Is This Seat Taken? And Will You Marry Me?

You never know where you will find love. Even on a crowded airplane or a cruise ship. Here are four stories of love found while in transit.

It was March 2015, when Amanda Sidman, 32, and Max Mancuso, 30, met on Delta Flight 401. They were both heading back from Austin to New York after bachelor and bachelorette parties.

After a serendipitous seating shuffle, Sidman ended up in 14B, and shortly thereafter, Mancuso sat down in 14D. “Of course, the one time I sit next to a cute guy ... I look like this,” she said. “I had my hair on top of my head, the previous evening’s eyeliner under my eyes, and I was in sweats — not my good sweats. I suddenly thought of something my mom had said a few weeks earlier when I was wearing a similar outfit that I liked to travel in: ‘What if you’re sitting next to your husband on your next flight?'”

Mancuso was asleep before the plane pulled out of the gate. He woke up just in time to hear Sidman order a Bloody Mary. “I thought a little liquid courage wouldn’t hurt, so I joined in and doubled the order,” he said. “After introductions, 14B and I started to hit it off.”

The two then made connections about summer weekends spent in Montauk, how they both lived in SoHo and how they both wanted to check out Emmett’s, the Chicago-style pizza place on Macdougal Street.

“Although we didn’t know each other previously, the name game yielded enough mutual friends of friends for her to ensure I wasn’t a creep,” Mancuso said.

The rest of the flight, Sidman and Mancuso popped salty-sweet snacks and didn’t stop talking. They made tentative plans to meet at a restaurant in their neighborhood the next week, but in the stampede of New Yorkers trying to get off the plane, phone numbers were not exchanged.

Facebook to the rescue: There was a message confirming their to-be date when he got home. “When we met for the first time on solid ground,” he said, “I brought her a bag of peanut M&Ms.”

They eventually moved in together and plan to marry this month in Chilmark, Massachusetts, on Martha’s Vineyard.

In 2006, Morlaye Kamara, 36, and Anthony Berklich, 33, were both students on an organized tour to Israel when they first noticed each other in the Tel Aviv baggage claim area. They smiled and began chatting.

Their tour company put them on the same bus that would travel around the country for the next 10 days. Halfway through the trip, Berklich invited Kamara on an extended adventure: three days in Egypt, to see the pyramids. Kamara accepted.

“I was so excited to spend an extra three days with this boy, who I had just met and felt was someone I could really be best friends with, someone who I could trust,” Kamara said.

Once they admitted to each other that they were gay, the two became fast friends. “We were completely enamored with each other but not sure where it would go.” Neither had ever had an official relationship before, nor had come out to their families.

After returning home to New York, they did just that. “Anthony’s family was fantastic, supportive, and took me in right away,” Kamara said. “My family, being Russian and West African, was a different story. My mother finally came around after five years into our relationship, but my father took longer. Even though my family wasn’t accepting at first, I always knew they loved me and would eventually come around. They are now very supportive of us and an integral part of our lives.”

The couple married in August 2008 in Montecito, California, before the state’s voters passed Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.

Ten years later and now living in New York City, they believe that they have become an example of a healthy, good and successful relationship among their family and friends.

“We’ve been through family deaths together, me being diagnosed with leukemia, and life successes as well,” Kamara said. “But my best friend has always been by my side. We are planning on having children in 2020 through a surrogate. We can’t wait to be parents. We are still in love, and after seeing each other through it all, we give gratitude for that every day.”

Barbara Werner and Nick Morris have been together in a committed, loving, long-distance relationship for seven years this September. And it all started in coach class.

“Ours is a very strange love story,” Werner said. “We were in our 40s and 50s when we met. Neither of us was looking for love or a relationship.”

She was traveling on business from Anchorage to Seattle. “Being only 5 feet tall, I have no idea why I decided to purchase a seat with extra legroom,” she said. A very tall man sat down next to her. He told he had been bear hunting.

When they got off the plane, Morris didn’t ask for her name or her phone number. She assumed he wasn’t interested.

About a week later, Werner received a card in the mail. It read, “If this is the right Barbara from the flight from Anchorage to Seattle: Hi. This is Nick and I sat down next to you on the plane.”

Werner, who lives in Stamford, Connecticut, and Morris, who lives in Joppa, Maryland, became serious very quickly, but she had to work in New York, a city that made Morris uncomfortable. The thought of either of them relocating was a nonstarter.

“I thought the relationship was over,” she said. “But after three months of not seeing each other, he sent me a huge bouquet of flowers with a note that read, ‘If this is all you can give — texting every morning, speaking with each other every night, going on two weeklong yearly vacations, and spending around six weekends together — I’ll take it.’ He said he would rather have me in his life long-distance then not have me in his life at all.”

“I thank God and United Airlines for the start of an amazing relationship,” Werner said. “If I hadn’t gotten on that flight and paid for extra legroom, if he hadn’t traded seats with his brother, we would never have met.”

It was July 2005 when Michele Natola, 18, was on a cruise from Boston to Bermuda with her best friends after their high school graduation. Steve O’Connell, 18, was also aboard.

The two met the first night on the dance floor. “He was a dancing machine, going a mile a minute,” said Natola. “Wearing shorts, tube socks up to his knees, sandals and a fedora, my first impression was that he was crazy and I was not interested. I pulled my friend Amanda over to ‘save me.'”

“Despite my initial reaction, every night on the dance floor I would gravitate toward him,” she continued. After some conversations, she discovered that “he had spent most of his childhood summers at a campground that was only two minutes away from where her family lived in Plymouth. We had been less than a mile from each other every summer for the past 10 years.”

She gave him her number on the final night of the cruise. “At that point, I realized that I wouldn’t mind getting to know this crazy guy once we were off the boat — it was worth a try,” she said.

A week later he called. “We met a few times over the summer and it was like we were still on the ship,” she said. “We had a blast whenever we were together.” Natola moved to Boston that September; she had been accepted at Suffolk University before meeting O’Connell, who lived in Boston. They continued dating through her college career at Suffolk.

Through the first years of dating, the couple became permanent fixtures in each other’s lives — merging their two worlds through celebrations of milestones, births of new family members and a growing appreciation for what the other brought to the table. By this time, even their two families had become close and saw each family as an extension of the other; the couple bought their first home together in 2012.

In March 2014, on another cruise, O’Connell proposed. They were married in September 2015 after 10 years of dating.

The couple, who still live in Boston, welcomed their first child, a boy, on Aug. 9.