Rambutan’s Cynthia Shanmugalingam on Meeting—And Marrying—The Love of Her Life at 40

A couple of years ago, in the purgatory between Covid-19 lockdowns and dating app hell, I met Joe.

Solidly in my fun auntie (funtie?) era, I had all but given up on love. After another relationship came to an end, my mum surprised me with a reassuring squeeze. “You’ve got a great life,” she said. A 74-year-old Tamil grandmother, she’s been married and caring for other people for more than 50 years at that point. I felt her pride in my freedom spreading over my heart and chest, thick as strawberry jam. It was true: I could do whatever I want, see whomever I pleased, dream of opening my own restaurant. And yet, as Maya Angelou says: “Nobody can make it out here alone.”

And so I reluctantly stayed aboard the carousel of hot strangers, stupid banter, and ruthless behavior that is dating in London. My most recent romance had been a Ghanaian playwright who seemed very nice until he ghosted me mid-phone call while I was on my way over for dinner. I matched with a TV doctor and looked him up online, only to find more than one video of him discussing the science of his own farts. Oh dear. I tried to keep an open mind with a French-Tamil tech entrepreneur, ignoring the identical black polo necks he wore on every date, not to mention his penchant for starting the evening with drinks at a WeWork. When he had to move back to the US, we politely agreed to keep in touch. A second lockdown hit. We didn’t.

And then something amazing happened. After months of my friend Anokhi sending me daily motivational messages while I wrote and rewrote my proposal, I landed a book deal more generous than I had ever dreamed possible. I could afford to spend six months in Sri Lanka with my mum and dad. I wanted to write about food as a kind of Tamil joy, to find a way to represent and transcend our painful history through recipes. But the Sri Lankan Covid-19 guidelines were strict, I’d need to spend a whopping four weeks in isolation. “Well, so what?” I thought. “How bad could it be?” I’d be staying at a quarantine hotel. There was a pool. I could take a lot of beach selfies, and get a jump-start on my writing.

About three weeks in, I looked in the mirror and realized: very bad indeed. I’d stretched my face mask tightly over my head and pinned my glasses to them with hair clips to save my nose from getting dents. The mirror did not lie: I had reached solitary confinement levels of woo-woo. It was time to talk to someone, but everyone in London was still sleeping, and when I called my parents, they wouldn’t put in their hearing aids. Time to check out Sri Lankan Tinder.

At first, Sri Lanka’s dating app etiquette was a surprise. A few guys with cat emojis or Tom Cruise’s face as their profile picture messaged me, almost universally with nothing more than: hiiiiiiiiiii. I quickly realized most matches were across the ocean in Tamil Nadu, and there was no way to get to them.

Then, I found myself on the receiving end of the most unromantic chat-up line I’d ever heard.

“Thought I’d drop you a line because we’re of a similar age. Would be good to connect,” wrote Joe.

“Wait, is this LinkedIn?” I replied.

Later, both of us hungry for human contact, we began to chat on the phone.

I got out of quarantine and launched myself into a punishing schedule of writing, cooking, and pounding fresh coconut sambols from the garden. Joe was a seven-and-a-half-hour drive away on the other side of the island, so all we could do was talk. He was easy and kind to speak to. He asked what it was like to write, and I told him. I opened up about how I felt like I hadn’t read enough, telling him about my worries and demons. “Do you have enough books up there?” he asked, and when I said no, a shiny, signed copy of Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka’s amazing new book arrived at our Jaffna house in the post. Joe had tracked the author down for an autograph. When I told him about various other things I liked in passing, more little gifts arrived: a few more books, cashew nuts from the big city, my favorite type of homemade ginger beer. “What a sweetheart,” I thought.

When it was almost time for me to go back to London, we’d spoken every day for a month, and he asked if I’d finally like to go on an in-person date. I was nervous and terrified that he would be a weirdo (or that I would act like one), but after an awkward start, he was even kinder and more silly in real life. That date stretched into a weekend, and before we knew it, we had spent a two-week holiday together. On the third day, we ate a delicious crab curry, Joe cracking the claws for me in his back teeth so I could eat the flesh easily, like I was a baby bird.

Looking back, I think I found modern dating culture harder than I realized, and to protect myself, I’d become very guarded, very wary. Or maybe I started putting up walls when I was small, watching my parents anxiously checking the news for stories of our Tamil family in war-torn Sri Lanka while trying to survive in ’80s England, a place sometimes hostile to immigrants. Or maybe it’s just difficult to find love when you’re from a traumatized community, when you feel fractured, between two places, perhaps afraid of being whole. And perhaps for me, it took a chance holiday romance—fished from an unlikely sea of cat emoji profiles—for me to fall in love. It took meeting someone both profoundly kind and wholly unexpected to be able to be vulnerable, to relax, to let someone in.

When our two-week holiday was up, Joe drove me to the airport to fly back to London, and we cried as we said goodbye. And just as I was dragging my suitcase back to my London flat, he called to ask if he could come and visit. We spent two years shuttling back and forth, and these last two years felt like a 100. Rambutan, my cookbook, came out, and it blew up. Then we opened the doors to Rambutan the restaurant, and it blew up even more: two-hour queues, a fire next door, two floods, scary reviewers—you name it, we had it. Through it all, I finally had someone to “make it out here” with, and what a difference it made. And so, towards the close of 2023, just as things were calming down for me at work, Joe and I decided to give ourselves another little project: we got engaged, with just two months to plan a wedding back in Sri Lanka on Geoffrey Bawa’s Lunuganga Estate earlier this year.

To anyone feeling lonesome today like I did a few years ago: I wish you your own very unexpected, very kind, very wonderful Joe.