Newlyweds discover their paths crossed in Walt Disney World when they were toddlers

A pair of newlyweds was looking through their childhood photos when husband spotted himself as a toddler, being pushed in a stroller by his dad, in the background of one of wife's photos from a Walt Disney World trip when they were both tiny, decades before they met and fell in love. At the time, he lived in Canada and she lived in Florida. Kismet!

Disney World Destiny for Married Couple

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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smackhappy

How can we find the girl in the hotpants on the upper left? I wonder how she’s looking these days…
Anonymous

I lived in 4 of the same cities at the same time as my significant other until we met.
How weird.
we have a 16yr age difference so 2 of the cities would have been statutory issues since they weren’t in Arkansas!
Phlip

Among the New Age sophists is the idea that events correlate outside of linear time, as if they shone beacons to each other to attract synchronicities.
lovelystrangeness

This is a cool coincidence and all, but I can’t seem to get over the news anchor’s frighteningly unexpressive eyes in the video clip. In the first twelve seconds she barely moves the top half of her face at all. The fact that her voice changes inflection at emotionally appropriate moments makes it all the more noticeable. Botox overdose? Soulless creature from the voidl? Hard to say.
- redesigned
  
  she is slightly cross-eyed which gives her that strange not quite looking at you look.
  
  what about the ex-football-coach looking guy next too her with the stupid remark…”talk about arranged marriages!!!”? They make quite the pair.
  
  this was a cute happy coincidence, it made me smile.
- Random Royalty
  
  She is reading off a teleprompter, and was probably coached to not move her head to look more natural.
rsplatpc

So Megan Fox is a reporter now?
bat21

Direct link ;)
Anonymous

Somethig almost exactly like this happened to the two show runners of LOST in the mid-80s:

IIRC, the elder Carlton Cuse was there with a network fellow who knew George Lucas–I believe it was Lloyd Braun, the namesake of the Seinfeld character–and who had been invited to the opening of Star Tours.

The younger Damon Lindelof was also at Disneyland that day with his dad. There’s a picture of Lindelof riding the Astro-Jets with Lucas in the frame. Carlton and Braun are just out of the frame.

They’ve mentioned it a few times on their podcast, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear them say it was at least partial inspiration for the myriad of historical crossings on LOST.

Of course, not quite as dramatic as them being eventual lovers in the very same image, but pretty wild nonetheless.
slgalt

My husband and I always joke about this having happened to us – we were both there in the same summer when kids, so it’s possible.
BF

I was at the AT&T golf tourney in the late 90′s with a friend who was helping me get over a huge heartbreak. We camped out at the 12th hole of Poppy Hills (1 of 3 courses being played at the same time) to wait for Kevin Costner to play through. While we waited we started chatting with a couple sitting next to us and my friend told them that she took me to the AT&T to cheer me up. That opened up the conversation for details.

I told them that I lived in central valley and that the ex boyfriend had been a cop and is now a P.I. because he got shot 3 times and retired early, etcâ€¦ and they asked me if he looked like Robert Goulet meets Burt Reynolds and I said, shockingly, yes. They had met him the night before at a bar in Carmel and struck up a conversation and he told them all about his life story.

The crazy part of this is that there are three 18-hole courses to choose from to watch your favorite celebâ€™s play and there are 4 days of tournament play and there are roughly (my math is based on ticket sales) 8,000 spectators per day /per/ course wandering around from hole to hole. 32,000 people per day, 3 courses to choose from and a total of 54 holes to choose from and we pick the same course, same hole, the same grassy spot to sit, and the same celeb to watch as the couple who just met my heartbreak ex-boyfriend the night before. Oh, and my friend and I bumped into the ex-b a couple hours later while walking around the course â€“ 8,000 people and I had to run into him. Great way to cheer me up.

Six degrees of separation anyone?
dargaud

A year before I met my wife, we were both in a gym at the same time. We figured it out when I recognized a very specific T-shirt she’d been wearing, and she remembered seeing me fall. Twice.

And a year before that we were at a friend’s party together but didn’t notice each other, which is weird.
- Brainspore
  
  A year before I met my wife, we were both in a gym at the same time. We figured it out when I recognized a very specific T-shirt she’d been wearing, and she remembered seeing me fall. Twice.
  
  Did your stumbles have anything to do with the fact that you apparently had your eyes on her chest? ; )
Robotech_Master

I bet this sort of thing happens more often than people even know, it’s just that most of the time there aren’t cameras pointed in the right direction to record it.
KanedaJones

wife and I born a week apart in the same hospital and since we are better at what the other is bad socially we joke that we are two halves of one person (or soul).

:)
tinfoil

Sounds similar to my wife and I. I was born in a rather small town in Ontario not too far from Peterborough. At the same time, my now mother-in-law & father-in-law were at the family cottage not 10 minutes drive away, with my mother-in-law pregnant with what would turn out to be my wife.

The cottage is still in the family and we (wife (preggers), child and I) will be there for a few weeks this summer.
deSelby

I would hazard a guess that almost everybody who reads BB has a “small world” story that is at least as improbable as this. I certainly have a few improbable coincidences (or is that co-incidences?) which have happened to me. At least one of them is (to my mind) even more improbable than this.

But my question is…. why is this news?

I agree that we all need a few “feel good” stories, but how does a story like this even make it on to the radar of a news programme? Do they have a reporter whose job it is to seek out synchronicities?

But, just like redesigned, I smiled too. Which is good enough for me.
Marktech

Has anybody pointed out that it actually /is/ a small world after all?
hobomike

Kismet? No, Dismet!
OCNCTY

Anyone want to put heads together to figure out the mathematical probability of this happening? I’m sure it is not too wild.
- airshowfan
  
  I’m just pulling this out of my behind, so feel free to point out errors and improve upon it, but at least to start off a sketch of an estimate:
  
  Say that Disney World gets 30 million visitors a year. (Probably close enough; a quick Google search brings up numbers ranging from 20 to 40). Say half of those are foreign, so, 15 million Americans. That’s 5% of the US population, so on average each American visits Disney World about once per 20 years, or about once per 7000 days.
  
  So if you are at Disney World, name any American and there’s something like a one-in-7000 chance that they are there on the same day.
  
  (Out of any group of X people, there is a 1-(6999/7000)^X chance that one of them is at Disney World on the same day. If your school has 1,000 people, there’s a 13.3% chance that one of your schoolmates is there. If you’re from a small town of 10,000, there’s a three-fourths chance that someone else from your town is there on any given day. I work for a company of 150,000, and there’s an almost-100% chance that someone who works for my company is at Disney World on any given day).
  
  But yeah, I’d say that one in 7000 people (give or take) visited Disney World on the same day as their spouse-to be. That’s tens of thousands of people! Throw in Disneyland, and the decades for which these parks have been open, and it might be closer to 100,000 people.
  
  Now, how many of them appear in the background of the other’s pictures? Well, assuming two rolls of 36-exposure film, and the field of view of a “standard” 50mm lens… ;]
  - Anonymous
    
    I appreciate the thought you put into this, but 1/7000 sounds ridiculously low for what we are talking about: that in a nation of 350MM people, your spouse and you will end up in disneyland on the same day AND THEN meet up again somewhere in the country ~15~ years later.
    
    My problem is that I suck at statistics and am having a hard time figuring out where to start. Also, this isnt even taking into account that she was living in a different country at the time and that a photo of them was taken at exactly the right moment. So would that be reducing to something like:
    
    For any given second the possibility that you and your 1/6,000,000,000 spouse are at the same spot on the globe…etc etc…
    
    ouch, my head hurts…
    - airshowfan
      
      The one fairly huge leap in my reasoning is to say that half the visitors are foreigners (I totally made that up, but I’d say it’s very likely within a factor of 2), and the one big gap is the fact that I only carried out the analysis for Americans. For a nation of 300 million or more, I think my numbers are pretty much in the right ballpark, but for a planet of several billion people (like you said, she was living in another country at the time) they’re WAY low. I do think that, if you’re an American and have (or will have) an American spouse, then the odds that your spouse was at Disney World on any given day (e.g. on a day when you yourself were there) is something like one in 5000 to 10000, on average. But for anyone in the world… the odds are much lower, probably by a factor of at least 20 (the ratio between the US population and the world’s population… and that’s not taking into account the fact that a non-American on average is less likely to visit Disney World than the average American).
      
      But I do think that my numbers for Americans are pretty much right. (For future spouses being in Disney World at the same time, not necessarily in each other’s pictures). I mean, think about it: What other attraction of any kind is visited by so many thousands of people EVERY DAY?
      
      And the bottom line is: If a certain person visits Disney World once every 7000 days (or maybe it’s 10000 or 20000 for your spouse), then the odds of them being there on any given day (e.g. on the day you are there) is one in 7000 (or 10000 or 20000 or whatever it is for that person). Maybe higher given that you are both more likely to go during the summer, etc.
      
      As for being in each other’s pictures, I did think about this a little bit. I originally started out thinking about the angle of view of a camera, how close to the camera a person had to be in order to be recogniseable, and the roughly-triangular area that a person would have to be in, and the density of people at the park… but then I decided that I might as well just say “In each photograph there will be about 10 people who will be recogniseable”, just from thinking back to my own family’s pictures at amusement parks. It’s probably in the ballpark. How many pictures taken during a day at the park? For some people it will be 5, for some people it will be 70 (this is before digital cameras, of course), so let’s say 35. So in total you have 350 people in your pictures, minus the people that show up multiple times, which will be about 350 divided by the number of people there that day… so, say, 300 people in your pictures. If Disney World gets tens of thousands of people to visit every day, then about 1% of them or less are recogniseable in your pictures.
      
      So if the odds of your future spouse and you (assuming you are both American) being in the park on the same day is one in 5,000 to 10,000, then the odds of one of you being in the other’s pictures is something like one in 500,000 to 2,000,000. That’s quite low… but probably happens a couple of times per month.
      
      And although I’m pretty much pulling numbers out of my behind, in my defense allow me to link to this:
      
      3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2008/09/useless-calcula.html
DisneyBoy

My partner and I realized that we had talked to each other in the past a few times in different occasions.

We were both dating other people at the time. When we both met, online, we didn’t realize who we each were. It was not until a few months into the dating game that we both started remembering the times we met in the past.

It makes you wonder sometimes.
Anonymous

It’s kind of like that “what are the chances that two people in the room share a birthday” problem but the number are ginormous.
jphilby

“Among the New Age sophists is the idea that events correlate outside of linear time”

And who is to say? The world could be a constant, roaring cascade of coincidences that we’re completely oblivous to … unless we tune to the right frequencies… which, now and then, we may do. There may be layers and layers underneath the obvious synchronicities.
Patrick Austin

You think that’s crazy?

When I was 3, my family was on a vacation in yellowstone park. We’d planned on going the month before, but my dad had an emergency at work. Some dumbass had blown a database away during a nightly upgrade and he had to stick around fixing it.

While we were at the park, I lost a totally kickass stuffed eagle. I left it on a playground and didn’t realize it was gone until we were about 300 miles away. I cried off and on for DAYS after that.

Fast forward 15 years to high school, 2000 miles away. I meet a girl. She’s nice. I go visit her at her house AND THERE’S THE EAGLE. She found my eagle! Two kids from the same small town in Michigan were at the same playground on the other side of the country at the same time, tied together by Eegla the Eagle. Crazy town.

Fast forward another 6 years to our wedding. Our dads get to talking (for the first time…my dad’s a programmer and not real fond of talking usually). It turns out MY FATHER IN LAW CAUSED THE DATABASE DESTRUCTION! ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG.

Ok, maybe I made up the part after “you think that’s crazy?”
Anonymous

I knew a guy who told me that when he and his wife first met at a party, he picked up a local newspaper which had his picture in the sports page (he was a safety for Ohio State) and directly on the back of it, on the next page was her picture, (she played tennis), squarely backing up his. They ended up getting married.
Godfree

I’m guessing the Mr. Smee rubberhead was retired quite some time ago.
Anonymous

I’m from Boise Idaho and I go to Disneyland once every 10 years or so. One time in 1993 I was in California and went to Disneyland. When I was in line for the roller coaster in Toon Town I realized that my neighbor (from Idaho) was in line 3 people in front of me. We were both stunned to see each other there.