On metro-based meet-cutes.
For those unfamiliar with the urban lore of the transit crush, one can merely take a cursory glance at the Craigslist Missed Connections archives for reference. The pages are rife with testimonials of love both found and lost in the canals of the subway, the belly of an airplane, perhaps even the backseat of a rideshare. Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy would have us believe it’s not out of the question to imagine we might encounter a young Ethan Hawke on a Eurorail train in Vienna and fall madly into a decades-spanning love. The New York Times has printed a surplus of Modern Love essays about this very phenomenon. In cosmopolitan cities, whereby life itself is orchestrated around shared vessels of transportation, there are few places where you’re more likely to come upon a host of new faces; overhear legions of intimate conversations; witness some distant stranger reading the same novel as you on the L train. By design, it makes sense that we’re always falling in and out of microscopic forms of love on our morning commutes.
Without a doubt, there’s a beauty in this — whether or not we actually work up the courage to introduce ourselves to the subjects of our transit-born lust. We’ve already written about the benefits of the crush, writ large. Beyond the fact that it’s, well, fun, there’s some science involved: Having a crush often elicits the release of a chemical called norepinephrine, which will typically bring you to a heightened level of attention. When more sustained, that’ll lead to a spike in dopamine (think: joy, renewed energy, and motivation). Of course, these rules apply more wholly to more committed, larger format crushes (typically on people whose first names you actually know), but still, in minute ways, your transit prospect spurs the same chemical reaction. On your way to work, say, envisioning what, exactly, the person with headphones in across from you is listening to, that tiny flash of norepinephrine-dopamine-cocktail might act like a shot of espresso — precisely the kind of pick me up one needs while commuting to an office on a Tuesday morning.
The point is, while we have countless evidence as to the success of properly actualized, subway meet-cutes, there’s still a certain crucial joy in the snack size versions of affection we encounter with our arms’ distance, implausible suitors in the dim light of a city bus.
