When Jessica met Luke at a wedding for the first time, two words reverberated around her head: “That’s it.”
She felt an instant ease with him. A familiarity. Chemistry.
“You always hear, ‘when you know, you know,’” Jessica tells CNN Travel today. “I never had any real experience with that myself until we met.”
As for Luke, he says he can “barely remember” life before meeting Jessica. It was so overwhelming, so exciting, so inevitable, that, today, he can’t really connect with the twentysomething version of him that didn’t know her.
One thing Luke’s certain of: this was “right place, right time.” And he doesn’t just mean the wedding meet-cute. Jessica and Luke met at their friend Becca’s wedding. But the seeds of their love story were planted years before, in a bar in Birmingham, Alabama.
This is the story of how one chance encounter led to two more chance encounters, ending in three transatlantic love stories and three weddings.
“The old butterfly effect,” says Luke.
So, let’s rewind to where it all began: Birmingham, Alabama, in the summer of 2014.
Alabama was an unlikely vacation destination for a group of British guys in their early 20s. Sure enough, Luke and his two friends Chris and Charlie ended up there pretty much by accident.
All they knew was they “didn’t want to do this sort of cliche West Coast road trip,” as Chris puts it today.
“We wanted to experience something a little bit different. So we decided to do the Southeast… Good food, good music, and then good football,” he tells CNN Travel. “I’m an American football fan and I’m a New Orleans Saints fan. So that was kind of the focus: Let’s get to New Orleans.”
The three friends flew to Atlanta, Georgia, and rented a classic American pair of wheels — a Dodge Charger muscle car. Their plan was to drive to New Orleans and back in two weeks.
But these three guys from the north of England weren’t used to the vast distances in the US. They hadn’t factored in the driving time — about seven hours from Atlanta.
“So, we stopped off in Birmingham,” Charlie tells CNN Travel. “And we were like, ‘We don’t know where we’re going. We’re not driving straight to New Orleans right now. Let’s go grab a beer, look at a map and figure out what we’re doing.’”
The trio stumbled into the first bar they spotted.
“It was dead,” says Charlie. “I mean, it was the middle of the day. And so we order a beer.”
The servers recognized they weren’t local.
“Of course, they all hear the English accent, so they start asking us questions,” recalls Charlie. “And they were like, ‘Are you guys single?’ We’re like, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘Oh, you should hang around. There’s a law school party tonight at this bar.’”
Luke, Chris and Charlie looked at one another. It felt like a bit of a coincidence — they were all newly qualified lawyers. Chris and Charlie are childhood best friends who remained close into adulthood, while Chris got to know Luke at work. They’d become a friendship trio and enjoyed nights out together in their home city of Leeds. None of them had girlfriends, but they hadn’t traveled to the US in the hope of charming women with their English accents.
“When we wanted to do a road trip, it was just to go on holiday, not looking to meet anyone, just to hang out with the guys,” says Chris.
Nevertheless, the idea of socializing with a bunch of American lawyers their age sounded like fun. So, they spontaneously booked a hotel and returned to the same bar that evening.
“And so we gatecrashed this law school party,” says Luke.
Also at the Birmingham bar that night: a law student named Alice.
Alice really didn’t want to be there that evening. She wasn’t feeling the festivities and after about an hour or so, she decided to head home, using her dog as an excuse.
“I went to leave, and then I’m closing my tab, and I get this text from a friend of mine … She says: ‘Come outside. We’re surrounded by hot British men.’”
Alice looked at the text, skeptical but intrigued.
She followed her friend’s instructions and found herself being introduced to a trio of Englishmen: Chris, Luke and Charlie, each with a beer in hand. They were all charming, all friendly, all a little tipsy.
Chris stood out to Alice right away. Leaving was no longer quite so appealing. But she really did have to go to check on the dog.
“So my friend takes my debit card as collateral,” Alice tells CNN Travel today. “She’s like, ‘You have to come back. Promise me, you’ll come back.’ I was like, ‘Okay, I guess the hot British men are enough to come back for.’”
Alice stayed true to her word. She returned an hour or so later. As soon as she saw Chris again, she was glad she hadn’t called it a night.
Alice kept gravitating to Chris’ side. And he was pulled to her too.
“It was just this magnetic draw that I can’t fully explain,” says Chris today.
He had this feeling: “I’m gonna marry that girl.” He even said this, aloud, to some of Alice’s friends — who were somewhere between dazzled and disbelieving.
“I wasn’t being hyperbolic,” says Chris. “We really connected.”
“Though we were both, like, drunk, 23 …” says Alice, laughing.
Maybe because of that context, because of the total “lack of game plan” — as Chris puts it — the night of barhopping around Birmingham ended without Alice and Chris exchanging phone numbers.
The next day Chris, Luke and Charlie got back in their rental car, left Birmingham and embarked on a four-hour drive down the Gulf Coast to the beach.
Throughout the drive, sitting in the passenger seat, Chris kept thinking about Alice, imagining a future with her, then dismissing the thought. They lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic. It was never going to be anything.
Then, midway through the drive, Luke piped up from the back of the car.
“You’ll never guess what,” he said. “Alice wants your number.”
“What?” asked Chris, turning around.
Luke passed his BlackBerry to the front seat. It turned out Luke had given one of Alice’s friends his business card.
“No idea why … I think maybe to prove that he was a lawyer,” says Chris today. “So, she had his work email and she sends him an email… ‘Hey, Alice really liked one of your friends. Can she get his number?’”
Luke doesn’t remember why he was handing out his business cards. But he does recall Alice and Chris connecting.
“They, definitely, 100% hit it off straight away,” he says.
Luke’s glad his drunken self accidentally helped them reconnect. And a week later, Alice and Chris reconnected in person, at a Mississippi football game. Chris had invited her, and she’d decided to go, with some reservations.
“I don’t like football,” says Alice. “There’s nothing for me in Mississippi to see, really.”
But she wanted to see Chris. And when she saw him again, she knew it was the right decision
“We hung out, and I kissed him first,” she says.
Later, before flying back to the UK, Chris returned to Birmingham to spend the last three days of the trip with Alice. It was an amazing time. But the future was uncertain. He was going back to life and work in the UK, she was finishing up her studies in the US. And they barely knew each other. Committing to anything concrete seemed crazy.
“It was obviously a little bit heartbreaking,” says Chris. “We had such a good time and we really bonded, but it’s like ‘That’s the end of it. What are we going to do here?’”
But he remained hopeful. At the airport, Chris got a fortune cookie with his Chinese meal. The message read: “You are about to embark on a most delightful journey.” It felt like a sign, so he sent a photo to Alice.
Now on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Alice and Chris stayed in touch via long WhatsApp messages.
“We would write these essays to each other,” says Alice. “I fell in love with the way that Chris could write me a WhatsApp message and just make me feel so special in the way he wrote. They were like love letters.”
Those close to her warned it was just a vacation romance. Her mom suggested she’d been won over just “because he has an accent.”
Alice knew this was something deeper than that.
“I didn’t ever think that this was a fun fling,” she says. “I knew it wasn’t.”
Over the next several months, Alice and Chris exchanged long messages back and forth, and visited each other a couple of times — each visit cemented their certainty about their connection.
“We built such a strong understanding of one another, and we felt these sort of shared values,” Chris says. “But we never really talked about what the future looked like.”
When Chris’ work took him to Hong Kong for a stint, Alice visited him there. The night before, she stayed over at her friend Becca’s house.
Alice confided in Becca that evening: “I don’t know where this is gonna go with Chris. Something’s gotta give. This has to end at some point.’”
Becca asked her if she thought they’d get married.
“And I was like, ‘No. I mean, that’s nuts. That is nuts.’ I was tallying up the days on my hands, how many days we actually spent in each other’s person … But then in Hong Kong, Chris proposed.”
It turned out Chris had kept the fortune cookie from that first trip to the US. When he proposed to Alice, he presented her with the message.
“We got married almost exactly a year to the day that we met,” says Alice. “We met in August 2014. We got married September 3, 2015.”
Alice and Chris’ wedding took place in New Orleans.
“Quite symbolic,” says Chris of the location. “Because that was the driver for going on the trip, to go to New Orleans … And almost exactly a year later I’m marrying a girl I met in a bar, going to New Orleans.”
Chris, of course, invited his best friends he’d traveled to the US with — Charlie and Luke.
Meanwhile, Alice invited all her closest friends to be by her side. Including Becca, the friend who’d wondered aloud whether Alice and Chris might get married.
“Becca and I had been close friends all throughout college. We were roommates,” explains Alice.
On a couple of occasions over their year of dating, Alice and Chris had questioned whether Becca might hit it off with Charlie. They decided to attempt a spot of matchmaking.
First up, they orchestrated an in-person meeting when Chris and Charlie returned to the US for a brief trip during Alice’s spring break in March 2015.
Becca and Charlie introduced themselves to each other that night. Both thought the other was attractive.
“We didn’t really interact though,” says Becca.
“I guess we kind of forgot about each other,” says Charlie.
Undeterred, in the lead up to their wedding, Alice and Chris gave Becca and Charlie each others’ numbers. The two started texting, then FaceTiming. They grew closer, and both started counting down the days to the wedding.
Charlie remembers thinking: “I really like this girl.”
And later, when he saw Becca in person at the wedding, he was even more sure. Becca felt the same way. During the various wedding events, they became inseparable.
Becca says the wedding weekend was the perfect backdrop for their burgeoning connection. Special — but also low stakes.
“You’re in a comfortable setting with all your friends,” Becca recalls. “But the wedding wasn’t about us, it was about them.”
By the end of the weekend, Charlie had followed in Chris’ footsteps and fallen in love with an American girl. Becca was falling for him too, but while Charlie wears his heart on his sleeve, she’s more practically minded. She was apprehensive and cautious, despite her feelings for him.
“I was like, ‘I don’t really know how this is going to work. You live in England,’” she recalls.
For Charlie, the “you live in another country” excuse didn’t really fly. They’d met via their British friend who’d married their American friend. Alice and Chris were now living in the UK together and seemed really happy. They were proof it was possible.
And so, Charlie and Becca stayed in touch.
That fall, Alice, Chris, Becca and Charlie went on a trip together — first to Prague, then on to Edinburgh. And over the holidays, Charlie visited Becca at her family home in Florida. In time, Becca and Charlie grew closer, rather than further apart.
For Becca, this family visit was especially telling.
“I have three brothers, and they all got along really well with Charlie, and I think for me, that was important,” says Becca.
“I passed the test,” chimes in Charlie.
“He fit in,” says Becca.
And so, against the odds, within a year, Becca and Charlie followed in Alice and Chris’ footsteps, getting engaged.
“They kind of set the example,” says Charlie.“Chris is someone I’ve been best friends with since we were three years old at primary school. You see him meet the love of his life … It set the example of ‘be intentional.’ When I met Becca, I knew she was the one.”
While Becca typically recoils from big romantic declarations, she was also sure Charlie was the right person.
“I had had a boyfriend before Charlie that I had dated for six years, and he had actually asked me to move to New York. And I said ‘no.’ That seemed like the hardest thing in the world to do,” she recalls. “But then obviously Charlie and I were together, and he’s like, ‘move to England.’ It was an easy yes. I was like, ‘Okay, so with the right person, it’s easy to make decisions.’”
Charlie and Becca got married in the summer of 2017 in Long Island, New York. Alice and Chris were there, of course.
Luke, the third friend from the road trip, was also in attendance, ready to celebrate another close friend’s nuptials.
Also on the guestlist was Alice and Becca’s close friend, Jessica.
Jessica hadn’t been able to make Alice’s wedding, so she was thrilled to finally get the chance to celebrate her friends’ transatlantic love stories.
She just didn’t expect the wedding to mark the start of her own.
Luke and Jessica’s friends had long talked about potentially setting them up. But they weren’t necessarily being serious — after all, expecting lightning to strike for a third time between the groups of British guys and American women was perhaps unreasonable.
Plus, it seemed harder to predict whether they’d gel. Alice and Becca always said Jessica was a “total catch.” Luke was a fantastic guy, but according to Alice, “nobody knew what Luke wanted.”
When they talked about setting the two up it was “playful,” more than it was serious, says Alice. There was no exchanging of numbers ahead of the ceremony, in the way there had been with Becca and Charlie.
“It wasn’t a set up,” insists Becca.
“Luke was aware of Jess before, and he told me that he thought she was pretty,” adds Charlie. “But it was organic.”
Plus, the group were all a little older by now — edging into their late 20s. The matchmaking stake felt a little higher.
Still, Becca and Charlie decided to sit Luke and Jessica together at all their wedding events.
And that’s how Jessica ended up meeting Luke for the first time and thinking: “When you know, you know.”
It’s funny, she adds, to realize there were so many moments she could have met Luke sooner. They had their overlapping worlds and friends, but had never crossed paths. Then, suddenly, he was next to her, they were chatting, connecting on a level that had always felt a bit out of her reach.
“Talking for a really long time … ” she recalls. “I just felt like I’d known him a long time already, we clicked in a way like it hadn’t before.”
Naturally, Becca made sure her wedding photographer captured Jessica and Luke’s first kiss on camera.
“Everyone was cheering,” says Jessica of this moment. “Everyone felt very involved — in a nice way. They had seen how it worked out really well for them. Luke was one of Chris and Charlie’s really good friends, and I think they just wanted the same experience for him. So, definitely, it felt a bit of pressure that first night, where everyone’s cheering and watching us. But it was nice.”
The other two couples were delighted by the sparks between Jessica and Luke. And when, after the wedding meet-cute, Jessica and Luke embarked on their own long-distance, transatlantic romance, both of them had close friends to confide in.
“I had people I could talk to about how to navigate the distance,” recalls Jessica. “I talked with Alice about this, and Becca too. And they were like, ‘It’s tough with the distance, but at the same time, it gives you a really good chance to build a strong foundation.’ And it did, because we spoke about stuff in those first couple months that some people don’t really cover in 6, 12, 18 months of a relationship. You almost expedite it, because you want to make sure if it’s really going to work.”
After a few months of flying across the Atlantic — and the Pacific, when Luke’s work took him to Hong Kong — Jessica and Luke made a big decision: They decided to move to Dubai together in the spring of 2018.
It was a major step, but one they were both confident in.
“We both wanted to travel and see different places,” says Jessica, though she admits that the decision gave her parents “a minor heart attack.”
To some people in their lives, the decision seemed impulsive. But Jessica and Luke were sure they were meant to be — and Becca, Charlie, Chris and Alice were cheering them on.
And so, like their friends before them, Jessica and Luke got married. They eloped to Amsterdam, just the two of them, in 2018. They planned a bigger wedding celebration for the summer of 2020, but the pandemic put a stop to their plans.
For Jessica and Luke, this felt like “a sign.” They never rearranged the big party.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to do anything else,” says Jessica.
Instead, they focused on building their life together in their new country.
While Jessica and Luke were establishing themselves as a couple, Alice, Chris, Becca and Charlie were living a stone’s throw from each other in Chris and Charlie’s hometown of Leeds, in northern England.
“My sorority sister from Florida, and me from Alabama, here we are in the city center of Leeds, just living down the road,” says Alice. “It was cool, it was neat.”
‘Serendipity and kismet’
Cut to today, Luke and Jessica are still in Dubai, where they’ve now lived for eight years and counting. Time and circumstances eventually took Alice and Chris away from Leeds to North Carolina, where they live with their three children. Meanwhile, Becca and Charlie welcomed their first two children in the UK, but moved to Texas during the pandemic. They now have three children, too.
“I wish all of us lived closer,” says Becca. “Sadly none of us do.”
But Becca and Charlie’s kids have met Alice and Chris’ kids and instantly became “fast friends,” says Becca. She says her kids also loved spending time with Luke in the UK on a recent overlapping trip.
“He’s kind of like an uncle to our kids,” says Becca. “When he left, they actually started to cry, it was so sweet.”
The three couples all remain close, despite the distances.
“We stay in pretty regular touch on WhatsApp and stuff like that,” says Luke. “We’re still very good friends. You can always just step back in and it’s like you’ve barely been away.”
They all believe their shared, interconnected love stories and enduring friendships bonded them for life. Even though if you’d told 23-year-old Luke, Chris and Charlie they’d end up married to American women and living thousands of miles from home, they’d never have believed it.
The irony, says Luke is “that trip gave us one thing in common, but also split us up for the rest of our lives.”
That’s bittersweet, he admits, but they’re all so grateful that the vacation to the US brought each of them such unexpected, fulfilling and lasting love.
There’s a photo of the three couples together in Leeds, taken around Christmas 2017. They’re standing in a row, all kissing underneath the sparkling lights. All of them love this photo.
“Alice was like, ‘This would be cute. It’d be cute in the lights.’ And it was,” recalls Jessica of the moment the photo was taken. “We’re all bundled up. I sent it to my mom and she was like, ‘This could be a rom-com.’”
“It’s all a bit Hallmark movie,” agrees Charlie.
The six friends are used to the “this could be a movie” reactions.
“People are always jaw-dropped when you tell them that there are three couples,” says Becca.
“People are always jaw-dropped when you tell them that there are three couples.”
Becca
“We would tell people this story and they’d be like: ‘Well, are there any more friends?’” recalls Alice, laughing — before clarifying that she thinks this is probably it, at least for now.
There’s also a lot of gratitude among the group for the ways in which they paved the way for each other’s happiness, and how one meeting in a bar between a Brit and American led to two more love stories.
“Without Chris seeing Alice that night. I genuinely would never have met Becca. I would never have had the life I have now,” reflects Charlie. “It’s very cool, the way it happened. It was a chance encounter. It just goes to show, you never know what’s around the corner. Each of us is obviously delighted it happened the way it did.”
“We have them to thank for our beautiful life and our beautiful kids, because of their chance encounter,” says Becca. “It’s kind of serendipity and kismet.”
Surnames haven’t been included in this story by request of some of the couples.
