As part of Alto Matchmaking’s Love Across Borders series, we're highlighting real couples navigating life and love across countries and cultures. Meet Niamh and Nik, whose story spans Europe.

When Niamh moved from the small Irish town of Kildare to Berlin, she didn't expect to meet her future husband within just two weeks of arriving - but fate had other plans.

In today’s digital dating world, we are promised unprecedented access to potential dates — a near-endless stream of profiles at our fingertips. With just a few taps, we can filter by height, job title, political views, ethnicity, lifestyle habits, music taste, and a myriad of other attributes. Dating apps assure us that by narrowing the pool and trusting their complex algorithms, we’ll find someone who perfectly fits our ideal criteria, and therefore, us.

But is this actually helping us find love? Or is it training us to be too selective, too quick to dismiss, and ultimately too lonely?

Valentine’s Day means loving yourself, too!