Like all good love stories, this one began in a barn. I was 15 with blue eyeshadow smeared across my face and hair so frizzy someone should’ve dipped me in a vat of mousse. And yet, this was the night I decided to pursue a boy in the year above me whom I’d always fancied. Teenage delusions based on questionable ’90s rom-coms had led me to believe this was a good idea. That and the fact that it was New Year’s Eve, a night famously pregnant with the possibility of romance.
I pursued the poor guy ardently, determined to kick off our storied, turbulent relationship with a midnight kiss. In my head, he liked me back and had been fantasising about our wedding for years. In reality, he avoided me all evening, nodded passively as I spoke at him and only gave me his full attention while asking whether my friend was single. At midnight, he was kissing her. I was dancing with a bunch of dads and, shortly afterwards, vomiting in a bush.
New Year’s Eve is a night of promise. Obviously, it’s the end of the year, which brings about an inevitable amount of self-reflection. On top of that, you’re fresh from Christmas, when you’ve probably been drinking more than you’ve been working and spending most of your time indoors staring at screens both large and small. Perhaps you’ve seen your family more in a week than you have all year, negotiating various conflicts and complications. If you’re single, you might even have been sleeping in your childhood bedroom. In other words, it’s a period completely detached from reality. Hence why we all arrive at 31 December feeling a little strange. Delusional, even. Or maybe that’s just me.
Every year, I’ve doggedly pursued a transcendentally romantic New Year’s Eve to no avail. There was the time I snogged two male friends at a Fatboy Slim gig, only to leave for another party in search of a third man I actually fancied. I arrived at 2am, drunk. The third man never answered his phone, so I went home. There was the house party in Streatham where I flirted outrageously with a professional rugby player, only to wind up having to leave before midnight with a friend who was so drunk she’d done a wee in the bath. And then there was the 21st birthday at a house in Surrey, where I had too many Jägerbombs and fell asleep at 11pm underneath a coffee table.
Even when I’ve been in a relationship, New Year’s Eve has been tricky. The pressure to have the perfect evening loomed large for the four years my ex and I were together. Ironically, my favourite one was during the pandemic when we had no choice but to stay in and watch the fireworks from my window. Still, the dream of a great New Year’s Eve story is one that’s been hard to shake, particularly in the last two years I’ve been single.
Experts trace the midnight kiss tradition back to Ancient Rome, as well as English and German folklore. It’s believed that German immigrants brought the custom to the US more than 100 years ago, with The New York Times reporting instances of people rushing “into each other’s arms” and exchanging “hearty kisses” when the clock struck 12 as early as 1893.
Then there’s all of the pop culture that’s conditioned us to think of New Year’s Eve as a night for declaring your love for someone. Yes, I’m talking about the final scene of When Harry Met Sally, the cult 1989 Nora Ephron film. After years of friendship, Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) professes his feelings for Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) at a New Year’s Eve party, delivering the famous line: “I came here tonight because when you realise you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” Straight women have never been the same since.
I’m not the only one clinging onto this fantasy, by the way. “I wish I had a story like that,” one friend said when I asked if anyone had ever had a New Year’s Eve romance in a WhatsApp group. “I saw it happen to someone else once,” another chimed in. “Literally never. Some of my worst kisses have been on that night,” replied a third. A fourth added: “I did snog someone at 2am in Leicester Square once when I was hailing a cab...”
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. One friend tells me she’s travelling to Las Palmas to spend the night with an artist she met earlier this year. Another recalls how she met a man at a New Year’s Eve party and wound up going out with him for three years. And one snogged a guy she fancied at a hat party who proceeded to confess his love to her; she’s now been with him for 11 years.
Some New Year’s Eve stories sound like they’ve been scripted by a rom-com mastermind. “I had been looking for a boyfriend and told my friends I was going to make it happen before the year was out,” says Cindy, 31. “I was at a New Year’s Eve party and had planned to do the Spanish tradition of eating 12 grapes under the table – but I forgot the grapes – so I figured I needed to find someone to kiss for good luck instead. I started looking around the room and then this guy grabbed me, saying ‘I know you!’ I replied: ‘Okay, that’s good. Do you wanna kiss me?’” After the kiss, the guy asked her out; they’ve now been together for two years.
For Holly, 38, New Year’s Eve has always carried an added dose of pressure given that it happens to be her birthday. One year in particular stands out. “It was at university and every girl I knew suddenly became obsessed with the same guy – let’s call him M – after he broke up with his girlfriend. Tall, dark, and ridiculously handsome but also funny, incredibly clever, a great actor, and always carrying a book of poetry… he was perfect.”
A flirtation blossomed after a few spontaneous run-ins at various indie music nights, leading Holly to invite M to her 21st birthday party, a “joyful, gigantic, messy celebration up a hill in rural Wales”. The chemistry was palpable: “We couldn’t take our eyes off each other, but I was too shy to make a move, even at midnight,” Holly recalls. “When everyone finally crawled into sleeping bags, squished in like sardines on the floor, a friend shamelessly engineered that I be next to M, and after hours of whispering and very slowly inching ever closer to each other, we finally kissed. On the floor, surrounded by my snoring friends, I don’t think I’ve had another moment of such pure, cannot-believe-my-luck happiness in my life.”
Clearly, an Ephron-worthy New Year’s Eve story is possible in real life. And while it hasn’t happened to me yet, who knows what could happen when we ring in 2025? The cynic in me says to let the delusion go and focus on spending time with my friends. But the hopeful 15-year-old girl in the blue eyeshadow? Well, she’s a little harder to convince.
Names have been changed.
