CONVERSATION: Meet Cute or Meet Horrible?
Janine: Sometimes the first meeting between two protagonists is cute (they are walking their dogs toward each other and the leashes get tangled–I think I’ve seen that somewhere) and sometimes it’s horrible (she thinks she’s catching he’s breaking in and greets him with a baseball bat). Which do you enjoy more? Why? What are some of the cutest and most horrible first meetings you’ve come across? What are your favorites? Which ones were memorable failures for you?
Jayne: I enjoy a good “meet cute.” But I think I liked them better before they became such a common trope. A good “meet-ugly” can be effective, too. What is the official name of the anti-meet-cute?
Janine: I don’t think there’s a universal term. I’ve heard them called meet disaster by a few people but I trip up on that; it sounds awkward to me. Meet disastrous would work better.
For me the horrible first meeting is often better than the cute one. Cute isn’t something I seek out in romances because in my experience a lot of scenes that aim for the meet cute feel forced. A terrible first meeting is also more attention getting. It’s easier for me to remember those than the other kind.
While I’ve liked both kinds, my own tendency is to prefer the meet horrible/ugly/disastrous. I’m a reader who is not afraid of high stakes in books and the stakes are higher when the main characters have some resistance to working together or spending time together, which is something that the protagonists in romances usually have to do.
Sirius: My god exactly what Janine wrote almost word by word. I agree. :)
Jennie: I think if I’m asked for a preference, generally it’s “meet horrible” over “meet cute” because I have an overarching preference for romances with h/h conflict. But good writing trumps all, and I think there are probably “meet cute” stories that have worked well for me – though I can’t think of them! Does My Sweet Folly by Laura Kinsale, with its extended epistolary flirting, qualify? (This book also reminds me that “meet cute” doesn’t preclude later conflict – think of stories where there is a h/h attraction, and then they discover that they are business rivals or their families hate each other, etc.)
Speaking of Kinsale, I’d say that her early book Midsummer Moon qualifies for “meet cute.” The hero comes to see the heroine under the impression that she is male, and a number of misunderstandings follow, partly based on the fact that she’s the prototypical “ditzy genius.” I know a lot of readers find this book too twee by half, but I have fond memories of it, both from my initial read and my reread three and a half years ago.
Janine: would say that the prologue for My Sweet Folly could qualify as a meet cute in the sense that it’s the beginning of their acquaintance and the epistolary opening paragraph is cute as well as charming. On the other hand it also ends disastrously. It’s one of the best beginnings to a romance (too bad the rest of the book doesn’t live up to it) in my opinion.
Midsummer Moon is too twee by half (I hate the ditzy scientist / engineer trope because I have never met one in my life and I have been surrounded by scientists and / or engineers for much of it) so yes, it’s a meet cute, and one that doesn’t work for me.
Kaetrin: To me meet cute encompasses something funny (or supposed to be funny), embarrassing (also meant to be funny) as well as just “cute” so I think it might be a matter for individuals where their line changes from “meet cute” to “meet disaster”. Some embarrassing things seem pretty disastrous to me. In Two Wrongs Make A Right by Chloe Liese, which I read recently, the characters themselves refer to their first meeting as a “meet disaster ” so that one was clear enough!
I don’t mind rivals to lovers but I’m harder to please when it comes to enemies to lovers, especially in contemporary romance, so generally I prefer the cute kind to the disaster kind.
Most of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ books start where something embarrassing happens to the heroine and the hero is there to see it. In Natural Born Charmer, Blue first meets Dean when she’s stranded on a highway wearing a beaver suit. It’s certainly memorable. Mileage varies as to whether it was funny or just humiliating. I feel like a lot of this is in the eye of the beholder.
Janine: You are so right that there is sometimes an overlap, Kaetrin. Besides My Sweet Folly, which Jennie brought up earlier, I thought of a couple more examples.
In Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid, Ilya and Shane meet as teenagers ready to compete on the world stage. Ilya does his best to act indifferent even as Shane congratulates him. On the one hand, it’s a rude and the beginning of an antagonism, but on the other Ilya notices Shane’s freckles and that plus the fact that they were teens made it cute for me as well.
Another example is in Devil’s Daughter by Lisa Kleypas. Phoebe is ready to hate West because he bullied her late husband in boarding school when they were kids. She expects an indolent, unattractive man but they first meet when he is helping her young son retrieve a marble and he is fit, attractive and good with kids. She’s drawn to him even before he introduces himself. On the one hand it’s cute–two people brought together by a curious child–but on the other it’s difficult for Phoebe because she feels disloyal to Henry. She also feels betrayed by the world–why does West have to be attractive and healthy when he’s (in her eyes) so hateworthy, while the lovable Henry wasted away from bad health for most of his life and died young, leaving her alone and missing him?
In both cases, these meetings worked for me on both levels, so I guess that’s the ideal kind of meet cute for me–it’s cute but it also ripples troubled waters.
There’s a great horrible first meeting in Archangel’s Blade by Nalini Singh gets my vote. Honor, once a vampire hunter, was recently held captive, raped and abused by vampires who hid their identity from her. She is now hiding in a library doing research when she’s sent by her employer to take a job from Dmitri, the most powerful vampire in the city. She feels threatened during the meeting and pulls out a knife without meaning to. Dmitri responds in a scary way, but he also makes it clear that he intends to seduce her. This is terrifying for Honor, and yet, she’s been inexplicably fascinated with him since before they ever met.
There’s no cuteness about this meeting, and the reader’s knowledge of Dmitri from earlier books makes it even more scary. He is not a nice guy. For me, that meeting made their romance all the more satisfying—I love seeing characters go from fear to trust. There’s also one scene later on when Dmitri literally falls to his knees to apologize to Honor for reacting badly to something, and wow, is it satisfying to me.
A meet horrible that doesn’t work for me is the one in Rushing In by Claire Kingsley. Skye, a newcomer to town, literally runs Gavin over and breaks his leg. She’s the daughter of his boss and he offers to show her around town while on crutches later on. She was an annoying character to begin with and running him over didn’t incline me to like her. It also made her seem incompetent.
As for a meet cute that didn’t work for me, that would be the one in Judith McNaught’s Something Wonderful (my favorite of her books otherwise; she was really hit or miss for me). Jordan is attacked and Alexandra intervenes on horseback. However, she is costumed in a knight’s armor for some reason I already forgot. McNaught can be a manipulative writer and I felt she was playing up the cuteness of the girl knight in shining armor rescuing the jaded aristocrat. It felt contrived and heavy-handed to me.
Kaetrin: Something Wonderful is my favourite McNaught as well but Alex and Jordan’s first meeting isn’t what’s memorable about it for me. I’d forgotten about it altogether until you mentioned it. Whereas I still remember when Jordan was trying to explain to Alex about sex and stumbling over it and she says something like “Oh you don’t know either!” LOL.
Sirius: What Kaetrin has helped me realize is that normally first meeting between the main couple is not really important to me, unless their impressions of each other will change by the end of the book. I guess it is all related to liking from enemies-to-lovers trope.
My favorite first meeting is probably from Soviet times movie Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears. It received the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980 so you may find it on YouTube or elsewhere.
Heroine in her forties is coming back on the late train from her friend’s dacha house. The guy makes hilarious assumptions about her married status and her employment status and she mostly annoyed that his shoes are not clean :)
Janine: I agree with you, Sirius, that the first meeting is much more relevant when it’s one where mistaken impressions are formed. That usually lends itself more to the meet disastrous than to the meet cute and may be another reason I prefer the former.
Sirius: Yes. I forgot to mention that another one of my most memorable and favorite meets is “Here Kitty Kitty” meeting between Kate Daniels and Curran in Magic Bites. It is funny, it is antagonistic enough and of course impressions are formed that are to be changed. ;- )
Naturally I can’t think of any examples of either type; however, I wanted to concur, @Janine, that Sweet Folly started so well yet ultimately was disappointing.
@Kareni: It was such a promising beginning. I was ready for a lovely relationship and then yikes! And ultimately the book went off the rails in the final third.
For another meet-not-cute The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian has the heroine “meet” the hero through a blackmail letter. The signature on her response is “Your mortal enemy.”
@RebeccaA: Oh that is lovely. And reminds me a bit of Connie Brockway’s My Dearest Enemy. It also opens with a correspondence over some conflict (something with a house, I think), and I’m trying to recall if the word enemy is in the signature line–I think it was but I could be misremembering.
We must do one of these conversations on epistolary romances sometime!
100% meet cute. My immediate memory was the costumed woman in Natural Born Charmer. And doesn’t Jennifer Crusie have a book or two which begin with a creative meet cute? (Mine are unavailable or I would look.)
I’ve read Regency and contemporary romance in which someone arrives home in the dark and finds a person already sleeping in their bed. Not a unique story – just ask Goldilocks – but each drew me quickly into the book.
Runaway brides often “meet cute” their [new] true love.
I can’t think of one meet cute I’ve read and enjoyedrecetnly. The embarrassing component often involves an ultra-quirky heroine and leads to much quirkiness which annoys me.
I recently read a book with an interesting meeting. The heroine gave a cup of coffee to a homeless man every day and then (after several months) asked him to enter into a fake relationship with her. I can’t tell you how many tropes and social issues this book checked off. Believe it or not, the author made it sweet and believable for a good portion of the book. I’m not sure I’d recommend it but it did make me think.
@LML: I’ve read those regencies too but in the ones I read (it was a long time ago) the hero assumed the heroine was in his bed because she wanted to sleep with him (often there was a reason; a barmaid had promised to meet him or some buddy promised to send a sex worker) and raped her. Clearly a meet disaster. I’d be interested in reading a meet cute (or at least nice) that began that way.
Great point about runaway bride.
@Jenreads: That does sound different! What was the book?
This has made me realize that I don’t care that much about how the characters meet in a romance. I tend to care more about the courtship and falling in love stuff than the meeting. And I also like friends / rivals to lovers, where the MCs often already know each other.
I do have a soft spot for the “whoops, why is my one-night-stand here at this important meeting?” type set up, when it’s done well. (Although by now characters in romancelandia should know better than to sleep with a stranger right before they start a new job!) Andre by Jayce Ellis is a good recent example of this trope. Charlie All Night by Jennifer Cruisie is an older one.
@LML, @jenreads: I don’t recall! but I’ll look at the books I’ve read. No rape, though! One was a female thief breaking into the bedroom of a supposedly empty house, and in another, two different people thought they owned the house and one arrived in the middle of the night. Although why they might end up in the same bedroom of a large house doesn’t make sense, does it?
whoops
Should have been @Janine
@cleo: For me also, how they meet is less important than the courtship and falling in love. But at the same time a great first meeting where you can feel the chemistry right away or one that makes you wonder how on earth they are going to get from point A to point B and you can’t wait to see how that happens can add so much to a book. If a relationship rivets me right away, there’s a lot to be said for that.
(For some reason I always think of my critique partner Sherry Thomas’s book His at Night where at first, the hero thinks he’s finally met the woman he’s dreamed of but pretty soon after that he realizes she wants to use him and her attraction is a show.)
I like the friends/rivals thing too. But I love the friends-to-lovers trope and you could mix it up with a lot of other tropes and end up with something I would like. It’s just so lovely to see two people who have known each other for years realize that they never appreciated before everything this person had to offer them and that now there are feelings between them that go beyond friendship.
@cleo: I meant to add that with regard to the “Holy crap, my one-night stand is my boss!” trope, I have a soft spot for it too. That trope was hugely popular in 1990s contemporaries and I remember reading a bazillion category romances that used it. And nevertheless, I always looked forward to that moment of shock.
@LML: LOL, no, it doesn’t. And how could they each believe they are the owner of the house? Or was one of them in the wrong house?
Breaking into a house at night sounds more fun. There used to be more cat burglar / jewel thief books and I miss them.
@Janine:
Marry Me Tomorrow by Carla Burgess
It’s on Hoopla. I enjoyed the relationship and the homeless part was not cringe.
I just read a book with what I thought was an unusual meet cute —the heroine is driving in LA traffic and a random dog jumps into her car. He is microchipped but the owner is overseas and unavailable. She sort of adopts the dog but then the owner comes back into contact and they begin a flirtation . So it becomes a sort of epistolary romance— they text and then move to phone calls. I hated the rest of the book but loved the beginning and the unusual premise!
@Jenreads: but not to be mean I’m curious how did the author make a homeless guy seem sexy or appealing? Not that they can’t be but most of the ones I’ve seen are terribly I’ll and dirty.
Another one— the billionaire’s wake up call girl. by Annika Martin, the heroine meets the hero because she’s assigned as a part of her job, the task of acting like his calling service— calling him to wake up and for other things. It’s super funny actually and cute.
@Layla:
His homelessness was economical not chemical or mental. It’s mentioned that he is thin and smells bad but nothing a shower, meal and a bed couldn’t handle. I just suspended my disbelief and went with it. So many romances these days feature one night stands with strangers, why not a homeless man you’ve had a daily conversation with on the way to work?
I also recently read a romance novella where one of the characters was homeless (“living rough” was the term used). The first meeting occurs when the other lead kicks what he believes to be a bag of trash left on his front steps. This was a m/m story titled A Kiss Before Christmas (Rory & Jack Book 1) by Ali Ryecart.
@Kareni:
Was that set in England? “Living rough” was used in the book I read too.
@Layla: Oh that sounds like something Jayne would like (the setup, I mean). And it is a cute premise.
@Jenreads: I wonder if homelessness is better outside the US. That is, if other countries provide better showering conditions and clothes for the homeless. I believe that in some places they can get free or cheap housing or also. It fixes a lot of problems because when you have housing it’s a lot easier to get medical care for disabilities like mental illness or missing limbs.
@Jenreads: ah I see. In the hands of a good writer any premise or hero can be appealing! I never thought a stroke victim would be sexy— but I love the hero of Kinsale’s flowers from
The storm.
@Jenreads, yes, A Kiss Before Christmas was set in London.