Surprising Places Real Couples Met

In a world where everyone seems to be pairing up with the help of dating apps, it’s becoming increasingly rare to meet a couple whose love story began sans swiping right. But there is hope! There are plenty of coupled-up pairs whose initial meetings went down in really unexpected places (i.e. during an UberPOOL ride, a round of World of Warcraft and more).

We promise these meet-cutes will make you smile while simultaneously restoring your faith in dating.

We Met … While Playing World of Warcraft

Tamara Langman and John Bentley are just two of the many couples who met while playing the multiplayer fantasy game. In 2011, the New York Times interviewed the couple, who first began chatting via the game’s messaging and voice communication service for two months before meeting in real life in Santa Barbara, where they currently reside. They have been together since 2009.

We Met … at a Planet Fitness

Okay, so this isn’t so strange. Plenty of people form connections while lifting weights or running on the treadmill, right? At least that was the case for Stephanie Hughes and Joe Keith, who met and wed at a Planet Fitness.

“I was using the bosu ball, and he asked if I was using a piece of the equipment, and I looked up and was like, ‘No,’ ” Hughes recalled, with a dreamy look on her face, in the couple’s wedding video. “I was so nervous!”

“I definitely was like, ‘Oh my god she’s gorgeous,’ and thought I should go say something,” Keith added. “Right when we first met I was like, oh she’s so awesome, so I guess you could say it was love at first sight.”

We Met … at the Dentist

Taking care of your dental hygiene not only improves your health, but may also lead to a romantic connection, according to Facebook user Melanie G. “At the oral surgeon, both getting our wisdom teeth removed,” she wrote of where she met her beau. “Dated for 8-9 months at the time and recently reconnected again some 12 years later…”

We Met … in an UberPOOL

After leaving a bad date, Hayley Mitchell decided to order an Uber to go back home, but accidentally ordered an UberPOOL rather than a private one. While waiting for her ride to arrive, Mitchell got a notification that “Charlie,” whom she assumed was her driver, was on his way. When the car pulled up, Mitchell realized the “Charlie” in question was another rider, Charlie Algar, prompting her to exclaim, “Oh, you’re Charlie.”

Mitchell decided to have some fun with her fellow rider after Algar was under the impression they had met before. “I went along with it and said, ‘I can’t believe you don’t remember me’, and he looked very pale all of a sudden,” Mitchell recounted. “He went on for about 10 minutes listing all these places we might have known each other from.”

After Mitchell admitted to the prank, Algar found it funny enough to ask for her number at the end of his ride. They began dating and moved in together almost a year later.

We Met at … a Barbra Streisand Fan Club

Although Jackie Holmes passed away in 2013, Steve Bunce aims to keep his beloved’s memory alive by sharing their adorable meet-cute, which occurred due to their shared love for Barbra Streisand.

“In 1975, we exchanged addresses through a Barbara Streisand fan club and began writing each other. Together we had a combined collection of 15,000 pictures,” revealed Bunce, whose love story was featured in The Way We Met Instagram account. “We were pen pals for five years before ever meeting in person.”

He continued: “I lived in England at the time and she lived in Brooklyn. The first time I met Jackie in person was when I flew to New York in September of 1980. I returned to England afterwards feeling very love sick. The second time I went to visit her was in December over the Christmas holiday, and that’s when I asked her to be my wife. I was a bit worried that I was rushing into it, but I knew she was the one for me. On my third visit to New York, we were married at The Plaza Hotel, which is where Barbara Streisand’s famous movie The Way We Were was filmed. We were married for 33 years until sadly she passed away in 2013. I share our story in an effort to keep her memory alive and to inspire all the other hopeless romantics out there.”

We Met … in Prison

And no, before you ask, this couple didn’t meet while completing their sentence. “I met my husband in prison. Actually, we were both working there, but I love telling people this,” wrote Facebook user Nicole W. “I always get the strangest looks.”

We Met … Using the Customer Service Center

In case you were looking for a reason to be nicer to customer service representatives: There’s a chance you might end up falling head-over-heels in love with him or her.

After getting FiOS installed at her home,this Reddit usercouldn’t get the service to sync with her computer, so she went ahead and called customer service. She stayed on the phone for four hours while the rep worked on the issue. “We had lots of down time because I was constantly restarting the computer and we would chat about whatever,” she shared. “We hung up with a plan to talk the next night because I had to get some antivirus software.”

“He called the next night and same thing — talked for hours while he worked on my computer. At the end I was really bummed because I thoroughly enjoyed talking to him,” she said, adding that she hoped her rep would contact her. And he finally did by sending a quick email to ask about the current status of her computer.

“I responded, and from there we began chatting privately,” she continued. “In two weeks he sent me flowers. We met seven weeks later, when we each drove two hours to meet in between our two homes. We’ve been together ever since. We would take turns visiting every weekend for a year. We missed three weekends that whole year. Then he moved up to be with me.”

We Met … Following a Car Accident

After Jennifer Lind experienced a terrifying car accident — which left her in the driver’s seat in the middle of the road after her car slid on ice — a firefighter came to her rescue immediately following the incident, and told her she was still alive thanks to a driver named Nicholas Angelus, who pulled his emergency break to avoid hitting Lind’s car. “Instead of t-boning me, he side-swiped me. Both our cars were totaled but we walked away with our lives,” Lind shared with The Way We Met Instagram account. “[Three] weeks later we went on our first date & let’s just say, we didn’t need an ‘ice-breaker.'” They are now married.

We Met … at Walmart

When you know, you know! “We met in the ‘mixed nuts’ section of Walmart,” John revealed of how he met now-wife Carol. “I took care of Carol’s father in a nursing home years before, but had never met Carol. I hollered at Carol’s father, who was shopping with her, she turned around, their eyes met, and we got married six months later.”

We Met … in the Comments Section on The Guardian‘s website

Emily Band and Tom Cuffe initially met in the comment section of The Guardian‘s website, where they bonded over their “shared leftwing views” and similar personalities before eventually exchanging their contact information to continue chatting. They ended up meeting in person, which initially felt different.

“Surprisingly, we were both met with someone fairly timid and wary of saying the wrong thing,” Band told The Guardian in 2012. “We had regressed back to the small-talk stage: We knew how each other felt about the finer points of clinical trial methodology or Nick Clegg’s Alarm Clock Britain, but we didn’t have the slightest clue about [favorite colors] or films.”

She continued: “Thankfully, this was just a phase, but it took us a considerable time to admit that we were attracted to each other – it’s far easier to be rude to someone via long-distance communication than it is to admit to love.”

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