LONDON — A London woman fell in love with a bookstore social media manager one tweet at a time.
Victoria Carlin was working as a circus performer in 2012 when she came across the twitter account for Waterstones books, located on Oxford Street in London. Little did she know, the man behind that account was her future husband.
O’Brien tweeted, “Pff, he’s not that dreamy in real life,” to which Carlin replied, “pffft. Book nerds > dreamboats. #girlfacts.”
Jonathan O’Brien told The Guardian he regularly received marriage proposals, but always turned them down with replies like “Sorry, I’m already married to the books.”
But Carlin was determined to meet the man behind Waterstones’ tweets, especially since she had been dared to do it. At one point, Carlin implied in a tweet to a friend that she had gone for a gin with him, and that piqued O’Brien’s interest, he told the paper. He asked her about it from his personal account, and the two started chatting on Twitter.
She told the Guardian about the fateful day she decided to act and went to the bookstore after seeing O’Brien tweet about a “hankering for doughnuts”:
“My legs were taking me and my head was going: ‘What are you doing?’ Upstairs, she worked out who he was. ‘And he was so much taller than I thought he would be. I’m only 5ft. I stood in the queue waiting. He went: “Hi, how can I help you?” and I just said: “There you go, there’s a doughnut. As requested.” Then I bottled it and ran away.'”
Her bold move four years ago led to a date at a secret cocktail bar during his lunch break that would change their lives.
“It was easily the best first date I’ve ever been on (and hopefully the last first date I’ll ever go on),” he told Mashable. “I brought a book of The Wizard of Oz as a present because Victoria had mentioned to me how much she loves the film.”
The two were married over the weekend at Islington Town Hall in London. And what would a July 2016 wedding be without at least one uninvited guest:
