Emily and Cyril, both 27, met through their school choir. As Cyril’s family favoured arranged marriages, Emily didn’t think a relationship was possible. But they married in 2019

As a music lover, Emily was excited to join her high school choir on a trip to San Francisco from Riverside, California, in 2011. They attended a competition, which went well, but on the journey back she became fed up of sitting with her friends. “They were talking about boys and being a bit annoying,” she laughs. She spotted Cyril sitting on the coach alone and decided to join him. Although they knew each other through the choir, they had never spoken for very long. “He had taken over playing the piano from me and I’d noticed he was better at it, so there was a bit of rivalry,” she admits. “I did think he was cute, though.”

They spent the nine-hour return trip talking and bonding over their similar tastes in music. “I knew who Emily was before that, but she wasn’t much more than an acquaintance,” says Cyril. “The bus ride was really a turning point for us.” Emily agrees. “It sounds cheesy, but it feels like that is where we fell in love.”

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We went for walks, marvelled at the views, saw baby eagles and had a lot of sex. But as the proprietor of the guest house could tell, not all was well between us

Back in 2008, I lived in New York. I wasn’t a total stranger to North American winters – my stepmother is from Michigan, and the one and only time she persuaded me to go on a family sledging outing I was so cold I bailed and went back to sit in the car, like the moody teenager I most definitely was. But I’d never been on the continent for an entire winter. I bought a gigantic army surplus parka and resigned myself to months of wading through freezing slush, alternated with sitting in my studio apartment at night with the windows open because the ancient radiators had one setting: on. That was until I read an article in the New York Times travel section about upstate getaways. The mere mention of a charming B&B overlooking the Delaware River, where you could watch nesting eagles on a nearby bluff while sipping cognac, was all it took. Manhattan’s dreary ice-bound streets slipped away momentarily, and I imagined myself on that very deck. I was in a long-distance relationship at the time, and what, I reasoned, could be more romantic than such a weekend?

It was February, the very worst part of winter, and any twinkle of New York City’s seasonal cheer had well and truly died. My boyfriend was due a visit, and I was ecstatic at the prospect of a trip out of the city. We would go somewhere a hundred times more romantic than my apartment (which housed the world’s smallest and most uncomfortable bed), a thousand times more interesting than the corner diner, and a million times more nurturing than the intersection of Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. I could see it all: the icy river threading its way below the B&B’s deck, the eagles soaring majestically above us, me and my boyfriend holding hands and laughing in the snow, pink-cheeked and very much in love.

The question I am due to be the bridesmaid at my friend’s wedding. She’s been engaged for five years. The whole thing has had to be rearranged twice due to the pandemic and now it’s on for 2022.

When she became engaged, I was one of her only mates. We had been teenage friends and used to go out drinking and partying. She started working and became sensible and ambitious, met her fiancé and settled down. I went to college, met a bunch of people I bonded with and we started to drift apart. She asked me to be her bridesmaid more than four years ago and I think it was because at that time there were not many other people she could ask.

We met in a cafe and struck up an intense friendship - soon we were kissing for hours on park benches. Then he asked me to join him on a trip to Iceland

There was a strip of cafes and bars that ran alongside Tompkins Square park in the Lower East Side in New York and none of them minded if all you bought was a single coffee and sat all night long. So I did just that. It was the late 90s, I was 19 years old and I had never lived in a city before. I sat night after night in these cafes, reading books, watching people, drinking too much coffee. I didn’t really have anything else to do, I didn’t know anyone, so I’d sit and watch the East Village whirl around me.

I wasn’t the only lonely kid, though. After a while I noticed another sitting night after night in Café Pick Me Up, a studious young man feverishly filling up notebooks. Café Pick Me Up was a cosy little place with a low pressed-metal ceiling, crammed full of tiny tables, with French cafe chairs and mellow lighting. If you were to write a romcom featuring a meet cute, you’d set it there.