Contributing Writer David Grinsfelder Reports on the ‘10-Second Romance’ in New York City
By DAVID GRINSFELDER | Contributing Writer
I caught her eye as soon as I crested the stairs of the Christopher Street subway station in the heart of the West Village. Flowing down 6th Avenue with an ethereal stride, she wore a dazzling sundress that fluttered in the light afternoon breeze.
Despite my best efforts to feign nonchalance, her crystal blue eyes nearly stopped me in my tracks (and every good New Yorker knows stopping on the sidewalk is a cardinal sin in this city).
As we passed, forced to squeeze by one another to avoid a pile of trash, I hoped we’d both stop and strike up a conversation. A moment later, I couldn’t help but laugh at my own naivete.
With a flock of young people frolicking in the springtime of their youths, the West Village is a neighborhood full of brief romances.
Some of these Gen-Zers (and occasional Millennials) prefer a late-night rendezvous. Others hope to meet a casual stranger at the bar. Still others seem unable to extricate themselves from the confusing on-again, off-again relationship that leaves them feeling morally confused and emotionally unfulfilled.
All of these encounters are par for the course in the New York dating scene. At least they have been in mine since moving to New York City last year.
But there is an even more ephemeral encounter that has caught my attention. I’ve dubbed it the “10-Second Romance.”
Since the West Village is only 0.57 square miles in size, your next romantic encounter could quite literally be within a few hundred feet of you at any given moment.
Of course, when you account for variables, like gender preference, age range and being in the right place at the right time, it is slightly less likely that your soulmate will simply stumble into your arms. Still, the odds of a sidewalk romance in the West Village are pretty good, given the armada of neighborhood foot traffic passing by.
There is something about the transience of these brief flings that make them unforgettable yet unremarkable. It would be an exaggeration to say each flirtatious eye contact leaves an indelible mark on my memory. But it’s true that the sum of these moments gives me a little extra motivation to pop out of bed each morning and ride the subway from my Upper West Side neighborhood down to the Christopher Street station.
The streets are imbued with that certain je ne sais quoi that confers a hopeless romanticism on inhabitants and visitors alike. So much so, in fact, that I recently imposed a strict limit on my daily flirtations.
Now I only let myself fall in love three times per day, but it has been a challenge to stick to this spartan diet of romantic restriction. After long winter months that subdue the city’s energy, New York springs to life in the summer in a way I never experienced on the West Coast.
It is easy to understand why incorrigible optimism overruns the Big Apple in the last weeks of May. And the epicenter of this epidemic, as best I can tell, is somewhere between Hudson Street and 6th Avenue in the West Village.
With the proliferation of social media and dating apps, I sometimes wonder if people are becoming more reluctant to strike up conversation with an interesting stranger in public.
If you can retreat to the safety of your smartphone, where every word of every text is meticulously crafted, then real-time dialogue suddenly becomes a risky business.
You might say the wrong thing. You might have food stuck in your teeth. Even worse, you might make such a complete fool of yourself that it haunts your dreams for weeks afterward. Not that that’s ever happened to me.
Regardless, I still love the idea of a serendipitous meet-cute story. And in a neighborhood like the West Village, I’m perpetually wondering if my 10-second romance might lead to something more.
David Grinsfelder is a graduate of Palisades Charter High School (2015) and UC Berkeley (2019). He currently lives in New York and is writing a series of travel stories for the Palisadian-Post. The Grinsfelders have been Highlands residents since 1989.
