Long-Lost Pen Pals Reunite On OKCupid After 14 Years And Get Married! [Video]

A love story this amazing seems so surreal — pen pals who were destined to be together.

In 1994, teenagers Piper Goodeve and Gabriel Vaughan had a mutual friend who thought the two would have a real connection. So, at their friend’s suggestion, the two became long distance pen pals. Piper, at 14 and living in New Hampshire, began writing to Gabriel, who was 15 and living in Massachusetts. The two became fast friends because they had so much in common, their love for acting first and foremost.

Piper and Gabriel were both involved in relationships at the time, but they formed a close bond because of their similar acting ambitions, according to the Daily Mail. Both Piper and Gabriel knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives; the couple claim their friends didn’t have the same clarity. This made it easy for them to share their emotions, their ideas, and their dreams with one another.

There wasn’t the option of texting, or talking via Skype, or messaging online during their teenage years. It was all handwritten communication.

Gabriel recalls Piper writing to him during a chat with The Huffington Post.

“It was like receiving a letter from a kindred spirit who…just knew what she wanted to do. So we could talk the same language right out of the gate and that was really rare.”

Piper only met Gabriel in person one time. She went to see Gabriel perform in a play called The Tempest at a theater in Massachusetts. The two pen pals continued writing to one another for four years, until college days caused them to drift apart — or so they thought.

As fate would have it, Piper and Gabriel’s lives were intertwined in ways they never knew. The Daily Mail reveals that they both “studied acting in London, then they both moved to Brooklyn, New York — where they lived only three blocks away from each other — they both worked as actors and audiobook narrators and the two even shared the same voiceover agent.”

Piper is amazed at how close in proximity she had been to Gabriel all those years, living so close to him, even taking the same subway, yet never running into him.

“We took the same subway every day. I would get onto the front of the subway and he would get onto the back. So we never met.”

It wasn’t until 2011 that Piper reluctantly decided to join OKCupid, an online dating site, that her world — and Gabriel’s — changed forever. Piper tells The Huffington Post that if her friend hadn’t pushed her to sign up on the dating site, she would have never done it on her own.

“This isn’t my story,” is exactly what Piper admitted to saying to herself, as reported by The Huffington Post. “This isn’t how I’m going to meet the guy I’m going to spend the rest of my life with. I just don’t think it’s how it’s supposed to happen to me.”

But, maybe that is exactly how it was supposed to happen.

Gabriel was also on OKCupid, and Piper (who used a screen name and not her real name) turned up as a 94 percent match for him. So Gabriel sent Piper a message where he simply said, “Hey, do you want to go on a date?”

Gabriel tells The Huffington Post, “And a second later I get a message back and its like, ‘Gabe! It’s Piper!’… It was completely shocking because I wasn’t expecting to see her there.”

A few days later, the pen pals went on a casual date and went back to Gabriel’s apartment where he surprised Piper even further. He went into his closet and, moments later, emerged with a worn purple folder with “Piper G” scribbled across the front. Gabriel had saved every single letter Piper had ever written to him for those four years — more than 50 of them. They spent endless hours sorting through the letters and reading each one.

It wasn’t long before Piper and Gabriel were completely and madly in love with one another.

In October 2013, Gabriel proposed to Piper in the garden of the Lord Jeffrey Inn, the Massachusetts theater where they had at met just once all those years ago, as reported by the Daily Mail.

Their love came full circle and now, at the ages of 35 and 36, Piper and Gabriel have become husband and wife after a romantic wedding ceremony last weekend. It was obviously meant to be.

[Photo Credit: DGLPhotography.com, DailyMail.co.uk, HuffingtonPost.com]