Tell me again how it happened. Come on, it was such a good story. You had car trouble and he just happened to drive by on his motorcycle – that’s how it went, right? Not? Sorry, I was thinking of another couple. Of course you met through a Marktplaats deal. You started talking about plants and then… No, not at all. Now I remember: his sister works at a petting zoo, and he came to visit her there when you were photographing the goats. For the socials, yes. And in the end, your camera was almost full of pictures of him. God, how cringe-worthy romantic.
Couples with a cute meeting story – a measure cutein good Dutch – are both the nicest and the worst people to be around. Great, because their story proves that romance isn’t dead. And nasty, because that romance is not available to everyone. You can wait a long time for your own meet cute, but in the dating app era it is simply more realistic that your story becomes a variant of: he had stated in his profile that he was into ethical non-monogamy, but after three months he thought it was fine to do it alone with me.
TV is teeming with brave singles who are not yet prepared to accept this and dream of being able to tell the whole family at the next Christmas dinner that they have met the love of their life in the First Datesrestaurant (BNNVARA), or that they saw the introductory video of a handsome ski instructor in the advance announcement of Winter full of Love (RTL) and immediately knew that they wanted to stare into those blue eyes for the rest of their lives. The price you pay for such a good story is that the whole of the Netherlands can watch. Even if you First Dates-flame goes to the toilet between the starter and main course, where there are also cameras for obscure reasons, and calls a friend there and says about you: “It’s not quite my type in terms of appearance.” Or when you stare at the bill at the end of dinner until your date pays it. This is all recorded for posterity.
And then there is the risk that your meet cute, which once started so sweetly on RTL4, degenerates into psychological horror on SBS6 a year later. That’s how Denise loved her Winter full of Loveadventure from the beginning of this year about a relationship with ski instructor Mike, but is now in The Hanslers: from the Piste to the Playa to see how the romance ends on a beach on the Costa Blanca. There, Mike’s mother Monique thunders so hard over her daughter-in-law that you wonder for whose pleasure this is being broadcast. It’s as stressful to watch as it must have been to experience.
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A nightmare
Back to Tinder then? Not if it is up to the Evangelical Broadcaster. He introduced the program on Monday You don’t know you’re datinga dating show in which the protagonists don’t know they are in a dating show. They are registered by family or friends and then the editors secretly arrange three meet cutes (with candidates who do know that they are participating in a dating program), recorded with hidden cameras. The announcement led to immediate skepticism from this viewer: how (un)ethical is this concept? And why is there no ‘-t’ after ‘date’?
The latter question was not answered, the former remains doubtful. The concept is a nightmare for people who care at all about their privacy, but it turned out quite sweet in the first episode. Thirty-something Martin met a woman with car trouble, a Marktplaats customer and, yes, a goat lover. He was deeply charmed by the latter, as can also be seen on the hidden camera images. It doesn’t seem very responsible to me. But it is a good story.
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