On April 13, the Islamic Republic of Iran launched missiles and drones at Israel. Also on April 13, as well as on April 12, 14, and 15, the Russian Federation launched missiles and drones at Ukraine—including some designed in Iran.

Few of the weapons launched by Iran hit their mark. Instead, American and European airplanes, alongside Israeli and even Jordanian airplanes, knocked the drones and missiles out of the sky.

By contrast, some of the attacks launched by Russia did destroy their targets. Ukraine, acting alone, and—thanks to the Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives—running short on defensive ammunition, was unable to knock all of the drones and missiles out of the sky. On April 12 Russian strikes badly damaged an energy facility in Dnipropetrovsk. On April 13, a 61-year-old woman and 68-year-old man were killed by a Russian strike in Kharkiv. On April 14, an aerial bomb hit an apartment building in Ocheretyne, killing one and injuring two. On April 15, a Russian guided missile hit a school and killed at least two more people in the Kharkiv region.  

[Eliot A. Cohen: The ‘Israel model’ won’t work for Ukraine]

Why the difference in reaction? Why did American and European jets scramble to help Israel, but not Ukraine? Why doesn’t Ukraine have enough matériel to defend itself? One difference is the balance of nuclear power. Russia has nuclear weapons, and its propagandists periodically threaten to use them. That has made the U.S. and Europe reluctant to enter the skies over Ukraine. Israel also has nuclear weapons, but that affects the calculus in a different way: It means that the U.S., Europe, and even some Arab states are eager to make sure that Israel is never provoked enough to use them, or indeed to use any serious conventional weapons, against Iran.

A second difference between the two conflicts is that the Republican Party remains staunchly resistant to propaganda coming from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Leading Republicans do not sympathize with the mullahs, do not repeat their talking points, and do not seek to appease them when they make outrageous claims about other countries. That enables the Biden administration to rush to the aid of Israel, because no serious opposition will follow.

By contrast, a part of the Republican Party, including its presidential candidate, does sympathize with the Russian dictatorship, does repeat its talking points, and does seek to appease Russia when it invades and occupies other countries. The absence of bipartisan solidarity around Ukraine means that the Republican congressional leadership has prevented the Biden administration from sending even defensive weapons and ammunition to Ukraine. The Biden administration appears to feel constrained and unable to provide Ukraine with the spontaneous assistance that it just provided to Israel.

Open sympathy for the war aims of the Russian state is rarely stated out loud. Instead, some leading Republicans have begun, in the past few months, to argue that Ukraine should “shift to a defensive war,” to give up any hope of retaining its occupied territory, or else stop fighting altogether. Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, in a New York Times essay written in what can only be described as extraordinary bad faith, made exactly this argument just last week. So too, for example, did Republican Representative Eli Crane of Arizona, who has said that military aid for Ukraine “should be totally off the table and replaced with a push for peace talks.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: The war is not going well for Ukraine]

But Ukraine is already fighting a defensive war. The materiel that the Republicans are refusing to send includes—let me repeat it again—defensive munitions. There is no evidence whatsoever that cutting off any further aid to Ukraine would end the fighting or bring peace talks. On the contrary, all of the evidence indicates that blocking aid would allow Russia to advance faster, take more territory, and eventually murder far more Ukrainians, as Vance and Crane surely know. Without wanting to put it that boldly, they seem already to see themselves in some kind of alliance with Russia, and therefore they want Ukraine to be defeated. They do not see themselves in alliance with Iran, despite the fact that Iran and Russia would regard one another as partners.

For the rest of the world, there are some lessons here. Plenty of countries, perhaps including Ukraine and Iran, will draw the first and most obvious conclusion: Nuclear weapons make you much safer. Not only can you deter attacks with a nuclear shield, and not only can you attack other countries with comparative impunity, but you can also, under certain circumstances, expect others to join in your defense.

Perhaps others will draw the other obvious conclusion: A part of the Republican Party—one large enough to matter—can be co-opted, lobbied, or purchased outright. Not only can you get it to repeat your propaganda; you can get it to act directly in your interests. This probably doesn’t cost even a fraction of the price of tanks and artillery, and it can be far more effective.

No doubt many will make use of both of these lessons in the future.

What if everyone’s wrong? What if Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign is savvier, more organized, and more cunning than it’s been given credit for? This past weekend, Kennedy’s “We the People” party gamed an Iowa loophole to secure his spot on the state’s 2024 election ballot. Instead of spending months gathering thousands of signatures, Kennedy’s allies persuaded hundreds of voters to show up in the same place on the same day and partake in something akin to a potemkin political convention. The summit barely lasted two hours. It was a bold gambit, and it worked.

On Saturday in West Des Moines, Kennedy “accepted” his nascent party’s nomination for president, then spoke extemporaneously (no teleprompters, no printed remarks) inside the historic Val-Air Ballroom. Twenty years ago on this same stage, Howard Dean gripped the mic and emitted a guttural “YAHHHHHH!”—a gargling, alien howl that many believe doomed his 2004 campaign. Kennedy’s vibe was tamer, though his language crackled with a fiery, burn-it-down ethos. He assured the room that the most confounding spoiler campaign of the year would rage on, even if no one knows exactly where it will all lead.

Kennedy is officially on the ballot in Utah, and his team (and super PAC) says he has met the necessary qualifications in Nevada, Idaho, Nebraska, North Carolina, and New Hampshire, in addition to Iowa. Depending on whom you ask, he’s either making a mockery of America’s electoral process for his own ego and enrichment, or he’s righteously revealing the system’s fatal flaws through a prolonged, patriotic, chaotic protest. Perhaps he’s doing a bit of both.

[Read: Where RFK Jr. goes from here]

Can voters trust him? Can anyone? At the lectern, Kennedy warned his followers against putting their faith in any government leader. He promised that, as president, he’d instruct members of the media to rediscover the journalistic virtue known as “fierce skepticism.” He also said this: “Don’t even believe me! You shouldn’t!”

This week marks one year since Kennedy launched his campaign, and he has settled into a comfortable groove: a flame-throwing extremist posing as a mellow unifier. Kennedy paints President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump as equally villainous leaders of equally villainous parties propping up a supremely villainous power system. He argues that he, the conspiratorial anti-vaxxer condemned by multiple members of his family, is the only sensible voice in this race. Kennedy deftly plays up his lineage, often deploying the phrase When my uncle was president. For virtually his entire life, like his uncle and father and dozens (hundreds?) of others with his surname, Kennedy was a staunch Democrat. Then, six months ago, standing outside the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, he declared his “independence” from the DNC and the tyrannical political duopoly. Rather than challenge Biden for the Democratic nomination, he announced his intent to go it alone and “spoil” the election—for both sides.

Kennedy may condemn Trump and Biden equally, but these days he certainly sounds much more like Trump than Biden. In Iowa, he began his “acceptance speech” by telling the crowd that he had just participated in a backstage interview with ABC News. Right on cue, a member of the audience yelled “Fuck them!,” prompting Kennedy to flash a mischievous, Trumpian smile. He shared that ABC had asked him about a recent New York Times/Siena poll showing him at only 2 percent. This led to a rant against what he believed to be the rigged poll. To be fair, Kennedy may have had a bit of a point: Survey respondents weren’t automatically supplied Kennedy’s name, as they were Trump’s and Biden’s. That methodology may have hurt Kennedy and other third-party candidates, but it doesn’t constitute “rigged.” Still, to him, this was fresh evidence that the corrupt media are part of the crooked system he’s intent on demolishing.

In most polls, Kennedy hovers between 10 and 20 percent of support—notably high numbers for any third-party contender, though history suggests his numbers will shrink as Election Day nears. Tony Lyons, the iconoclastic book publisher who runs the pro-Kennedy American Values super PAC, recently told me that Kennedy’s pivot to independence led to a major increase in fundraising. His newly announced running mate, the Silicon Valley businesswoman Nicole Shanahan, will bring even more money to the operation.

Many people believe that Kennedy will ultimately draw more votes from Biden than from Trump in November. But the results will vary depending on the state. In Iowa, where Trump won in 2016 and 2020, I spoke with several attendees who identified as Republicans. Most of them were former Trump voters. A 63-year-old farmer named Howard Vlieger had driven four hours that morning to do his part to help get Kennedy on the ballot. (State regulations required the campaign to find at least 500 “eligible electors” from at least 25 of Iowa’s 99 counties; in the end, it was able to notch well over 600.) Around noon, I noticed Vlieger standing in the sun near the venue’s mid-century neon DANCING sign, clutching a large cardboard box. What’s inside? I asked. An assortment of GMO-free summer sausage from his family’s livestock, packed on ice—a gift for Kennedy. Vlieger was wearing a bolo tie engraved with a cross, much like the one on his belt buckle. He told me he’d been a registered Republican for most of his life. “I did vote for Trump in 2016,” he said. “I thought he was genuine, but he definitely proved me wrong.”

Another man, a 54-year-old named Dan (no last name given) wearing an American-flag bandanna, rolled up to the ballroom on his vintage red-white-and-blue Sears Roebuck bicycle with a Kennedy yard sign splayed across its handlebars. He, too, had been a lifelong Republican. Ten years ago, he was diagnosed with a rare cancer. He underwent chemotherapy but, as time passed, grew skeptical of conventional medicine. He had refused to get a COVID shot and told me uses only “God’s grass” to manage his pain. If he could go back in time, he told me, he probably wouldn’t agree to the chemo.

[Read: The first MAGA Democrat]

A young couple, Brady and Madison, 20 and 21 years old (no last names given), had driven a couple of hours southwest from Black Hawk County to get here. Brady told me that he works at Dollar General, and that this would be his first time voting. He said he had latched onto Kennedy after listening to him on several podcasts. “I would say that, like, even if some people think it’s a waste, it’s definitely better than not voting,” Brady said of his Kennedy support. “And definitely better than voting for the other two options.”

Kennedy isn’t courting MAGA world so much as slyly raising the flap of his circus tent and offering a safe space for some Trump folks. Much like Trump, Kennedy’s campaign merchandise has a coyness to it. By far the most popular shirt I saw Saturday read NO SHOES, NO SHIRT, NO SECRET SERVICE, with a black-and-white photo of Kennedy sitting barefoot at an airport gate. One item for sale was a camouflage trucker hat with Kennedy’s name in orange lettering, conspicuously similar to one of many current iterations of the MAGA hat. Kennedy described his campaign as an “idealistic journey to restore everything that we have in our country”—a tad ganglier than “Make America great again.” The official new slogan sounds like it was made by ChatGPT: “The future starts now.”

Beyond the obvious presence of many former and current Republicans, Kennedy’s “convention” featured perhaps the biggest cross-section of people I’ve ever witnessed at an Iowa event. I saw a blend of young people, old people, flat brims, sun brims, billowy blazers, Harley-Davidson shirts, earth tones, floral prints, tie-dye, work boots, and more. I overheard one woman admonish her fellow volunteer for drinking out of a plastic water bottle instead of a reusable aluminum container. I also saw attendees clutching cans of Miller Lite. (Cold beer is, and will always be, a bipartisan unifier.) Like MAGA, RFK Jr.–ism has become a real movement, a club, a place of belonging. A bit later in the afternoon, I ran into a Trump caucus captain whom I had spoken with at the former president’s pre-Christmas rally in Waterloo, Iowa. Roughly 1,000 people had now filed in to see Kennedy. He told me that only two candidates could draw these sort of numbers in Iowa: his guy, and this guy. He was here for the show.

Like Trump, Kennedy peppered call-and-response sections into his speech, giving the event the air of a church revival. And who owns all those pharmaceutical companies? Black Rock! He soon segued into an attack on processed foods. (The venue’s snack bar had Domino’s pizza on offer, and more than a few attendees were chowing slices.) He warned that we could soon see “more pandemics,” using his fingers to turn air quotes into scare quotes. In response, one audience member screamed “Plandemic!”—a reference to a movie packed with conspiracy theories that had gone viral in 2020. As Kennedy spoke, people in the crowd periodically raised their fists in emphatic support, no matter the topic.

“If you give me a sword and some ground to stand on, I will give you your country back,” Kennedy promised. It was the ultimate needle-thread. Not only did this statement sound Trump-esque, but the “sword” was perhaps a sly reference to Camelot—the nickname of his uncle’s White House.

When I interviewed Kennedy for a profile last spring, he was traveling with an extremely small crew anchored by his press secretary, Stefanie Spear. On Saturday, I spotted Spear hovering by the VIP section inside the ballroom. She looked tanned and rested—the opposite of someone who had just spent a year on a grueling presidential campaign. Everything was falling into place. Spear told me that the campaign was ahead of all of its milestones and that she was confident Kennedy’s name would appear on the ballot in all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia.

Nevertheless, both Democrats and Republicans have been trying to thwart Kennedy’s progress with legal challenges. Spear told me that the campaign had figured out some workarounds. The Iowa “one-day convention” was unique; in many states, her team is engaging in clock management: The campaign has the requisite signatures to land Kennedy on multiple state ballots right now, but it’s waiting until closer to the final deadlines to submit the paperwork. This way, the DNC and RNC will have less time to mount their legal oppositions.

Democrats are finally reckoning with the threat Kennedy poses to Biden’s reelection. The DNC recently hired operatives to take on third-party candidates, namely Kennedy. Meanwhile, Trump’s allies are reportedly planning to boost Kennedy (and other third-party candidates) in swing states. “The path to victory here is clearly maximizing the reach of these left-wing alternatives,” the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon recently told The New York Times.

Liberal voters who say they plan to abandon Biden on account of his support of Israel in its war in Gaza won’t necessarily find comfort in Kennedy, who falls to the right of the president on the issue. On Saturday, I spoke with an attendee named Priscilla Herrera, a transcendental-meditation instructor from Fairfield, Iowa. She wore a red Kennedy baseball hat and had brought along her three-month-old son. She told me she’d been a fan of Kennedy ever since watching him on The Joe Rogan Experience last year. “There are some policies that I don’t agree with,” she said. “And he may have lost a lot of people, a lot of younger people, when he didn’t speak out against what was happening in Palestine, the atrocities against the people in Gaza. And I get chills, because I was really upset about that, too,” she said. “But despite that, I think I’m still going to vote for him.”

Kennedy is no doubt counting on wooing more voters like her. Maybe they’ve heard him speak his truth on a podcast, maybe they think Biden’s too old for another term, or maybe they like that he seems like a crunchier version of Trump—an outspoken outsider, seemingly afraid of no one. Someone who appears willing to say almost anything and worry about the consequences later.

Say you’re in a bar. You see someone across the room who looks appealing. But do they think the same of you? You don’t want to stare for too long, so you turn back to your drink. No worries—the electronic tentacles attached to your shoulders give a wiggle, indicating that the hottie, mercifully, has glanced your way.

That’s the premise of a device called “Ripple,” named, I guess, for the undulating sensation triggered by a stranger’s horny gaze. Equipped with two cameras, it connects computer-vision technology with sensors to detect when someone is looking at you. (Unfortunately, it can’t really distinguish between the eyes of an admirer and someone noticing you because you’re wearing tentacles out to the bar.) Ripple’s creators pitched it as a way to help people meet in person—the old-fashioned way, with, um, one minor difference.

It was developed in 2017—five years after Tinder and Hinge launched, when people were getting nervous about the effects of dating apps. They’d created a society-wide experiment: “What if we stopped dating people we meet in our regular lives and started building some other system, where major corporations use algorithms to figure out how we meet?” Eli Finkel, who studies romantic relationships at Northwestern University, told me. What would it mean for technology to mediate romantic connection? Would it make us all irreparably incapable of courting on our own?

[Read: The rise of dating-app fatigue]

Ripple never got big, but it was only the most memeworthy in a long line of similar offerings made for people both sick of and dependent on dating apps. There’s the “pear ring,” designed to be worn by mingling singles to signal their eligibility. Or speed-dating events, an old concept that’s become newly popular. Some dating apps are, paradoxically, designed to combat your dating-app fatigue. Take Thursday, which unlocks swiping for one day a week—and then holds a real-life soiree for people to meet. Or Strike, which notifies you when someone you’ve matched with is nearby. Or Happn, which shows you users you’ve physically crossed paths with, and promises to “use technology to improve real life, not to replace it.”

If “real life” means finding love face-to-face, rather than through a screen, you can’t blame people for wanting to return to it—especially considering how many shows and movies involve soulmates connecting via fluke run-ins, reaching for the same pair of gloves or physically running into each other on the sidewalk. More than a decade after the dawn of dating apps, we’re seeing the emergence of a strain of meet-cute nostalgia. Perhaps more than ever, singles today idealize romance that doesn’t involve the internet—the kind that’s physical and visceral, and that finds you.

But people aren’t so used to waiting around for love to find them anymore, and they seem less willing to risk rejection by putting themselves out there in person. And anyway, the utopia of serendipitous encounters only exists in our imagination. Meet-cutes won’t fix modern dating.

For much of human history, single people couldn’t usually just decide to go on a date. Before the Industrial Revolution, your family or another trusted community member would likely set you up with the person you’d marry. Later, people commonly met through their social circles or at places of worship, school, or eventually work; you could try to be flirty and open to connection, or put yourself in situations to meet new people, but you could only control so much. You were under the heel of fate.    

Dating apps radically upended that powerlessness. They created a practical kind of agency—the ability to “go out and make it happen,” Paul Eastwick, a UC Davis psychologist, told me. They also created another issue entirely: the burnout that comes from sorting through a deluge of options, many of them far from ideal. Still, that’s arguably preferable to having no options at all—which could happen pretty quickly if you’d exhausted your pool of friends-of-friends (and you weren’t going around spilling orange juice on charming strangers). “Yes, it’s a bummer, even today, to not have found somebody after working at it,” Finkel said. “But it’s certainly nice to know that those 100 dates were available, even though they weren’t great.” And online dating has led to a ton of successful relationships. In fact, it’s the most common way that American couples now meet. The people complaining about apps, Finkel said, “don’t know what it was like to be single in 1980.”

That’s just it—many of them literally don’t. Plenty of young people dating today have never done so offline. They’re used to having the agency that was so novel when apps first emerged. Now some of them, tired of the responsibility that comes with being in the driver’s seat, want to let go of the wheel. What they covet is just the opposite of pragmatic efficiency: serendipity.

[Read: America is sick of swiping]

Media outlets have proclaimed for a while now that young people are turning away from online dating—but it’s unclear to what degree that’s actually happening. One commonly cited study found that 79 percent of college students don’t use dating apps regularly. That makes sense, though: College students are meeting people on campus. Whether or not the apps are dying, they’re not dead yet—and definitely not for young people. In 2023, 60 percent of Tinder’s 75 million monthly active users were younger than 35.

But that doesn’t mean they’re enjoying it. In one 2022 survey, nearly 80 percent of 18-to-54-year-old respondents reported feeling emotional burnout or fatigue when online dating. Liesel Sharabi, a communications professor at Arizona State University, has found that meeting on an app still carries some stigma, despite how common it is. “I think people like the idea of having that love story to tell,” she told me. Perhaps young daters especially. They seem to be romantics: A 2024 Hinge report found that Gen Z participants were 30 percent more likely than Millenials to believe each person has one soulmate and 39 percent more likely to consider themselves romantically idealistic. For them, Sharabi told me, the old meet-cute ideal is particularly intriguing: “It’s almost like nostalgia for a dating experience that they’ve never had.”

It might also be harder for them to get that experience if they want it. Young Americans are hanging out less on average, so they have fewer opportunities to chat someone up in a social setting. And less practice might mean doing so feels more intimidating. Sharabi recalled one Gen Z research participant saying they probably would never approach someone intriguing at a party; instead, they told her, “I might see if they’re online.” Of course, if you slide into someone’s DMs or find them on an app, you could still get snubbed. But a nonresponse is harder to interpret than a verbal “no thank you” in a way that can be comforting: Perhaps the other person didn’t see the message, or they got too busy to respond. Even a clear no stings less through the distance afforded by a screen. The Hinge survey found that Gen Z daters fear rejection “most acutely”: More than half of them said that concern has kept them from pursuing a possible relationship, and they’re 10 percent more likely than Millennial respondents to say they’ve missed out on a romantic opportunity because of it.

That helps explain the meet-cute-nostalgia industry offering to make in-person encounters easier. Yet most of those efforts, frankly, are flops—ineffective, impractical, even bizarre ways to force romance to unfold in a manner that isn’t natural to modern courtship. Happn, designed for finding “your crush in the places you love,” presented me with a bevy of people who lived around me—which is pretty much what every other dating app does. It kept proclaiming that a user “lives in New York City too,” as if that was a profound, romantic coincidence. The app Strike hypothetically lets you buy a “wearable” (a little rectangular device that fits in your pocket) to notify you when a match is nearby—in real time, so you can actually approach them—but I couldn’t set up an account, nor could I reach anyone at the company to help me. The major online-dating companies are trying to join the trend too; Hinge is offering tens of thousands of dollars in grants to any organization that can help “Gen Z find belonging and community in person,” and Bumble is hosting “IRL” dating events. But when I searched for one in New York—the Big Apple!—I was told, “No results match your search.” I would have tried speed-dating, but I couldn’t swallow paying $30 just to sit through two hours of awkward conversations. (I would, however, be willing to bet $30 that I’ll never see anyone wearing a pear ring.)

On TikTok, real-life-chat gurus promise lessons like teaching “the most natural, non-awkward way to approach that cute stranger.” (The channel “How to Talk to Strangers” had 61.6 million views at the time of my writing this.) Common advice is to ask for directions, make eye contact, give a compliment, or pose a specific question—like what someone’s favorite nearby coffee shop is. But it seemed to me that this might have a higher success rate for a notably hot person than for most everyone else. “It literally doesn’t matter what you look like” as long as you’re confident, one TikToker proclaimed before adding, “I mean, obviously you have to look, like, somewhat pretty.” Eastwick also pointed out that this brand of how-to romantic instruction is “tailored to pick up certain kinds of people attending certain kinds of establishments at a particular period of time.” It might have worked for someone else, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work for you.

People aren’t wrong to crave in-person connection. The shortcomings of dating apps have been, at this point, well covered: They can encourage shallowness, for one thing. They’re rife with harassment, for another. And they often set you up with people whom you share no context with beyond geographical proximity. Sharabi has found that on average, relationships that start on dating apps are slightly less stable than those that begin in person, and partners are slightly less satisfied. Her explanation: “You’re meeting people who you have no prior connection with. That can have long-term effects when you try to integrate them into your network.” That is to say, you’re dating strangers.

The solution to those problems is probably not finding strangers to date in person rather than online. Doing so would still mean going for someone who remains mostly mysterious except for their appearance, and you still might not share anything beyond proximity. Besides, random meet-cutes were never the “natural” way to find a partner, or even the most common way. Before apps, most couples met through friends or family. When Eastwick hears that people feel guilty for not wanting to chat someone up in public, he tells them: “That’s okay. That’s a skill that you can learn if you want, but it’s really not central to the way that we meet each other.” On the phone with me, he laughed about the idea of, say, striking up conversation with a lone bombshell at the end of the bar. “Is this bar in an airport? Like, where is this happening? This is very odd to me.”

[Read: The golden age of dating doesn’t exist]

Now the airport-bar kind of encounter is probably even less likely to happen than in the past—not just because dating apps have made people unaccustomed to taking romantic risks, but also because they’ve (fortunately) let us prioritize consent, at least in the realm of early propositions. Society has largely become more attuned to the discomfort that unwanted advances can cause, Finkel told me. The notion of a loose, spontaneous culture of in-person flirting sounds nice—except that it would entail some interactions you never wanted.

Of course, it is possible to approach a stranger of interest respectfully. Several dating coaches told me they work with clients who are hungry for real-life romance to teach them how to do so. Jayda Shuavarnnasri, a sex and relationship educator, suggests that people always give the other person an out—for instance: “If you want to sit in silence to eat your meal, please let me know.” It’s tricky, though, because some people will have a harder time landing all of this smoothly, not necessarily because they’re pushier but because they struggle more with social cues. “Is it okay with us if a guy who’s kind of on the autism spectrum” gets called out for hitting on someone, Finkel asked me, “but people who are Brad Pitt don’t get sanctioned for the same behavior?”

None of this means that you should never talk to strangers. It just means that doing so is a delicate way to find love, and it’s certainly not the only way that can lead to something genuine. We shouldn’t put it on a pedestal—especially if we’re not ready to accept what it would really mean for society to embrace it. If you do want to seek connection with the people you see out and about, Shuavarnnasri advised taking some pressure off by not expecting the interaction to be necessarily romantic. Maybe you’ll have a pleasant conversation and then never see each other again. But you’ll still have opened yourself up to a bit of playful uncertainty—the kind that comes when you have no agenda and no idea how things might play out.

Meet-cute nostalgia raises the question of how much ambiguity we can tolerate—whether a serendipitous spark with a stranger is worth the potential for awkwardness and misinterpretation, or whether boundaries and clarity are worth some lost opportunities for connection. “Do we want a society where there’s an excess number of people being hit on and having to say no … or do we want a society where there’s an excess amount of people not initiating relationships that would have been desirable?” Finkel asked. We can’t have it both ways—not perfectly.

Either way, mystery and doubt will always be part of romance. You could follow a TikToker’s advice to a T, march proudly into a café, and ask the person next to you about their oatmeal—just to get a short response and a turn away. You could also get ghosted by someone whose app profile says they’re looking for a life partner. In love, however you meet, you’re always risking something—and even a set of fancy flirting tentacles can’t change that.