing doors of a train, to then see them again a decade later on another train. We know those stories well. Art isn’t being made about scrolling on your phone with your retainers in, a clenched jaw and giving Hinge £9.99 so it will boost your face on its algorithm in the hopes that you’ll be able to tell who might be a great love based on a blurry photo and that they like going for a roast and a walk each Sunday.

Why is that? Have we become so chronically online, that we romanticise everything we do offline, because it feels increasingly distant to us? While I can’t think of anything more embarrassing to my sense of self than someone serenading me with their guitar and golden retriever-eyes; I have one rom-com plot line that I would like to live in the reality of.

The missed connection.

I would always flick to the back of the Metro newspaper left sloppily by someone else, to head to the missed connection personal ads. They would read like tweet-length love stories created by an image description generator.

Girl with brown hair at Embankment station wearing a red scarf at 6:45pm. I’m the guy across the platform with a backpack who waved at you before you got on the train. Would love to connect.

It filled me with such joy seeing who was making eyes at each other on the District Line. Even more so, to witness the inky expression of being so compelled to act on a feeling that a stranger gave you that you would take the time to write in, in the pretty low odds of them reading it, feeling the same way as you and reaching out. To this day, I am naively and obnoxiously sure that someone has written a missed connection for me and I missed it. Perhaps it was on Craigslist. Maybe a newspaper I never read. I surely hope that someone’s son is in the throes of crushing yearning for me, because he didn’t catch me in time as I fled Harrods Food Hall.

Speaking of Craigslist, not just an archaic mid 2000’s marketplace of risking it all to find an apartment, roommate or casual sex; it is still the home of missed connections and going strong to this day. Colman Domingo’s appearance on The Graham Norton Show spread around social media quicker than an infographic that everyone’s been guilt-tripped into sharing. It was storytelling at its finest, as he carefully and sweetly told the account of how he met his now husband Raúl in 2005. You can watch the short clip below, but it is the missed connections love story that we all needed, and also such a gorgeous reminder that things go far and beyond the scope of “just a coincidence” and can only be explained by sheer magic. If only we keep believing in it.

I would love this story for me. There’s something incredibly delicious about meeting someone in this way. Imagine spending hours in longing about someone you walked past in the street. The days of anticipation and hope deciphering if your paths will ever cross again. Trying to find the right words to say when you write a post trying to find them. Then you find them and have no idea what will happen. Then everything happens. If anything can warm the pragmatism of my Venus in Capricorn heart, this is it.

But, what is not it for me, is TikTok’s approach to the missed connection. I am an unapologetic frequent millennial consumer of TikTok. I feel the intended dopamine rush pulsing through me as I scroll through videos of people eating fast food chicken (I don’t even eat meat yet I am transfixed) in their cars, Nara Smith making bubblegum and well, everything from scratch and everyone dancing to the same three songs. It makes me happy, and as you can see from this newsletter, it is also research.

I first saw the TikTok version of missed connections with a video of a guy walking past a girl in a club and she did a slow motion capture of his sculpted face complete with R&B soundtrack. The caption got my attention, as she said, “TikTok help me find him” and the internet responded in true genie fashion with a resounding, “your wish is our command babe”. Within a few hours the comment section community had delivered the subject of her brief attraction’s Instagram handle, Snapchat and probably his social security number and mother’s middle name if I scrolled down far enough.

You’d think I’d be thrilled at this tech dalliance, in the same way I get giddy over Craigslist ads, but no, it didn’t hit the same and I wasn’t sure why. Then, over months and years, thanks to the algorithmic genius of the For You page which is equally astounding as it is terrifying, I kept seeing more of these missed connection videos. They’d all follow the same format. A video clip of someone lasting anywhere from seconds to minutes. It might be at a bar, on the street, a train. Again, with the caption of, “TikTok help me find them”, and just like good little minions the internet often finds them and demands to be updated on if there’s any romantic progress happening in the DM’s.

I don’t like it.

Not only do I think it’s weird to film someone without consent and paste it on the internet for all and digital sundry, but it’s not a missed connection if you had a full two minutes to film them close-up and chose not to speak to them. This is not the romance or magic of a true missed connection, that feels crushingly fleeting. Someone gets on a train just as the doors shut. Something needs to happen to prevent the connection. The connection was missed not by choice but circumstance. I’m sorry beloved, but why should the internet do the labour of looking for someone for you, when you were right up in their nostrils filming them instead of saying, “hey” or at least showcasing your come hither eyes.

Yes, we can name all the reasons why this happens and I understand those reasons. People are shy. Always have been. Increasingly more so. We have also been more vocal about our distaste for catcalling and safety fears around being approached. We’ve received endless cultural conditioning that women shouldn’t make the first move and so on. My main issue with the new era of missed connections is that it just makes me sad.

It speaks to our wider disconnection as a society, and the issues that stem from feeling more at home online compared to the outside world, where we can make eye contact, taste, touch and smell all the richness this life has to offer without the sensory blocking nature of screens in between us. I am not anti-tech nor social media. I am not a spokesperson for digital detoxes and never scrolling. It is a part of life and we can disengage or we can try to engage intentionally. We can acknowledge that we are wrapped up in the system of big tech and decide on the role it plays for us individually.

I don’t believe that technology is solely responsible for our disconnection, but it absolutely has a role. There is safety in sharing only glimpses of ourselves. In connecting with others through bitesize messages that we have the luxury of time to filter, preen and polish before sending. It is safe to share opinions knowing that you can block or ignore anyone who doesn’t agree with them. It feels easier to stay in bed and send a few voice notes instead of getting dressed, leaving the house and sitting with all parts of another human. It’s more comfortable to express sexual desires on an app when no-one knows your last name or can even see a full-length photo of you.

We are disconnected not only by our phones and laptops, but just modern living. We are pushed into picking sides. Being divisive sells. Forced into making statements and forming opinions without time to reflect. Putting ourselves into pristinely decorated boxes to let people know exactly who we are. We are told to work harder and harder if we want to be successful. We can have our groceries, cookies, hopes and dreams delivered by the next day. There’ll always be more clothes available, more food in production, more water streaming from taps, more trees even when one gets cut down.

Even when it comes to looking within, resting or connecting with yourself it has to be optimised, performed, or at least come with an Adanola legging and glass of Rheal. When we’re encouraged to connect with others, we have to beg the social media God’s to show our profiles to enough people so they can even find us. We are technically more connected than ever. We can wave through a live video portal in New York City to someone in Dublin. Your partner can control a vibrator in your knickers through their own phone. We can WhatsApp people when we’re 30,000 feet and flying through the sky. And as Jeremy Corbyn poignantly said, “we’re live-streaming a genocide”, about Rafah.

With all of that, it’s weird that it can still feel unfamiliar to just walk up to a crush and ask if it would be okay for you to speak to them for a few minutes or ask what book they’re reading. To make a new friend in a clothing store by simply saying you like their sunglasses. I learned from New Yorkers about how precious it is to compliment people when they walk past. In signature NYC fashion, when I lived there or when I visit, I’d always have people shouting anything from, “YES babgirl, loving those polka dots”, to “just wanted to say how happy you look today, thank you for smiling”. With no agenda, just saying something lovely and carrying on with their day. I’ve been doing the same back in London.

It’s a start. It might not be as loud as a missed connection, but it’s a start. A way to connect back to each other again. Whether it’s telling someone you like their outfit, taking a photo of someone, walking up to them, saying hello and airdropping it to them, asking more than “how are you?” or being curious enough to start a conversation in a coffee shop.

It matters because our interconnectedness matters. We might see each other as strangers. Strangers who have the capacity to hurt, reject and dismiss us. But, we share the same collective address, the same home, right here on this planet. We are all made of water and blood, hearts thumping, brains controlling. Different in our uniqueness, the same in our humanness.

We must give each other a chance.

A chance at a smile, glance, moment of connection and maybe, just maybe, even love.