Nora is scrolling through her phone, looking for a particular photograph. “It was the coffee shop,” she says to Silas across the table, “near the tram. Remember, the one with the yellow chairs?” Silas does not remember. Silas, in his defence, has met Nora in three different countries now, and all of them had yellow chairs somewhere.
They swear it was all coincidence. Three continents. Three chance encounters. Zero premeditation. I do not believe them, and neither, on the third coffee, does Nora.
How they met, officially
Lisbon, April 2022. She was a graphic designer from Oslo, on a one-month reset after a breakup. He was a German sound engineer, finishing a project remotely. They ended up at the same small bar in Graça one night because the bar next door was full. They spoke for forty minutes. She was leaving for Porto the next day. He had a train to Madrid on Sunday. They swapped Instagrams and never texted.
“I thought he was nice,” Nora says. “But I had just ended something. I didn't want to import a new complication.”
“I thought she was very sharp,” Silas says. “But I could tell the timing was wrong. You don't want to be a rebound country.”
The Budapest “accident”
Nine months later, Nora was in Budapest for a friend's wedding. Silas was there for a music festival. They ran into each other at the Szimpla Kert ruin bar on a Saturday night.
“What are the odds,” Silas says.
“What are the odds,” Nora agrees.
This is where I point out that Instagram Stories exist. Both of them had seen the other's location tags for weeks. Nora had posted the wedding on Friday. Silas had posted a festival wristband on Thursday. Neither of them reached out to arrange anything. They also did not, it must be said, explicitly avoid each other.
“I think I was hoping,” Nora concedes. “Without planning for.”
“That is planning,” Silas says, “with extra steps.”
In Budapest, they spent two days together. Walked the chain bridge. Ate lángos badly. Watched the Danube go grey in the rain. No kiss. No declarations. At the end she said, “I think I'm going to Chiang Mai for three months in winter.” He said, “Huh. I might be in Bangkok in February.”
The Chiang Mai coincidence
Ten weeks later, in February 2023, Silas got off a night bus in Chiang Mai, checked into a guesthouse in the old city, and discovered — or claimed to discover — that Nora's favourite cafe, the one she had mentioned once in a story, was two doors down.
“I did not choose the guesthouse because of her cafe,” Silas says, not quite convincingly.
“He absolutely chose the guesthouse because of my cafe,” Nora says. “I think he had looked it up on Google Maps at least three times.”
This was the meeting that turned into a relationship. They spent six weeks in Chiang Mai in loose orbit — shared mornings, separate afternoons, most dinners together. By week three, there was no pretending anymore.
What I learned from them about “coincidence”
The third time you run into someone across three countries, it is not coincidence. It is a very soft version of pursuit that preserves everyone's dignity by not calling itself that.
Their pattern, as I listened, was actually a form of extended compatibility testing:
- Low-commitment first meeting — a chance encounter in Lisbon that neither chased
- Medium-commitment second meeting — a soft re-collision in Budapest, where both travelled for their own reasons first, and each other second
- Higher-commitment third meeting — a deliberate proximity in Chiang Mai, framed as coincidence, but recognised by both
They gave each other three chances to say no without ever having to. Neither of them had to risk a direct ask that might wound. That protection, intended or not, was probably what saved the thing.
The best travel relationships we see on the platform are often the ones that happen in three meetings, across different cities, rather than three dates, across one week.
What they do now
They live, technically, in two cities. Nora is based in Oslo and Silas in Berlin. They see each other approximately every three weeks, alternating who travels, with one deliberate “neutral country” week every two months — somewhere neither of them lives — that mimics how they met.
“Those neutral weeks are what keep us fresh,” Nora says. “If we only meet in our home cities, we start acting like a regular couple. Which is fine. But the thing that's good about us is not the regular. It's the slightly unmoored version.”
Some of their neutral-country rules:
- A city neither of them has lived in, ever
- No work on those trips, actively defended
- A minimum of four nights, to avoid the whirlwind dynamic
- At least one long, boring activity: a museum no one rushed through, a six-hour walk, a train
They've done this in Ljubljana, Porto, Tbilisi, Valencia, Bratislava, and a painful, in-hindsight-funny trip to Naples where both of them were getting over the flu and spent three days watching Italian television from a rented apartment.
Their honest warnings
I asked Nora and Silas what the warning signs were, for someone listening to their story and hoping to recreate it. They did not give me the romantic answer.
Silas
“You have to actually like travelling with them. The story is charming from the outside. In practice, Nora and I spent our first three-country year discovering that we disagree about almost everything when it comes to airports. Lines, which terminal, when to eat. You can't outrun that. You have to negotiate it.”
Nora
“You can't use travel forever as a proxy for commitment. At some point one of you has to be boring in the other's actual home city, for a long time, without a trip on the calendar. We have had to work on that. It does not come naturally after the way we started.”
What the three countries taught them about each other
I asked what each country revealed.
Lisbon: that the first meeting could be light. That neither of them needed to make a strong move to be remembered.
Budapest: that the attraction survived a second encounter in worse weather, with fewer illusions.
Chiang Mai: that they were both willing, quietly, to bend a trip around the other one. That was the decision point, even if they never said it out loud.
Now, three years in, they have added two more cities — Tbilisi and Porto — where they explicitly “accidentally” met again for an anniversary they do not celebrate out loud. The coincidences keep accumulating. The spreadsheet, which Nora finally admitted to me exists, has eight cities on it.
“It's not a spreadsheet of accidents,” she says. “It's a spreadsheet of places that worked. We only go back to the ones that worked.”
Silas nods. Then: “Also Ljubljana, which did not work at all. But we went back anyway. Some things are worth a second try.”
If you have been running into the same face in your own algorithm, one city at a time, you already know whether you are avoiding coincidence or curating it. The honest version is usually the second.
