"Last year, I flew to the West Coast for a dance workshop. I had an aisle seat on my second flight and I arrived in my row first. A few minutes later, a young man said, Excuse me,' and I got up to let him into the window seat. I was relieved that someone who seemed to be near my age was sitting with me. Nobody else came to our row, and the seat between us stayed empty. For the final hour of the flight we spoke nonstop, learning about each other.
"He was new to the area to where we were both flying back, as I had been not many years before. I offered to show him around sometime if he was interested. We exchanged numbers. I have repeatedly told him that I was not flirting but simply being friendly. The relationship started out slowly, and I just had the greatest time hanging out and talking with him wherever we went. This is the happiest I have been in a long time, and I cannot wait to spend my life with this wonderful man."
Taylor's Friendly Skies
"My brother is a high school social studies teacher in Ohio. He was traveling to Las Vegas for an economics conference during the summer in 2005. While there, he met a wonderful girl from Davis, an agricultural city in Northern California. They really hit it off and started dating long-distance. After about a year, he flew out and proposed to her in Monterey.
"On his flight home he was sitting next to a middle-aged woman and, a seat over, a pretty, younger woman on her first business trip. An avuncular guy from Ohio, my brother struck up a conversation with them both, telling them about his newfound love and fianceé and sharing pictures of her and his family. They talked from California to Chicago. Once he landed in Chicago, my brother called me in Ohio to tell me that he thought he'd really hooked me up.' I assumed he meant his new fianceé had a friend in California worth meeting. Instead, it was a stranger that he'd just met on a plane.
"We were engaged in July of 2008, married in July 2009, and bought our first house in October 2013. Next year, we will have been married for five years."
Debbie's Runway Disaster
"My husband and I met on a flight from NYC to Turks and Caicos," says Debbie. "We were both traveling alone to the Club Med there on a chartered flight, looking forward to a fun singles week.
"When the flight landed in Providenciales, there was no stairway to help us get off the plane. We had to sit on the plane for three hours until they found a stairway tall enough to reach the jet. No air-conditioning and no food due to customs laws. The doors to the plane were opened to let air in and crime-scene-like tape was placed across the doorways so no passengers would fall out. It was quite comical.
"I am a gregarious person (my friends call me the mayor') and I couldn't sit for three hours so I walked around the plane chatting with people. This man was sitting alone quietly, and we struck up a conversation. We became friendly and spent time together in a group during the vacation week. We stayed in touch afterward and visited each other over the next year. We began dating and were engaged two years later. That was 20 years ago!"
—Written by Laura Schaefer for HowAboutWe
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