A Woman Was on a 6-Hour Train Ride with Her Boyfriend. When He Fell Asleep, She Met Her Husband

Yahoo

05-06-2025

Maire Clifford met her future husband, Andy Bain, on a train to Edinburgh while her then-boyfriend slept beside her.
The two instantly clicked, stayed in touch, and reconnected months later — eventually falling in love without even sharing a first kiss.
Bain proposed at a train station with his grandmother's ring, and Clifford said yes, calling their meeting a moment of fate.A traveler took the 'never let your boyfriend stop you from meeting your husband' meme to heart on one fateful train ride.
Maire Clifford shares the unlikely story of how she met her husband in 2000 while making the six-hour train trip from London to Edinburgh, Scotland with her then-boyfriend in an exclusive interview with CNN, Shortly after departing, she recalls, her beau fell asleep beside her and the events that followed changed her life.
'I was like, 'Okay, this is going to be really boring,'' Clifford remembers. 'So I went through to the smoking carriage.' It was empty except for one man, Andy Bain, sitting beside his large backpack.
She asked him for a light, which he happily provided, and the conversation flowed from there. 'I just remember being struck by how easy…like there was a real sense of familiarity,' she said. Bain was traveling back from a journey through Zanzibar and Tanzania, where he'd been contemplating his life and relationships.
'I'd kind of not had a great relationship prior to Maire, and not really any great relationships, I guess,' Bain explained. 'I'm not putting any blame or anything. People just are wrong for each other, but I made this conscious decision that I wasn't going to be seeking a relationship.'
After flying back to London, he missed his original train, which landed him on the same one as Clifford. Their meeting, he says, made him 'believe in fate.'
'Not only was it immediately after I'd kind of said, 'I'm going to open myself up to the world,' but I'd missed the train that I was supposed to be on,' he said. 'And then the first person that I really met after that decision, through that kind of happy accident, was Maire.'
In return, Clifford praised Bain for being 'a certain type of person to be able to notice those special moments when they happen.'
As for Clifford's sleeping boyfriend, he remained in his slumber for the duration of the train journey, giving her and Bain six hours to get to know one another, platonically at the time.
'I don't remember thinking, 'She's really hot,' you know, or anything like that," he says, "It was just, 'She's really cool.' And it was really, really nice just to have just such an easy conversation with someone.'
At the end of the trip, the two swapped emails before Clifford returned to her original car and her snoozing beau. About a week later, she sent Bain an email and they kept in contact for months, speaking more frequently and eventually advancing to phone calls. By that point, she says, the boyfriend from the train ride was out of the picture.
The two eventually met up in London, still as friends, and then she planned a trip up to Edinburgh for Hogmanay (Scottish New Year's Eve).
During a late night talk on that visit, he asked her, 'Do you believe in soulmates, because I think that you're mine,'' she recalled. And days later, the two professed their love to one another.
Though the two hadn't even shared a kiss up to this point, Bain explained that it was their shared values and experiences that made him realize his feelings for her were more than friendly.
From there, the two dated long-distance, but after a few months, he moved to London and shortly thereafter.
He proposed with his late grandmother's ring, which he wore on a necklace. 'We were in Paddington Station, amongst all the Burger King wrappers or whatever… And so I got my ring off my neck, I got down on one knee, and I said, 'Will you marry me?''
Clifford said 'yes' and recalled dreaming about Bain's grandparents that night, welcoming her into their family.
Read the original article on People