Should you ever go on a first date to an art gallery?

There’s a scene from J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey that sticks in the memory. In the grip of an existential breakdown, Franny tells her all-American, Ivy League boyfriend that he is being “a section man.”

“I am? And how does a section man talk?” he asks.

A section man, Franny tells him, is usually a graduate student, or a tutor with an oversized sense of self-importance. “He comes in, in his little button-down-collar shirt and starts knocking Turgenev for about a half-hour. Then, when he’s finished, when he’s completely ruined Turgenev for you”, she says, “he starts talking about Stendhal or somebody he wrote his English MA thesis on.”

I met my first section man in the Scottish National Gallery, where, as a nineteen-year-old, I’d made the mistake of going on a first date. It was there, in front of Titian’s Venus Rising from the Sea (1520), a painting I’d told him I loved, that my date proceeded to roll his gorgeous eyes, call Titian overrated, and recall the various ways in which this Venus was, in his view, derivative. I hated him in an instant.

Since then, each time I visited Venus, I found my response to the work tainted. The memory would flash, and against my will the section man would appear, however nameless and blurred he had now become. And so a hard rule was established. No museum trawls. No galleries. No wandering around exhibition spaces with a figure I’ve never met before. In short: no art on first dates.

It seems I’m not in the minority.

For Holly*, it was the artwork itself which dampened the occasion, citing a recent first date to a Nan Goldin exhibition. “We effectively ended up sitting in the dark in silence watching some quite harrowing stuff for two hours,” she tells me. But it’s not just the work itself that can snuff out a spark before it’s had the opportunity to alight. In the words of Tom*, “We were walking at different speeds. I’m a look-and-go type person and she was not. I wasn’t sure how to come back from that.” It sounds petty, but it’s understandable, the gallery space allows for subtle differences to feel glaringly apparent in a way that doesn’t happen when just meeting for drinks. Sonia* points to a museum date with a PhD student writing a thesis on the Impressionists. “I found out more about Manet than I did about him.”

Yet there are obvious reasons why art galleries and museums are fertile ground for budding romance. There’s the promise of a daylight meeting, with evenings kept clear should an escape to the nearest bar be needed. As more pivot towards a sober lifestyle, these spaces also offer an opportunity for a first-date-activity without the pressure of alcohol, allowing strangers to connect without the messiness of a three-pint haze loosening inhibitions and initiating bad decisions. In many cities, these museum spaces are often free, with government subsidies paving the way for intimacy unburdened by personal spending thresholds. There are also several centuries of visual imagery to grasp at should you run out of things to talk about, a late Renaissance triptych of a saint experiencing the most degrading torture imaginable providing the perfect opportunity to say: “mood”. It might not be love, but it is a kind of social lubrication, the sensual and sumptuous surroundings appealing on an aesthetic, or even erotic level, greasing conversation to allow for – what you’d hope is – romance.

For Tilly – who met and later married their partner El following a first date at The Wellcome Collection – it was in Ann Veronica Janssens’ yellowbluepink, an installation which featured rooms filled with brightly coloured vapour, where the relationship began. “The mist was playful but romantic. We couldn’t rely on our own sight, so we had to rely on each other,” they tell me. “‘Let’s go kiss in the blue’, is the line I used. And it worked. We kissed in the blue.”

As a metaphor for desire, art galleries couldn’t feel more apt. At once public and private, they encapsulate the erotic appeal of the voyeur and exhibitionist, the artworks mirroring the power dynamics at play. In Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), a sexually frustrated housewife begins a cat-and-mouse game with a stranger in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The scene, which is characterised by long takes that emphasise the maze-like topography of the space, sees the housewife at once follow and become followed by her desired stranger, the two of them engaging in a seductive game of connection and near-miss as they prowl through the galleries. That this tension is built within the museum space, is not accidental.

De Palma is not the only auteur who has used art spaces in this way. George Eliot’s Middlemarch sees its protagonist Will Ladislaw encounter Dorothea Brooke as she stands beside a reclining marble Ariadne, her face illuminated by a shaft of early afternoon light which streams through the windows of the Vatican. Surrounded by some of the western world’s greatest works of art, it is Dorothea who becomes – within the confines of the museum – the object of Ladislaw’s affection. “Here stands beauty in its breathing life, with the consciousness of Christian centuries in its bosom,” says Ladislaw’s friend. In Middlemarch, it is within the museum space where, in the eyes of Ladislaw, the married Dorothea’s blossoming occurs, appearing as an object of desire just as distant and unattainable as the stone figures that line the Vatican’s halls.

There’s a psychological aspect too. Ellen Winner, Professor Emeritus in the department for psychology and neuroscience at Harvard University has made a career studying the way people experience and perceive art, bringing the philosophical theory underpinning art into behavioural science. “Asking someone to go to a museum signals that one is cultured. It also allows people to gauge whether they share aesthetic tastes,” she tells me. “People usually want significant others to share the same tastes in art and culture, unlike in food, where idiosyncrasies are more ok, and it allows two people to talk while looking at something jointly rather than face to face.”

I am reminded of a trainee psychotherapist I met once, who told me that difficult conversations often happen in cars. “Not necessarily having to look at someone directly, that’s when the deep stuff comes out.”

Despite my own strictly enforced rules, there have been rare and profound exceptions. To see art with another person is to allow yourself, for a few hours, to view the world through their eyes. It’s why I look at Francis Bacon differently now. Goya too. Perhaps, like Tilly and El, this rare possibility is something to be grasped at, and not shied away from. How else can one find someone to kiss in the blue?