A staple of the rom-com genre is the meet-cute: two nauseatingly adorable characters who are fated to fall in love first meet each other through sheer coincidence, only to be separated by events until they meet again later, when they really connect.
But even Meg Ryan wouldn’t attempt to pull this stunt in her movies.
In 1952, nurses at the Lennox Castle Hospital maternity ward briefly handed two babies to the wrong mothers, both of whom were named Margaret. The mothers realized the mistake – not unexpectedly, as one baby was a boy and the other a girl – and the correct families were reunited. Fast forward 18 years, the now-grown babies met at a wedding of mutual friends. They started dating and within a few months, Jim Mitchell and Margaret Rafferty realized they had met before, when 2 nurses accidentally switched them at birth. They married in 1972.
As a prompt, write your own outlandish meet-cute story. What if it didn’t turn out as well as this one? Reframe this story in a mystery, horror, fantasy, or science fiction setting and see where the characters take you.
