As the temperatures dipped ahead of Valentine’s Day, I wandered Cambridge and Somerville in search of love stories. I stopped in local bookstores, gift shops, a record store and the Harvard Art Museums and asked people flipping through novels or admiring a 19th century print to tell me a story of their meet-cute.
Many people turned me away, not because they didn’t want to talk or didn’t have the time, but because they didn’t have a story to tell. People in their early 20s and late 70s alike told me good-naturedly that they’d like to help, but nothing came to mind. The people who did agree to an interview were most often in a group, with a friend to nudge them toward a story. Over three afternoons, I gathered stories from people about their first encounters of love of all kinds – romantic, platonic, familial and even spiritual – with future spouses, friends and pets. Their responses have been edited.
Cynthia Alvarado
Found at Lovestruck Books
“I met my husband when I was going through jealousy of seeing other couples, then decided I wasn’t going to do that anymore – I was just going to be happy for people. There was a concert the week of Valentine’s Day that nobody wanted to go with me to. It was Spanish rock; nobody in my family was really into that. I went by myself, two days after Valentine’s. My now husband and I were on opposite sides of the mosh pit. We locked eyes and somehow, in between jumping, we bumped into each other. When the concert was over and they turned the lights on, we could see each other better, and I remember looking at him and knowing, ‘Yeah, that’s my man.’ We left holding hands, and we got married two weeks after. And we’ve been married for 11 years. It was just completely immediate – energetic and magnetic – and just different than anybody else I’ve ever dated. I don’t know if it had anything to do with me letting go of what other people have and just enjoying myself and my company that opened the space for me to meet someone. Everyone was surprised. My dad, my mom. Obviously the music taste has a lot to do with it; we like the same music. But in every other thing too, personal goals and what we want to do. He moved all the way here from California with me so I could go to school. I just love him. He’s my person. I don’t want to say ‘my other half’ because I feel like you have to feel complete yourself first before you meet somebody. But he’s my best friend.”
Charlie Kohlhase
Found at Stereo Jack’s Records
“When I first moved to the Boston area I lived in Central Square, in Cambridge. In the alley near my home, there were a number of street cats, and I’d see them regularly. I had a roommate, a rather pesky roommate, but he brought in a cat. Our third roommate was away on vacation – he was allergic. We found out the cat was pregnant, and she was due to have her babies pretty soon. At first, she stayed in my roommate’s room, but she decided that she liked me. She moved into my room, and she moved her babies into my room, and hung out with me. We named that cat Love Bucket, because she was a real sweet cat. This was 1993, ’94, and she was my companion until 2018. She was a good pal. She used to spoon with me. She would put her head on the pillow next to mine. We had two sets of kittens with her – nine kittens altogether we raised. We found good homes for all of them, and my roommate kept one, whose name was Tom. Love Bucket and Tom. Love Bucket knew hunger. I had a bag of cat food around I had to keep on top of the refrigerator where she and her son couldn’t vandalize it. Even if their food dish was full, they would still try to break into the other food. The last two cats that I’ve had, I got them straight from their mother. That’s the story of Love Bucket.”
Deepti Nijhawan
Found at the Harvard Art Museums
“There’s a story of the god Krishna when he meets the gopis, the village maidens. They go to swim in the river, and Krishna steals their clothes. And I thought of this story because I’m thinking of love, and how love waxes and wanes, because it does. So I’m trying to think of a love that is eternal. And one of those stories is the Krishna story of the gopis, these women who adore him and adore him for life. And that spiritual love is the highest form of love that sustains itself, over the years, over your lifetime, and is something that you can pass on. That’s the story of Krishna. He loves so deeply himself, and it’s such an open-hearted love, that other people can bestow that upon him. In India, women old and young consider themselves kind of married to him, even though it’s a spiritual love. One of my friend’s mothers, she was a complete Krishna devotee, but I thought part of the reason was that she didn’t get the love that she wanted in her married life. You couldn’t divorce at that time, and so this was her way of transferring the love that she desperately wanted in her life to a mythical figure, which can give you whatever you want from them. My relationship with Krishna is more artistic. I love paintings, and I have a bunch of paintings of Krishna in different forms. The story I was telling you earlier is painted or embroidered on a piece of fabric. I just love that piece of work. My love of him is through art.”
Gabbi Lutz
Found at the Magpie gift shop
“We met in high school doing a production of ‘Sunday in the Park with George.’ I was scared of him because he’s tall and looks goth. I was terrified. But we’ve been together for nine years in March. We just started looking at rings, so we’re really excited. We met in Florida and we moved up here together. First, we were friends for about a year. I actually coached him through a breakup – a girl broke up with him, and he was a mess. We got together six months later. Honestly, it felt very natural. We’re still best friends at this point. I feel like if you stop being best friends it’s a problem. We’ve kind of always just been friends first, so it didn’t feel like much changed. We just are the way we are with each other. I feel like people have things to say sometimes about people who meet in high school, but we’re very happy. I love him very much.”
Cindy Zheng and Anna Zhang
Found at Porter Square Books
“We are both from New York and went to the same high school. But our high school was really big, like 800 or 900 kids a grade, so we didn’t know each other. I had heard of her, but she hadn’t heard of me. We were seniors, it was Covid, we were doing online school and we were both applying to colleges.”
Cindy:“We had a class together, so we were seeing each other across the screen, but we still weren’t too familiar. Once the results were coming back from the college application process, we were actually in a lot of the same acceptance groups. Each of the colleges had Facebook groups, and we were in a lot of the same ones.”
Anna: “She reached out to me asking, ‘What are you thinking?’ And we started texting, like, a lot. It felt very natural because we were all pretty bored and pretty disconnected, and being able to talk about colleges with people who had the same options was a pretty normal thing to do. What was abnormal was how much we started talking after that.”
Cindy: “We spent a lot of time figuring out together what each of our preferences would have been out of the schools that we got into. It turned out we were considering the same top three of our choices, and we came up with really silly ways – we made a couple of decision wheels and we would spin them and see how our hearts felt about it.”
Anna: “That’s basically how we chose to go to the same college. She committed first, but it was really the wheel that told us to go to MIT. I committed shortly after.”
Cindy: “At that point, we started to decide which dorm we wanted to be in together.”
Anna: “And we made more wheels, more spreadsheets. We were roommates for the first year, in the dorm that we chose, and then we weren’t roommates after that, we were right next door, and then in our last year we moved into a two-bedroom apartment. Full circle.”
Cindy: “This year, we both started jobs in New York, and we joke that it’s long-distance: She lives on the East Side and I live in New Jersey, so we’ll commute to each other. We’re back here going to all the places we went during college and revisiting them.”
Wendy Prellwitz
Found at the Harvard Art Museums
“I didn’t grow up as a dog person. I grew up in a family with cats. When my kids were young, we decided to get a dog, and I became surprisingly enamored; maybe because dogs keep you company. He would go with me if I went somewhere to paint, and I would have a buddy. Fast forward, now I’m a single person, the daughters are grown and gone, and I sort of thought, ‘You know, maybe I should get a dog again.’ It was a little journey to find my dog. I walked around the sidewalks of Cambridge and would ask people, if I saw one I thought was cute, I would say, ‘What kind of dog is that?’ I like black dogs, small, kind of fuzzy. Labradoodles are mostly beige, but this particular breeder in Maine sometimes bred her dogs with black dogs. When the puppies were born and there were three black ones, she invited me to go up and see the litter. Oh, my god, so cute! I mean, it’s a dog, you know? It’s a puppy, it’s not a baby, but, oh, my god, she was cute. So I was sold. She was the smallest one in the litter, a third smaller than all the other ones. She was out in the yard while I was talking to the woman who raised them, and, even though she was the smallest one, she was the toughest. She’s feisty. I’ve had her for eight years now. I’m an artist, and I never really painted dogs, but now I do. I’ve made watercolor paintings of her, I made a watercolor book with a little story for my grandchildren. If you love something, it will show through in the art.”
Maddie Yazel
Found at Magpie
“We vaguely knew each other from college. Then we matched on Bumble years after we both graduated and had moved around the city. They had left the city and came back, and we just ended up reconnecting. We both went into it being like, ‘This is just going to be a hookup, this is going to last maybe a few months.’ It felt very low-stakes at first, and that made it easier to set a good baseline of friendship. I blinked and we had been doing whatever for over a year. It really eased into something deeper and more meaningful, and it didn’t come with the stress that comes with a new flirtation. Because we were able to be so chill with each other at first, it kind of allowed us to create a stronger foundation. I’m able to just let myself be around them. I’m fully and authentically myself. They really take me at face value. We’ve been together for three years in April. We live together now, and we just got a cat named Gremlin.”
Tomas Ramirez
Found at Lovestruck
“I’m a Harvard student, and I found love in Harvard. She was second-year and I was a first-year, so she welcomed me into the university. Harvard is a really intense place, and when you find someone that is your soulmate and you can share that intensity with and navigate all those waters, the connections that you create are really, really tight and profound. I think that’s just what happened to me and my girlfriend. It’s a really romantic place if one lets it be. We belonged to this one student organization, she was a leader of the organization, and through that we started getting to know each other first as friends, then as a couple. Our first date was kind of classic: We took a walk through Harvard Yard and across the bridge. We just took a walk and that ended up being like seven hours of conversation. We’ve been together for a year now.”
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