LOVE, ASTORIA DAY VALENTINE'S Courtney & Munim It was a rainy night in February 2013, and neither Courtney Steers, 30, nor Munim Jalil, 28, wanted to go out. Luckily, their friends dragged them to Break Bar and Billiards on Broadway, because that’s where this couple met. “I credit a lot to one of my best friends,” said Jalil, who works at American Express. “It was one of those nights where you wouldn’t go out unless you got a really good push from somebody. I was content to just stay home.” Break wasn’t too far out of the way for Jalil, a lifelong Astoria resident — but Steers, who was living in Manhattan at the time, wanted to go out in Meatpacking or the Lower East Side. “My friends in Astoria said, ‘You have to come out here. It’s fun. You’ll have a good time,’” she said. Steers remembers walking around the bar to see what was going on, and she was talking with a group of guys until she went up to the bar by herself to order a drink. “He Jalil came over and stole me away from them,” said Steers, an education technologist at NYU. Jalil remembers seeing a girl in a blue dress and thinking, “I have to talk to this girl somehow,” he said. “I approached 18 FEBRUARY 2 0 1 7 Courtney at the bar and started talking — the rest is history now,” he said. The couple will celebrate four years together later in February. They’ve lived together in Astoria since April 2016. “We have a great apartment and we have friends over all the time, and I really enjoy living here,” Steers said. The couple loves how Astoria provides the “perfect balance” of being able to chill out, order in and have a board game night with friends, but still having a lot to do and being close to the city. “I tell all of my Manhattan friends when they’re complaining about boy stuff and not meeting people and all the horrible guys in the city, I’m like, ‘You need to come out to Queens. We have a lot of good guys here,’” Steers said. FAVORITE DATE SPOTS: Bagelberry Queens Comfort 16 Handles Mayflower Pizza Burger Club By KATRINA MEDOFF @KATYA_M22 @KATRINAMEDOFF Photo courtesy of Courtney Steers Thanks to romantic comedies, we all know a good meet-cute when we see one: Jonathan and Sara reaching for the same pair of gloves in "Serendipity"; the title characters sharing a ride to New York City in "When Harry Met Sally"; book owner Will spilling orange juice on movie star Anna Scott in "Notting Hill." If you think that meet-cutes are a thing of the past thanks to dating apps, think again — we have no shortage of how-they-met stories, even right here in our neighborhood. We reached out to readers so that we could share their stories of how they met their significant others in Astoria. Read on for seven swoon-worthy stories from western Queens.
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