This Valentine’s Day, meet couples who met on vacation

Sometimes a missed flight or a spur-of-the-moment trip can lead you to your romantic interest. Think that happens only in the movies? Meet these real-life couples who met on vacation

Movies, books, and songs over the years have led us to believe in the idea of a holiday romance. New city, new possibilities... and sometimes new love. This could be a holiday fling that ends when the couple says goodbye to each other, or a relationship that thrives for weeks, months, years... despite the daily humdrum and challenges of work, family, and life. While some of us come back with suitcases full of souvenirs, there are a few who come back with a significant other.

For Renuka Patra, a realist, holiday romance is something she never believed would happen to her. She went to Europe to spend time with her sister and friends. On a cold, drizzly day in Budapest in 2017, while soaking in the warm pools of Szechenyi bath, two friendly Indians — Arnav and his friend — struck up a conversation with them. “I was doing a solo trip across Europe for a month and hadn’t met any Indian on that trip. And my friend who was working in Budapest for six months hadn’t seen too many Indians either so we were happy to see people from our country. We soon realised that we were all from Mumbai,” says Arnav Patra, a pilot currently based out of Bengaluru.

Renuka and her girl gang were in Budapest for just one night and were leaving for Vienna the next morning. After chatting for about half an hour and giving them restaurant recommendations, Arnav and his friend went ahead with their day. None of them exchanged numbers. But fate intervened, and three hours later, Arnav and Renuka bumped into each other at a restaurant. They were waiting for tables and decided to sit together. “Dinner was fun. Arnav drank strawberry beer and I judged him,” laughs Renuka, a business manager.

After dinner Arnav convinced the rest to come with him to the Hungarian parliament, post which they ended up at the ruin pubs. “Arnav and I were walking ahead. And my sister noticed that there was definitely an interest,” says Renuka.

The next morning the two kept texting each other. “I asked him if he would like to come to Vienna and gave him our hostel details. Seven minutes later he booked the same hostel and sent me a screen shot of the booking. He reached later that evening,” says Renuka. Since Vienna is a relatively quiet city, after the pubs shut, Arnav, Renuka and her sister decided to hang out in the common area of the hostel and play board games. “I thought he would judge me for playing a game here but I felt we should be doing something. We played Sequence. We taught him the game, he put his mind into it and he caught up really fast. He was a sport. That was a green flag for me,” says Renuka, adding that the next morning she left for Italy and Arnav went to Croatia.

After returning to Mumbai they met up again in May and chatted everyday. Arnav laughs, “I wasn’t expecting anything,” he says, but admits that he would call her from far-flung places like Canada on his layovers. Almost organically, they started dating, and in February 2023 they got married. “I was not supposed to go on that trip in 2017 but I went. And Arnav hadn’t planned to go on a holiday but one night he decided to pack his bags and go on that particular solo trip. Those two were my best nights in Europe,” says Renuka.

In 2016, when Lilian Albrecht came to India from Germany, to spend time with her school friend, little did she know that this would eventually become home. “My friend was finishing a year of voluntary work here. We met in Goa, rode around town on a two wheeler, and then took a sleeper train to Bengaluru to meet other friends. We had planned to go to Mysuru but one of them fell ill. So we decided to go to a city with good hospitals and landed in Chennai, unplanned,” says Lilian aka Lily, an assistant events manager.