meet-cutes

Every Coffee-Shop Writer Had a Chance

Riz Ahmed
Riz Ahmed. Photo: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

Well, everyone. It’s over. Riz Ahmed is married. In fact, he got married months ago. I knew I sensed a shift in the air; it feels good to finally know what it was. Rather than focus on his wife, the novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza — who is lovely, I’m sure — let’s review the circumstances of their chance meeting.

Ahmed and Mirza’s real-life meet-cute took place at a coffee shop. After revealing that he was secretly married in a podcast interview on Monday, Ahmed went on The Tonight Show on Wednesday and told Jimmy Fallon that he and his beloved both sat down at the same table in a café while he was in New York to film The Sound of Metal. Are you kidding me?

“We were both jostling over the same laptop plug points, like a very modern way of meeting,” he says. Well, that’s just adorable. I’m happy for them both, truly. I’m also happy for every coffee-shop writer in New York — nay, the world. This confirms that we have a chance.

“We met so randomly,” Ahmed says of his now-wife, but as someone who has long believed in the fantasy of meeting a hot guy in a coffee shop, this doesn’t sound random to me at all. It sounds like a dream. How many hundreds (thousands?) of dollars have I spent on lattes and bagels waiting for this exact scenario to unfold? I shudder to think. Of course, I never imagined the hot guy I’d see over the brim of my cup would be Riz Ahmed, because, well, he’s Riz Ahmed. My imagination takes liberties, but not that many.

My fellow coffee-shop writers, we still have a chance. The second New York City reopens indoor dining and we can jostle laptop plugs again safely, I wish you all happy loitering.

Every Coffee-Shop Writer Had a Chance