When UK woman Mandy Ashforth was 17, she met a boy named Barrie Moat during a girls weekend with her friends in Bridlington, Yorkshire. The pair immediately hit it off and ended up spending the night together. Ashforth was leaving to go back home the following day, but she and Moat made plans to meet a week later at a bus station in her town.
The following week, she stood waiting at that bus stop for two hours, but Moat never showed.
"I went home brokenhearted," Ashforth told The Mirror.
For the next three decades, she was never really able to get Moat out of her head. She made attempts to track him down on the Internet over the years, to no avail.
Then, after Ashforth separated from her husband earlier this year, she tried to look up Moat on Facebook once again. She had always spelled his name "Barry," but on this day -- for whatever reason -- she tried spelling it "Barrie." And then his profile popped up.
She sent him a friend request and he accepted. Ashforth then sent him a message asking if he had gone to Bridlington in 1982 and met a girl there.
Sure enough, he had. They began texting frequently, making up for lost time and catching up on each other's lives. A month later, they met in person and the chemistry they shared 31 years ago was still alive and well.
In June, five months after they reunited, Moat proposed. Now the couple is planning their July 2014 wedding.
“Even though we spent less than 24 hours together and he stood me up on our next date, I never stopped thinking about Barrie," Ashforth told The Mirror. "I always thought of him as my first real love and despite the number of years that passed, I always dreamt that one day I would see him again. I still have to pinch myself that we are finally a couple and planning to spend the rest of our lives together.”
In September, we heard about another couple -- Loraine Atkins and Terry McGurk -- who also reconnected after decades apart. McGurk had written more than 100 love letters to Atkins during their high school romance, and Atkins never threw them away; she even turned to them while going through her divorce. Thirty years after their relationship had ended, she decided to contact McGurk on Facebook and the rest is history.
For more on Ashforth and Moat's story, head over to The Mirror.
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