It wasn’t exactly love at first flight — but somewhere between the airplane aisle and window seat, a little turbulence turned into a whole lot of sparks.
When Los Angeles native Megan Meza noticed a “cute” guy approach her row on an April 2022 flight to London, she immediately began fantasizing about an airplane romance between her and the handsome stranger.
Little did she know, the man would be Brit Freddie Gershinson, who would eventually become her husband-to-be.
“I immediately thought he was cute. I saw him pause near our row, and I thought, ‘There is no way he is going to sit next to me’,” she told the Daily Mail. “So when he put his backpack on the seat, I couldn’t believe it. It’s like every single girl’s dream to have the cute guy sit next to you in some meet-cute fantasy.
“And here it was suddenly happening. I actually texted my mom (who was sitting in a different row) along with my sister and friends, being like, “CUTE GUY IN MY ROW. SOS.”‘
Initially, Meza was too nervous to chat up the six-foot-two stranger, but when he dropped his AirPods and couldn’t find them, she piped in with advice to look at the row behind.
While she “had no other expectations,” the pair spoke for six hours during the flight, speaking over the woman sitting between them in the middle seat.
“At this point, I was like, okay, this is fun and flirty. Like he had every opportunity to go back to his music, but we kept chatting,” she dished. “I [couldn’t believe I was] having a connection with a total stranger,” she said, adding they stopped chatting when the cabin lights dimmed at night.
But Gershinson was determined to keep the conversation going. He passed over his phone, asking, “Have you got a boyfriend?” in the Notes app.
Meza quickly responded “No” with a smiley face.
After the flight landed, the pair exchanged phone numbers and the Brit said he returned to London “with a smile on his face’ because of her.”
“At that point I was like — I have never met a man who is so confident and upfront with his emotions and it sucks that I will probably never see him again,” Meza said. “We continued to text immediately after the flight. About three days after we met, he called me and said he hadn’t felt a connection like this before, and wanted to see if I would come stay with him in London [after my family vacation].”
Unable to adjust her return date, Meza returned to the U.S. but told Gershinson that if they were still texting in the summer, she’d visit him.
Three months later, after they called each other “every day” on the phone, she returned to London.
“On the third day [of the trip], he took me to meet his parents for tea, then surprised me with an early birthday dinner, and then we met his friends for drinks,’ Meza revealed. “It was that night I thought, I can’t go back home and that be the end of it. Everything was too natural – his family, his friends, our connection.
“He was so intentional, kind, and so confident in who he was. So that night, we had a long talk about all of it, and we made it official. His words were, ‘I like you too much to not try to make this work.’ So we did.”
Three years after their meet-cute, the happy couple is getting married. Meza urged singles to keep an open mind because you’ll never know when you’ll meet your happily ever after.
“I saw a man who I thought was very cute, and I used that as an opportunity to have this ‘yes’ moment on a plane where it’s like, I’m never going to see him again. What do I have to lose?” she told PEOPLE.
“Dating is a drag and with Freddie, I never felt like we were playing games. If I had known this was waiting for me, I wouldn’t have wasted another day crying over boys who didn’t deserve the tears,” Meza added. “So don’t lose hope. The right person is out there and it would have sucked to settle and never have found this.”
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