(CNN) — Marsha Bobb spotted Lenny Spence one day in 2005 while she was walking down the aisle of an American Airlines flight from Jamaica to Miami.
Lenny was sitting in Marsha’s window seat. And she wasn’t happy about it.
“I hope I’m not sitting beside him,” she recalls thinking.
Lenny had the opposite thought.
“I saw this beautiful lady, and I thought, ‘I hope she’s sitting here,’ ” he remembers.
Lenny was correct — Marsha was sitting in the same row. Not that he switched seats. Marsha grudgingly took the open center seat.
Then her attitude changed.
“He seemed nice and pleasant,” she says, hoping that someone as well-dressed and well-groomed as Lenny was probably a gentleman. “I don’t think we’d even left the tarmac, and we started talking.”
Except for one gap, they’ve barely stopped since — through long-distance phone calls, a 2011 wedding and now as parents of two boys.
It wasn’t love at first sight, however. More like comfort, which developed into a close friendship. After all, they were separated by thousands of miles: Marsha owned her own business in Toronto and Lenny was a long-distance truck driver based in Florida.
But they talked — for hours. Lenny says his phone bills used to be in the four figures.
“My phone bill was like a mortgage,” he chuckles. “I would go over my minutes and be calling AT&T and asking, ‘Is there any way you could work with me?’ ”
The friendship appeared to have run its course in 2008. The two lost touch but still thought of one another. For Lenny, Marsha was the “the girl that got away”; for Marsha, Lenny was a special memory.
There was one time when Marsha called Lenny out of the blue and he didn’t recognize her voice. And he tried other social media services, including MySpace, hoping to stumble across her.
But Facebook put them together again in 2010.
“I sent her a message, and she responded the following day,” Lenny says. “Once we started talking again, it was like we picked up where we left off.”
“He didn’t waste any time,” adds Marsha, who says she was in a better place for a relationship. Marsha ended up moving to Florida. They were married 10 months later.
What’s the secret to their “fairy tale,” as Marsha calls it?
Trust, honesty and respect, they say. And “communication is key,” Marsha adds. She wishes to thank American Airlines, Facebook and AT&T for helping bring them together.
Incidentally, they now have an unlimited plan.
