‘Excuse me, sorry, are you two a couple?’
A few times a week, Aaron Feinberg, 31, takes to the streets of New York and chats to the city’s love birds.
They might be rushing to work, walking around the park, or sitting at a coffee shop. But no matter their age, gender, or sexuality, they all have one thing in common: they’ve found The One — and Aaron wants to hear their story.
Together with childhood friends Victor Lee and Jeremy Bernstein, both 31, the trio founded Meet Cutes, a social media project interviewing couples about how they met.
The first video, which featured college sweethearts, was posted in early 2023. You can hear the slight trepidation in Jeremy’s voice from behind the camera as he asks to speak to them.
Three years on though, and the group have interviewed more than 10,000 couples, amassing 1.9 million TikTok followers and 3.2 million on Instagram.
It’s a testimony to the power of human curiosity, and perhaps even proof that there really is someone out there for everyone.
‘We thought it’d be fun to talk to strangers’
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Meet Cutes began without much fanfare. Victor had noticed street-interview social media accounts popping up, and when he mentioned it to his two friends — who had no media experience — they decided to give it a go.
Aaron tells Metro: ‘We thought it’d be fun to talk to strangers and get the stories of how they met.
‘It was more of a curiosity to see what happens when you ask them that question. Do they light up?’.
Plus, as Aaron says, ‘dating in New York is challenging.’ The group were all in relationships at the time — with Aaron in the early stages of seeing someone.
‘It can be tiring and stress-inducing,’ Aaron continues. ‘We were excited to achieve the idea that anybody can be anywhere, at anytime.’
That same day, they headed to the streets. Jeremy’s previous job as a phone salesman meant that he could handle rejection, and was given the job of the approach.
‘Plenty of people keep walking. But we quickly learned that most either politely decline or more often than not, light up completely,’ Aaron explains.
‘There’s something about that one simple question that creates an immediate, authentic connection.
‘We got an awesome series of videos from the first few couples that stopped to talk to us.
‘We were like, let’s just post them and see what happens. Then, the third or fourth went super viral, so we decided to just keep doing it.
‘The response from our audience told us these stories were resonating far beyond what we had thought was possible.
‘We just wanted to put more and more of it into the universe, and three years later, here we are.’
‘We got them 30 years into their marriage’
Now, the team go out four to five times a week and film for a few hours at a time. Their videos average 1million views every day, and Meet Cutes is now their full-time job.
Theorising why Meet Cutes is so successful, Aaron says: ‘It’s because it’s more than just a story of how a couple meet.
‘It’s how they look at each other when they speak, how they have this physical connection and chemistry when they’re talking.’
The group have had their fair share of awkward moments though. Sometimes the presumed ‘couples’ are just friends, or, worse still, related.
Aaron says that they’ve misinterpreted colleagues, parents and adult children, and even ex-partners for lovers. But, it makes for great content.
Aaron shares: ‘Those are some of our favourite videos to put together, because it’s just the funny moments of what our day-to-day looks like.’
The weather influences people’s willingness to talk, too. The group will struggle if it’s raining, or if it’s particularly cold. And their own moods can have an impact.
‘We’re really like, do we have a lot of energy today? Do we want to do it for three hours, or are we really tired?’ he says.
Aaron has many favourite stories but there’s one in particular that stuck, of an older couple, who met at Grand Central Statoin.
He was a train manager and she was a beautiful passenger. His job meant that he could determine which track her train arrived at the station on.
‘He was head over heels for her, and so he kept putting her train on the same track every day, and then get to see her,’ Aaron says.
‘They finally locked eyes, and she knocked on the glass [of his office].
‘We got them 30 years into their marriage, and they’re just this couple living their beautiful lives in New York City. It was kind of a time capsule of a really special moment.’
Another one that sticks out is of a man who called the wrong number, and ended up chatting to the woman on the other end of the line. They eventually got married.
‘Usually when you call the wrong number, you just hang up, but they could feel each other’s voices, and they hit it off. That was crazy,’ Aaron says.
‘Every relationship is different’
Aaron adds that he’s taken away some important lessons from his years interviewing loved-up couples.
One particularly poignant piece of advice came from a couple called Tom and Lisa, who described their marriage as ‘almost a competition, to see who can treat each other better.’
‘I’ve brought that home with me. I wrote it on my notepad and I think about how I can do more for my partner every single day,’ Aaron says.
‘A lot of love is built from how much you do for the other, and how much you can forgive the other.’
He’s also realised that everyone’s relationship trajectory will look different. ‘There’s no right answer,’ he adds.
But the most important lesson he’s learnt? ‘Success in relationships is about tapping into what matters to you most, and communicating that with your partner.
‘Finding that balance is where you find the happiness.
‘Meet Cutes has genuinely informed how we show up in our own lives and relationships. It’s one of the unexpected gifts this has given us.’
‘We’re giving people hope’
Since their first meet-cute in 2023, the page’s brand has evolved. They’ve now written a book, and collaborated with celebrities President Joe Biden, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Olivia Coleman.
They’ve started documenting love stories in the UK too, born out of a chance meeting between Jeremy and Cat, who became the London coordinator, after they met at a hostel in Costa Rice. They swapped numbers, and a few months later, Jeremy asked her if she wanted to host the British format.
They’ve also started up Besties, which celebrates platonic forms of love instead.
‘Love is love and it can happen in any way, shape or form. You can see as much love between friends and mothers and daughters as you see between partners,’ Aaron says.
Above all, the group hopes that the Meet Cutes brand gives people ‘a lever of hope’ that a chance meeting might happen to them too, and to always be open to that spark.
Aaron concludes: ‘We hope that we’ve created more interactions between people in settings that maybe they wouldn’t have felt comfortable interacting in before.’
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