Meet-cute

A meet-cute is the scene in romantic fiction in which two people who go on to become a couple meet for the first time, typically under "unusual, humorous, or adorable circumstances". The device is a staple of the romantic comedy, and it also appears in sitcoms and soap operas. What the scene delivers is engineered memorability: a humorous clash of personalities or beliefs, an embarrassing situation, a comic misunderstanding, or a collision after which two strangers have no choice but to talk.

The phrase is old Hollywood. Its exact origin is unknown, but it was familiar in screenwriting circles by at least 1941: the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation is Anthony Boucher's mystery novel The Case of the Solid Key, in which a character uses the phrase as recognized story-conference slang. Billy Wilder, in a 1996 Paris Review interview, pointed to the pajama-counter meeting in Ernst Lubitsch's Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938), one shopper wanting the top and the other the bottom, as the concept in action, and George Axelrod's 1955 play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? has a character explain that in movies the couple cannot simply meet normally at a cocktail party. The term circulated through critics: Bosley Crowther used it in 1964, and Roger Ebert and Christy Lemire kept it alive in film reviews; Ebert's working description of a classic one is a scene where somebody runs into somebody else, and then something falls. The lineage is older than the term, which Wikipedia illustrates with an 1861 watercolor by Victoria, Princess Royal, of Romeo meeting Juliet for the first time.

For a writer the meet-cute is a promise with a delivery date: it compresses the couple's dynamic into one memorable scene, and readers judge every later beat against it. It is the standard opening move of romantic comedy, the seed the HEA/HFN ending grows from, and the front-loaded counterpart of the slow burn. See how to write romance.