When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist

Late last night, I was scrolling through Amazon Prime, looking for something to watch, when a series called "Modern Love" caught my eye. The second episode, titled "When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist," looked interesting. 

In the opening scene, a New York Times reporter interviews a young software developer who has invented a popular dating app. At the end of the interview, as she closes her notepad, she asks him, "One more thing: have you ever fallen in love?"

Surprised, he tells her, "No one's ever asked me that before."

"Well, do you want to tell me the story?" she continues. "Because there's obviously a story. It's written all over your face."

He begins telling her about the woman he had met at a job interview right after he arrived in New York City. She had gone in first, but he skipped his interview to be there when she came back out so he spend the rest of the day with her. Before long, he had met her parents. Everything went perfectly for the first six months. 

"Her dad even liked me," he says wistfully.

"So what happened?" the reporter pries.

Six months into their relationship, his girlfriend had confessed to him that she had run into her high-school boyfriend, who had recently gotten divorced. One drink led to another. Before long, she had slept with him. She apologized tearfully, but he no longer trusted her. He broke up with her and moved out of their apartment.

He couldn't forget about her, though. A few years later, he saw her on the street with someone else. He called her on the phone and she told him she'd been engaged for the last two years.

"Two years?" the reporter asks. "That's a long time."

He agrees.

"So are you gonna do anything about it?"

He says no. 

"If you still love her, you have to at least give it a shot," the reporter tells him. "If you don't, you'll always wonder what could have been."

"How do you know?" he asks.

"Do you have a few minutes?" she asks. He says yes.

She tells him that when she was young, she met an English man while on vacation in the Caribbean. They shared a powerful connection. He had promised her that he would come to her apartment in Paris a few months later once she had finished a journalistic assignment in Afghanistan. He never showed up. 

For two decades, she had wondered why. One day, while she was signing books at a bookstore in upstate New York, she looked up and there he was. They spent the next several hours catching up. They were both married with children. They had both considered divorce.

He had told her that he had come to Paris but had simply lost her address. She had written it in a copy of "Anna Karenina." Someone had stolen it on a train when he went to the restroom. Since her number was unlisted and they had no mutual friends and the Internet did not yet exist, there was no way for him to find her. By the time Google did exist, it showed that she was married with three children. With sadness in his eyes, he had shown her the ticket for his flight to Paris 17 years earlier.

Their reunion had given both of them closure in different ways. It convinced her to leave an unhappy marriage. It convinced him to fix his unhappy marriage. They hadn't ended up together but at least now she knew why.

“If you still love her,” she tells the young man, “and she’s not yet married, you have to tell her. If you don't, it will mess you up."

Three months later, she gets an email from him asking for another meeting. When she gets to the restaurant, she learns that the reservation is for three. The young woman he told her about had seen her article in the newspaper and knew who he was talking about. When he called her a few days later, she had already broken her engagement to a man she didn't really love. She married the software developer, who had found the courage to call her after talking to the reporter.

"Thank you," they tell her.

The amazing thing about this story is that it actually happened (although some of the details were changed for TV). Justin McLeod, the founder of Hinge, is now happily married to Kate. You can read Deborah Copaken's 2015 piece about the "happily ever after" that almost didn't happen here.