Whereas attending reunion occasions for Hamilton School in upstate New York again in 2017, Preetha Nooyi and Rem Van Aikin Myers each discovered themselves on the identical Indian restaurant after a buddy arrange a double date. Rem—who was residing in San Francisco on the time—had simply ended a relationship, and Preetha—who was residing in Brooklyn—was tired of beginning one. Evidently, sparks didn’t fly that night.

Destiny had different plans although, and two years later, after Rem moved to New York Metropolis, he matched with Preetha on a relationship app. “I used to be intrigued by the placing similarity in our profiles,” he remembers. “I had written that I ‘loved harmonizing within the automotive on a protracted drive,’ whereas Preetha’s profile mentioned, ‘singing on lengthy drives, further factors in case you can hit the harmonies!’” Proper after they matched, Preetha swiped “sure.”

Rem and Preetha rapidly started conversing over textual content, however it took the pair over a month to attach for a primary date in actual life. Lastly, on a chilly and dreary Wednesday in mid-November, they met up at a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I liked how simply we had been in a position to talk and the way, on a primary date, we had been already in a position to deal with severe matters,” Preetha says. As they fell into dialog, an preliminary glass of wine was a complete bottle—and a hefty serving to of poutine.

Although that they had attended the identical school in several years, they discovered that they had been each science majors, sang within the choir, knew most of the identical classmates, and that Rem occurred to be in a fraternity that lots of Preetha’s buddies had been in. Nonetheless, Preetha wasn’t totally bought: She was leaving 4 days after their first date to journey for a month in India and Argentina and doubted that such a brand new connection would final whereas she was overseas.

Rem, nevertheless, wasn’t so simply dissuaded and took her out on two extra dates that week. First, to a karaoke bar the place they sang Bon Jovi, and the subsequent night—the night time earlier than Preetha’s flight to India—to a shellfish restaurant in Brooklyn. He then made it a degree to bid her farewell in individual the morning she left for India.

In some way, distance and time didn’t dampen the connection. Preetha and Rem made a degree to speak day-after-day whereas she was overseas. “It wasn’t till a month into our relationship once we found, throughout a name with the mutual buddy who organized our first assembly in 2017, that we had crossed paths all these years in the past,” Preetha explains. “He remembers me as arriving late to dinner, and I bear in mind him as, ‘the man who talked along with his fingers.’ A buddy of ours taught us the phrase ‘bashert,’ a Yiddish phrase for soulmate. It’s tacky, however our relationship has so many coincidences that we will’t assist however surprise if we could have discovered such an individual in one another.”