Meet Cute - Television Tropes & Idioms

I hope this movie never has a sequel, because Jon and Sara are destined to become the most boring married couple in history. For years to come, people at parties will be whispering, "See that couple over there? The Tragers? Jon and Sara? Whatever you do, don't ask them how they met."

— Roger Ebert's review of ''Serendipity

, a movie consisting only of Meet Cutes.

Two characters, a man and a woman, meet. The circumstances are none of the typical ways couples meet. There's something cutesy about it. Possibly they have an instant dislike for one another. Maybe they crash into each other in a hallway and papers fly about. Perhaps mistaken identity or other wacky misunderstanding is involved. Sometimes someone is naked or in an otherwise embarrassing situation.

There is no clear cut definition of what constitutes meeting cute. One criterion is that it's not any way you or anyone you've ever known has met a significant other. A crucial indicator is that it makes you roll your eyes and wonder if there's a viewer alive who doesn't see where this is going.

Meeting Cute is the #1 dead giveaway for any audience who has seen TV before that these two will be a couple. It usually indicates that the writers are invested in this couple, have big plans for the relationship, and won't be willing to let go if the fans don't care for the pairing.

Television writers should probably take note that the most popular TV 'ships generally do not meet cute. They develop more naturally as characters who interact organically are found to share chemistry. Couples that meet cute tend to develop forced-down-your-throat, inauthentic, and annoying relationships.

Any time you read that a character is being brought in as a love interest for another character, chances are they will meet cute.

It's also used in Films due to time constraints, while on television you can have a relationship develop over many episodes, that luxury doesn't exist in film as the whole thing has to be resolved in around 2 hours

Also a staple of romantic comedy movies and most shojo anime and manga. A subtrope of Boy Meets Girl.

Examples:

Live Action TV

Pick a daytime soap, any daytime soap.
Even during the aftermath of a deadly plane crash, Jack and Kate on Lost managed to meet cute; she sewed up his stitches while they bantered about drapes and spinal surgery.
- However, it was somewhat subverted in flashbacks: Jack met his wife, Sarah, when he operated on her following a near-fatal car accident. He promised her that she would be able to dance at her wedding, despite the prospect of paralysis; when her fiancé left her and she miraculously recovered, Jack married her. However, his devotion to his work ended up destroying their marriage.
Though technically they already knew each other, Ross and Rachel met cute in the first episode of Friends. Later in the series, Phoebe and Mike met cute.
Riley and Buffy meeting in "The Freshman."
- "So, in all the concussion, I didn't get a chance to introduce myself..."
- This has most of the elements, including the fact that Riley was brought in especially as a love interest for Buffy and that most fans didn't care for him.
Dean and Jo in Supernatural: they first met when she was holding a gun on him and after he disarmed her she punched him in the nose. In the minority as after the creators realized that the new character didn't work as intended (coming off more Annoying Younger Sibling than potential love interest) and that roughly 98% of the fans hated the pairing with a passion, the whole idea was called off and never progressed past her having a slight crush. The casting sides for Jo actually included the words "sparks are flying" in the notes though. Yikes.
Although there were no plans for the two to get together at the time, Daniel Jackson and Vala Mal Doran had an interesting first meeting in Stargate SG 1. In an attempt to hi-jack the Prometheus, Vala disguises herself as a Kull Warrior, which are normally disgusting artificially grown humans encased in armour. After tying Daniel up to a chair and asked why she chose him, she tells him that she finds him very attractive. Keep in mind at this point, she is still disguised and her voice has been digitally altered to sound deep and masculine.
How about Lois and Clark on Smallville? He's amnesiac and naked in a field. She even teases him about it later.
Subverted on Gossip Girl, where Dan meets cute a girl early in the second season, by bumping into her, books falling, and you know the drill. So definitely a love interest, except that by the end of the episode they show you that the girl was hired by Chuck and he pretty much orchestrated everything from the get-go.
Named by Charlie in Two And A Half Men when he flirts with a nurse who is prepping him for a vasectomy.
Coupling: Steve meets Susan in a ladies bathrooom, in the middle of having sex with his ex.

Film

This trope goes at least as far back as the film Singing In The Rain. Early on, Gene Kelly's character is running from a crowd of fans. He's jumping from the roofs of cars, taxis, trolleys, etc. until he goes flying and lands in the seat of a roofless car. The driver, played by Debbie Reynolds, thinks Kelly's character is a no-talent hack, and they yell at each other before he leaves. Needless to say, they end up romantically involved. This makes it Older Than Television.
- However, later on it is hinted that she was already a fan of his and said those things mostly to appear smarter.
It may go even further than that, since the film Gone With The Wind could be considered a subversion. Scarlett and Rhett Meet Cute several times over the course of the Civil War, eventually marry...and have a horrible marriage, because people whose only contact is bumping into each other during a war probably don't have much in common.
Kal Ho Naa Ho must take this to the extreme. Aman yells at the Kapoors for their awful singing, and their arguing gets Naina's attention. When he sees her, he begins singing (beautifully) what develops into a Bollywood/Hip-hop/Gospel remix of Pretty Woman, in front of a giant American flag, with the entire street playing background music and joining in the dance. Of course, he doesn't get her.
A Double Subversion occurs in True Romance. Clarence and Alabama meet cute in classic style, complete with spilled popcorn, bonding over Sonny Chiba movies, and romance in a comic-book store. Then it turns out that she's a call girl who was hired specifically to meet cute with him. However, they do eventually fall in love with each other for real.
In The Truman Show, Truman's hand-picked cheerleader love interest in his high school years, the woman who eventually would be his wife, was set up to meet him in an artificial Meet Cute; she tripped and fell right in front of him. It didn't work, an incidental background extra who happened to be nearby at the time was the one he truly fell in love with, and after she was forcibly removed from his made-up world, he nursed a secret, almost obsessive love for her for his whole life.
Subverted in Can't Hardly Wait, in which the main character finds all the signs of his one true love in his freshman year, up to eating the same flavor of Pop Tart... only to get interrupted by the jock, so they never actually meet. They get together at the end of the movie, though.
If Will and Elizabeth from Pirates Of The Caribbean don't count, nobody does. Especially since that was a Rescue Romance both ways...
- But even though they met as small children because he was fished from the sea after a pirate attack, it's implied that went through the normal steps of being childhood friends before the romance started.
In Disney's animated 101 Dalmatians, Pongo (the male dalmatian) intentionally arranges a Meet Cute for his owner and Perdita's owner by tangling his collar in their owner's legs and pulling them into a pond.
This is a staple in many of the classic screwball comedies:
- It Happened One Night - Clark Gable, playing a penniless, cynical reporter, and Claudette Colbert, playing a spoiled runaway heiress, meet on a bus. They argue over who should get the last seat, and Claudette Colbert ends up falling asleep on his shoulder overnight.
- Bringing up Baby - Cary Grant's dorky paleontologist runs into Katharine Hepburn's madcap heiress on the golf course; she mistakes his ball for her own, and he follows her around trying to convince her that it's his ball, not hers. She then drives off in his car, with him teetering on the running board.
- The Lady Eve - Barbara Stanwyck plays a femme fatale out to snag rich men so she and her father can cheat them at cards; Henry Fonda plays a naive but wealthy heir to a brewery. Wanting to make lots of money off him, she deliberately sticks out her foot and trips him, then berates him for breaking the heel off her shoe. He accompanies her to her cabin, where he puts a new pair of shoes on her feet himself as she aggressively flirts with him.
- Mr. Deeds Goes to Town - Gary Cooper plays a naive country boy who suddenly becomes a millionaire. Once he moves to the big city, the cynical reporter played by Jean Arthur wants to meet him so she can do a big story on him — so she pretends to faint outside his mansion, and he gallantly comes to her aid.
In a scene from the upcoming movie My Best Friend's Girl, Dane Cook's character actually talks about this trope and calls it Meet Cute, saying it's common in Rom Coms because all girls want that funny, witty guy, charming, dorky guy. He then goes on to invoke this trope by running with her on the track and falling over her then being struck by her beauty when she tries to help him up.
The film whose review gave us the quote at the top of the page, Serendipity, consists of a couple meeting cute for the entire first half of the movie, before trying to Screw Destiny for no particular reason by testing how badly fate wants them to be together (The answer: Fate wants them to get together REALLY badly).
The Holiday explicitly spells this out via an elderly screenwriter who's probably been in Hollywood long enough to name most of the tropes found in the film. One of the female leads has a meet cute with him that leads only to friendship, but she has another with Jack Black that leads to romance. It's surprisingly effective.
Played with in Back To The Future. In the beginning, Lorraine reveals that she met George this way and they don't have a particularly good marriage. When Marty goes back in time, he meets her the same way and she falls for him instead. So basically Lorraine would have fallen for whoever her dad's car hit that day.
- Doc Brown explains this onscreen with the same implications. Ew. Of course, once Marty gets involved, he turns it from Meet Cute into a Rescue Romance and things turn out to go surprisingly well from then on.
In Good Bye Lenin! Alex meets Lara when she saves him from choking at a press freedom rally.

Anime

Played with in Tenchi Muyo: Under the misguided impression that shojo manga are actually a realistic guide to teenaged relationships on Earth (an impression fostered by a mischievous Sasami), both Ayeka and Ryoko engineer classic Crash Into Hello meetings with Tenchi — months after they first met him.
Kaoru and Aoi Meet Cute at the start of Ai Yori Aoshi. They bump into each other at the station, he fixes her shoe, walks her to her destination (taking a round trip on the train because he didn't want to wake her up) and then they discover they are childhood friends... Aww.
Yuuichi meets every available girl in Kanon in an odd manner.
Shuichi and Yuki in Gravitation meet cute twice: the first time, Shuichi's lyrics blow away in the park into the hands of Yuki who insults them, much to Shuichi's shock; the second happens a few days later when Shuichi jumps in front of Yuki's car in the rain and Yuki, after deprecating him again, drives him to his home to dry him off.
Lampshaded and subverted in Lucky Star: two random characters of no importance whatsoever accidentally tangle their bag keychains, and Konata (witnessing this) notes that they are now on the way to being a couple, while Kagami snaps that real life does not work that way.
- How do we know it's subverted? Do we ever see them again?
In Basilisk, during their first meeting, a hiccup causes Oboro to stumble and spill a tray of tea she was serving all over Gennosuke.
Subverted and lampshaded in Hunter X Hunter during the Greed Island arc with "Love-Love, The City of Romance" which is "famous for its easy meetings": various Moe Moe-looking characters crash into the main characters, lose their glasses, and generally need rescuing, but the main characters ignore them because they've got a mission to complete.
Most of Love Hina is filled with this trope... Keitaro and Naru get it most often, particularly in the episode wheree they both decide, separately, that they need to go on vacation, bump into each other, both break their glasses, and have to spend the day together, doing romantic stuff, only to find out when they've regained their glasses who they are, and spend the rest of their trip escorting an anemic girl back to her home island.

Western Animation

Aang met Katara by running away from home, getting in a massive storm, ended up frozen in an iceberg for a century, and having her face to be the first thing he sees when he wakes up. The result: love at first sight. Awww...

Literature

Brutally subverted in American Gods. Mister Town meets Laura by the side of the road and offers her a lift. Within the span of less than an hour, they make playful banter and run through the rain with newspapers held over their heads, laughing. The character is convinced that he's found true love for the first time in his life. Then Laura kills him just like she killed his friends. Of course, if you've read the novel faithfully up to that point, you already know that Laura is Shadow's undead wife who's willing to murder others to help him, so you know from the start that it isn't going to end well for the hapless guy.
In the Newbery Award-winning children's book Ginger Pye, the children's father (Mr. Pye) met their mother (the soon-to-be Mrs. Pye) when, for kicks and giggles, he decided to run "up" the "down" escalator in what he thought was an abandoned subway station. Naturally, he ended up running down their mother-to-be, who was riding "down" it. Romance ensued.

Video Games

A flashback in We Love Katamari reveals that The Prince's parents - The King of All Cosmos and his wife - met cute to a ridiculous degree, in a Crash Into Hello involving a cut-off Pompadour and a half-eaten bread accidentally forming a heart shape. The result: love at first sight. Awww...
Final Fantasy VII had Aerith meet Cloud when he fell through the ceiling of her church into a flowerbed - from a terminal height, mind you. Also, Crisis Core reveals she met previous love interest Zack in the exact same way. Ironically, Aerith and Cloud's real first meeting was a subversion of the Crash Into Hello where she was knocked over - by a random NPC - before calmly asking Cloud if he wanted to buy a flower as he wandered past.
Deconstructed (maybe even invoked) in (surprise, surprise) Metal Gear Solid 2. We learn that Raiden and Rose met over a pedantic argument over which building King Kong was climbing in the movie. It later turns out to have been all a big set-up to ensure Raiden would fall for her, allowing her to spy on him as part of the set-up for a Xanatos Gambit.

Web Comics

The anime-inspired Mega Tokyo naturally has this happen several times. Of particular note is the main couple, Piro and Kimiko, who've managed to meet cute 'bout 3 times so far... Largo and Erika probably also qualify, albeit only twice.
- Yuki and Kobayashi's Meet Cute is almost a parody; their first interaction within the strip involving her falling on him from a great height (immediately after he unintentionally distracted her) and giving him three broken ribs, a concussion, and a broken arm.
Last Resort pulls a Meet Cute almost right out of the gate with Slick pulling a Crash Into Hello onto Jigsaw as he's trying to evade his guards. Granted, Slick and Jigsaw aren't a couple yet, but being the only other of her species on board so far leaves little to the imagination.

Real Life (Somehow)

Martial artist Wong Fei Hung meet his fourth wife, Mok Gwai Lan, when his shoe flew off during a martial arts demonstration and hit Mok Gawi Lan in the head. She then leapt up on the stage and berated him. Impressed by her spirit, he asked her parents for her hand in marriage, and they accepted.

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