LEAH, 30, AND MARK, 30
I live in Canada and was in London for a work event when a friend joked I should try the dating app Bumble. Mark was one of my first matches. He was on his way to Heathrow when he passed my hotel – that’s how we matched. He was off to France and I was in London for less than a week so there wasn’t time to meet and I ended up giving him my number. I didn’t think I’d hear from him once I was back in Canada, but he messaged me and we started talking – we really clicked.
Our first face-to-face meeting was when my company sent me back to London and I landed exactly 100 days after we matched. I used to teach English in South Korea and 100 days is really meaningful there so it felt very serendipitous. We went for a pizza and it was as if we had known each other our whole lives. When you have a connection that isn’t physical but online, you can be true to yourself and really get to know each other.
After nine months of dating, I decided to move to England. We had only met in person five times. My parents thought it was wild but they also said: ‘If you want to see where this relationship is going, then do it.’ So I moved three years ago. He proposed in Budapest that December and we’ll be celebrating our second wedding anniversary this year. messaged him and, after a week or two, we met up and took his dog for a walk. We soon realised we had lots in common. He was interested in computers and I had worked in IT for years, we are both big coffee drinkers, love to play Scrabble and share a huge appreciation of music – Frank plays the guitar, bass, keyboards and drums.
A few weeks later, I was at his house and he was messing around with the music equipment in his studio when I had a go at singing – I’ve always liked to sing, but mainly in the shower or car – and that’s when we started making our own music. The first song we released was called ‘Online’ and tells the story of how we met. Our friends said we sounded good so we continued to write more songs. Since then, we’ve released nine songs on Spotify under our artist name DognDust. My daughters even threw us a launch party to celebrate.