While attending reunion events for Hamilton College in upstate New York back in 2017, Preetha Nooyi and Rem Van Aikin Myers both found themselves at the same Indian restaurant after a friend set up a double date. Rem—who was living in San Francisco at the time—had just ended a relationship, and Preetha—who was living in Brooklyn—was uninterested in starting one. Needless to say, sparks did not fly that evening.
Fate had other plans though, and two years later, after Rem moved to New York City, he matched with Preetha on a dating app. “I was intrigued by the striking similarity in our profiles,” he remembers. “I had written that I ‘enjoyed harmonizing in the car on a long drive,’ while Preetha’s profile said, ‘singing on long drives, extra points if you can hit the harmonies!’” Right after they matched, Preetha swiped “yes.”
Rem and Preetha quickly began conversing over text, but it took the pair over a month to connect for a first date in real life. Finally, on a cold and dreary Wednesday in mid-November, they met up at a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I loved how easily we were able to communicate and how, on a first date, we were already able to tackle serious topics,” Preetha says. As they fell into conversation, an initial glass of wine turned into an entire bottle—and a hefty helping of poutine.
Though they had attended the same college in different years, they found that they were both science majors, sang in the choir, knew many of the same classmates, and that Rem happened to be in a fraternity that many of Preetha’s friends were in. Still, Preetha wasn’t entirely sold: She was leaving four days after their first date to travel for a month in India and Argentina and doubted that such a new connection would last while she was abroad.
Rem, however, wasn’t so easily dissuaded and took her out on two more dates that week. First, to a karaoke bar where they sang Bon Jovi, and the next evening—the night before Preetha’s flight to India—to a shellfish restaurant in Brooklyn. He then made it a point to bid her farewell in person the morning she left for India.
Somehow, distance and time didn’t dampen the connection. Preetha and Rem made a point to communicate every day while she was abroad. “It wasn’t until a month into our relationship when we discovered, during a call with the mutual friend who organized our first meeting in 2017, that we had crossed paths all those years ago,” Preetha explains. “He remembers me as arriving late to dinner, and I remember him as, ‘the guy who talked with his hands.’ A friend of ours taught us the word ‘bashert,’ a Yiddish word for soulmate. It’s cheesy, but our relationship has so many coincidences that we can’t help but wonder if we may have found such a person in each other.”
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