Natalie Malouf often thought about the man she’d met on the plane to London.
It wasn’t a romantic connection, exactly. But as soon as they’d started talking, the conversation had been imbued with a distinctive ease.
“When I was talking with him, it felt so natural,” Natalie tells CNN Travel today. “It felt like I was talking to someone I’d known for a really long time. I think that’s part of the reason why the conversation just kept going and going.”
At the beginning of that flight in 2016, Natalie, then in her mid-20s, had been more consciously flirting. When her seat neighbor didn’t reciprocate, she dialed it back.
But the conversation continued to flow.
“It felt like someone was tapping me on the shoulder, like ‘Pay attention to this guy.’ There was just this feeling beyond, ‘Oh, it’s nice to meet someone new.’ It was almost like this compulsion.”
When the flight landed in London, she asked the man if he wanted to stay in touch. They swapped emails. She hoped he might become a long-distance friend, at least.
For a while, he did.
They emailed a little, and swapped numbers in case they ever ended up in each other’s cities. But the conversation soon dwindled.
Natalie wasn’t surprised. They lived in different places. They led separate lives. And while she was a firm believer in the idea that men and women could be friends, the intensity of that airplane connection didn’t entirely seem platonic. And the man from the plane didn’t seem to be interested in romance. Perhaps he had a partner. She didn’t want to cross any boundaries.
So, Natalie busied herself with her life in Dallas, Texas — work, dating, vacations, friends.
And then, one day in 2017, almost a year after they met, Natalie got a message from the man from the plane, out of the blue.
She was surprised to see his name flash on her phone. She clicked on the notification. To her surprise, it was a single emoji: a rose.
The man from the plane was Juan Prieto. Originally from Colombia, Juan was in his early 30s and working as a research professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He’d also spent a five-year stint working on his doctorate in France.
“By the end of my stay in France, I was feeling a little bit lonely, I’d say, and then I decided to leave France,” Juan tells CNN Travel. “I was dating someone. At that point we were still dating, and I was actually on my way back to visit this person.”
Juan felt the relationship was slowly crumbling. But he was still trying to make it work. So that day in December 2016, he boarded the flight from North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham International Airport to London, planning to connect on to France and visit his partner.
He almost missed the flight. He was sitting at the gate on his laptop, working on a research paper, when he realized it was the last call for the American Airlines flight to London Heathrow. He scrambled to get his stuff together and ran onto the airplane at the last minute.
“I was rushing to find my seat,” he recalls.
Flustered, he located his row and saw a smiling woman sitting alone, looking at him.
“I thought, ‘Oh I have a nice person sitting next to me, that’s great,’” says Juan. He didn’t expect her to chat, but she looked welcoming enough.
“What happened next is they closed the doors and then the seat between us was empty,” he recalls.
That’s what prompted Natalie and Juan to start talking for the first time.
She spoke first, gesturing at the empty seat: “Oh cool, we’ll be able to stretch out,” she said, as much to herself as to Juan.
In truth, Juan’s late arrival meant Natalie had assumed she was going to have the whole row to herself.
This prospect had suited her perfectly. Natalie was in the middle of a master’s program. She was en route to Berlin, via a layover in London, to visit her sister, who was studying abroad there. Thanks to her academic workload, Natalie was feeling sleep-deprived.
“And because I booked at the last minute, I had to take a flight that was from Dallas, Texas, to Raleigh-Durham to London to Berlin,” she recalls. “So, I was thinking, ‘This is the second leg out of many legs. I kind of want to rest.’”
When Juan dashed onto the airplane and settled into her row, Natalie’s heart sank.
But her disappointment was temporary.
“Something about him was intriguing. And I thought, ‘Oh, okay, I really want to talk to this person,’” she recalls.
It wasn’t love at first sight. More like a spotlight was beaming on the airplane stranger — telling Natalie to pay attention.
So, she started making conversation. At first, it was classic airplane chitchat. Nothing deep, nothing personal.
“But from there we started talking about Juan’s work, then after that, we just talked the whole flight,” says Natalie.
“We found out we had a lot of things in common,” recalls Juan. “For example, I learned Natalie spent a year living in Bordeaux. Of course I had spent some time in France, so that also kind of connected us a little bit.”
They chatted about their experiences in France. Juan didn’t mention his partner. He tried to steer the conversation away from anything obviously romantic.
And while Natalie wondered if their connection could be something significant, she didn’t know in what way.
“It wasn’t really on my radar, to be honest, to find a partner, per se, when I met him,” she says today. “And so, when I met him, I felt like I was just really being honest about who I was, as I didn’t even think anything was going to really come from it. I think I got to be really, just authentic with him.”
As the conversation continued, Natalie abandoned her plans to sleep. Juan abandoned his plans to work. They couldn’t stop talking.
“We saw that we’d had some similar life experiences and some parallel interests, even though the type of work we did was very, very different,” she says. “I studied international relations and poly sci, and he’s a computer scientist, and he’s working in the medical field.”
The two had a similar outlook on life and shared a love of travel.
“He’s originally from Colombia. And so, we talked about some of our experiences growing up,” says Natalie.
“We talked about how I traveled many times to the US, I had family here, aunts and uncles,” says Juan. “Natalie is very interested in travel. So we found a lot of common points.”
The ease Natalie felt around Juan made her feel comfortable “just to be myself.”
It was this that prompted her to ask if Juan wanted to exchange details as the flight started its descent into London.
“Because I felt such a natural rapport with him, just right off the bat, and it was distinct and unique from almost anyone I’d met before …” she says.
She wasn’t assuming they’d date. She just felt sure she’d met a kindred spirit.
As for Juan, he also thought they may become friends. He recalls thinking: “She seemed very nice. It’s nice to talk about different things, to be able to have a natural conversation where you can talk about anything, because we did talk about many things.”
Email addresses exchanged, Natalie and Juan disembarked the airplane together and walked through London’s Heathrow Airport side-by-side. They were both catching connecting flights and had to head in different directions.
They didn’t hug goodbye.
“I don’t think we even shook hands or anything,” says Natalie. “He told me, ‘Okay, have a wonderful time with your sister,’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I miss France. Enjoy France.’ And so, it was just a kind of a cordial goodbye.”
But Natalie vividly remembers watching Juan walk away. As he disappeared into the crowd, it felt bittersweet.
A few email and text message exchanges followed. But the connection quickly dwindled as both Natalie and Juan resumed their busy lives.
“There was a large, big period of time where we didn’t talk,” says Juan.
During this time, his relationship ended. It wasn’t a shock, but it was a big change. Juan focused on rebuilding life post-breakup, on his work at the university, and on his friendships in North Carolina.
Then, almost “out of nowhere,” Natalie floated into his consciousness. He found himself thinking about their time together on the plane. The easy conversation. The natural connection.
They hadn’t spoken for almost a year. He debated whether it was strange to pop back up in her life again. He wondered how to even go about getting back in contact.
Now that he was single, Juan could acknowledge to himself the romantic potential in the airplane chemistry. He wanted to make that clear in the text, but every message he composed in his head sounded intense.
So he decided to go with the rose emoji.
The reply from Natalie came through quickly: “Why are you sending me this?”
Juan panicked.
“I thought, ‘Oh no, was it too aggressive?’”
Across the country, Natalie stared at her phone, trying to decipher what the message meant.
“I remember being like, ‘Oh, yeah. I really liked talking to this guy. But why has it been so long, and why are you sending me this now? And did you also know my middle name is Rose?’”
Roses, for Natalie, had always had extra resonance because of her middle name. It all felt a little serendipitous. But she was also skeptical of Juan’s intentions. She’d assumed he wasn’t interested in her.
“It’s kind of like, ‘Okay, what are you doing with this, sir?’” she recalls, laughing. “But then we started talking right after that again. We picked it right back up.”
Juan explained that when they met, he’d been dating someone else and now he was single. Natalie suggested they talk on the phone.
And when they heard one another’s voices, the ease of the airplane conversation returned.
Natalie was going through a bit of a low point in her degree, feeling dissatisfied with life more generally. Talking to Juan was a balm.
“I felt like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing with my life right now. I don’t know if I know what I want to do with my career, and I was just feeling a bit lost.’”
She confided in Juan, and he listened. He made her feel better just with his presence, even though he was thousands of miles away. In turn, he opened up about his relationship falling apart.
“It wasn’t very good for me,” he told her.
“We chatted a lot about both of our experiences,” recalls Natalie. “It ended up being like a two- or three-hour phone conversation, and it was the same sort of natural feeling as it felt when we were on the flight.”
After that first phone call, the two started connecting on the phone regularly — usually at the end of the day, after Natalie had finished studying and Juan was done with work.
“Those conversations, very late at night, they started going in a different direction…” says Juan. “We started getting more romantic because we’re both available.”
“Things could actually develop,” says Natalie. “But then there was the challenge of the distance, that was the next obstacle we had to kind of overcome.”
After several weeks of late-night talking, Juan invited Natalie to visit him in Raleigh. They reunited in the same place they’d last seen one another — an airport. When they spotted one another across the busy arrivals terminal, they both started smiling. They didn’t stop smiling as they walked toward each other. Then they embraced.
“We immediately just gave each other a hug and kissed,” says Natalie. “That was pretty cool.”
“We knew, ‘Okay, this is romantic,’” says Juan. “So, the first time we saw each other again, we kissed.”
That weekend together was special for both Natalie and Juan. The comfort that had defined their connection from the start was still present. It only grew as the weekend continued.
“I was just following this feeling of, ‘This is such an easy connection.’ So when we met in person it felt so natural, we clearly are really into each other,” says Natalie. “I wasn’t worried about my physical appearance all the time. I wasn’t thinking about being this girlfriend material or anything.”
Juan had organized a weekend packed with fun activities.
“I was thinking, ‘Okay, we’re living in different cities. She’s gonna come visit. Let’s just try to have as much fun as possible,’” says Juan.
First up on the agenda? Goat yoga.
“It’s on a farm, and the baby goats will come and nibble snacks while you’re doing downward dog and all this,” says Natalie, laughing. “We had a weekend just full of dates and downtime and just getting to know each other and watching movies and getting outside. I met some of his friends.”
They were both relieved, but not surprised, by how genuine and easy everything felt.
“The physical chemistry was there,” says Natalie. “We’d been talking for so long, we’d only met that one time on the flight — I was like, ‘Will we feel this physical chemistry, now that we know that we’re really interested in each other?’ But we definitely immediately did.”
When Natalie returned home, she filled in her family and friends.
“I told my parents how well it went and just how much I liked him, and that I was ready to do long distance with this guy,” she says.
“Then I went to Dallas to meet Natalie’s family, which also went great,” says Juan.
After these initial visits, Natalie and Juan settled into a long-distance relationship. The distance wasn’t always easy, but they both knew they were committed to making the connection work.
They dated from afar for over three years, meeting whenever they could. An end date to the distance was initially hard to predict — Natalie was finishing up her master’s program and unsure what the future held for her life and career.
But in 2021, in the wake of the pandemic, Natalie decided to relocate to North Carolina to be with Juan. The relationship was one of the only things she was sure of. “He had a job that was very secure. He’d been with the university for quite a while by that point. I was at a point in my life where it was easier for me, logistically, to move than it was for him,” she says.
Plus, Juan loved North Carolina. And Natalie had fallen in love with the state as she fell for him.
Later, in the fall of 2021, the couple decided to get married. They’d always talked about marriage, and the timing felt right. Once again, their love and connection felt like something certain in a time of turmoil.
“So, we got married in North Carolina at a courthouse with just a few people,” says Natalie. “It was a very small, intimate wedding. It was actually really beautiful. I loved it. But then we’d still talked about how it would be so fun to get the families together. I was hoping we could travel to Colombia or France or somewhere international that was meaningful to us to have a wedding.”
In the end, the second celebration took place in the fall of 2022. By then, borders had opened up and the couple’s loved ones — including Juan’s family in Colombia — could all gather together to celebrate.
“We had 170 people,” says Natalie. “It was awesome, it was a lot of fun. So, we got two weddings.”
Today, Natalie and Juan still live in North Carolina, now with a 10-month-old in tow.
“Sleep deprivation is the hardest part,” says Natalie of being a parent. “But I think it’s brought us closer … And then just seeing this tiny human that you have together, you share this thing, it’s really cool.”
The couple are raising their son to be bilingual in Spanish, Juan’s first language, and English.
“We have regular phone calls with his family in Colombia, his grandparents there, and other family members. And we’re planning a trip with him this July to bring him to Colombia to meet family and friends there,” says Natalie.
“Our love of travel and international experiences and multiculturalism, that’s being continued through raising our child together, which is really cool.”
Today, a decade on from their inflight meeting, the couple still occasionally reminisce on their first flight — especially when they’re in the air together.
“We’ll be holding hands, and I’ll say, ‘Remember how we met this way?’ Or something like that, and he chuckles,” says Natalie.
Although as young parents, they’re often focused on everyday life rather than recollecting, “but it still hits me once in a while,” says Natalie.
“If I hadn’t booked that exact flight, and hadn’t sat in that exact seat, and if he hadn’t had the exact itinerary…” she says.
For Juan, their love story celebrates the importance of “connection.”
“Try talking to a stranger,” he says. “You never really know what can happen, what those connections can lead to, it can be something very beautiful, like what happened to us.”
