Name couples

Coincidence level: 5/10 Category: Funny / charming / cute

Names have often appeared to me in pairs. I’ll offer up a few quirky examples through the years. They get better in ascending order.

1. Once, I was working a job in New York for a big media company, and the woman who sat directly next to me happened to be from my exact hometown in Michigan, and her birthday was three days off from mine. We’d never met until that job in New York. If that weren’t enough, there was another girl who sat kitty corner to us who had my same first name (nothing out of the ordinary). But the girl with my same name was dating a guy named Gabriel; I was dating a girl named Gabriella. Hehe.

2. One summer after a big breakup I had two new people come into my life. Both were named Nat – one was English, one Australian. One I jumped out of a plane with, one was my new roommate (the first time I’d had a new roommate in almost 5 years). Oh, and one of the Nats was dating a guy named Ant — amusing that they were anagrams of each others’ names, both three letters, and both the names of tiny little bugs.

3. One summer in Barcelona I was learning Flamenco guitar because I’d fallen in love with it the previous year when I was in Sevilla. One morning I was chatting on the phone with my Finnish friend Nina, and somehow we’d accidentally patched in a random contact from my phone. As in, added her into a threeway phone chat. Luckily, she didn’t pick up. “Who is Aida?” Nina asked me. “I have no idea,” I replied. This mysterious Aida called both Nina and me back that day — Nina picked up and told her it was a wrong number. I dodged the call, suddenly having remembered that Aida was a girl I’d met in Sevilla the previous year who was friends with a couple I’d met who wanted a threesome with me. This Aida was from Madrid — we’d never met or spoken again since Sevilla. Funnily enough, I also happened to be learning Spanish at the time so I thought it’d be good to take on a Spanish lover. Later that night I met my Spanish lover for the first time — Aida, from Alicante.

A bonus: I left Barcelona to take a job in New York. One of the guys who hired me was named Tim Walsh*. During that exact time I also happened to interview at another company with another Tim Walsh, who was South African. They had zero relation to each other.

*Name changed for privacy, but the two men had the exact same first and last name.

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