What would you do if you woke up one morning to a random text from a stranger?
Chances are you may assume it’s spam, delete the message and maybe even block the number for good measure. However by doing this you may be missing out on meeting the love of your life.
Sounds unlikely, we know, but a cheeky text to an unknown number blossomed into a 23-year-marriage for couple Donovan and Kirsty Shears.
Rewind back to the year 1998 and Donovan received his first mobile phone for his 18th birthday.
Now, it’s worth noting that the phones at the turn of the millennium were an entire lifetime away from today’s smartphones of today. Rather than scrolling for hours through social media, phone users only had snake to entertain themselves, which means people had to get creative when it came to keeping themselves entertained.
For Donovan, this involved making up a bunch of numbers and firing off a simple ‘hello’ text.
After sending out the electronic equivalent of a message in a bottle, the former DJ received a response – from a woman named Kirsty who lived 100 miles away.
“I’d only just got the mobile so assumed it was from somebody I’d given my number to so just responded to it saying ‘hi who’s this?'” she recalled of meeting.
“It came back ‘Don’ and we just started chatting from there.”
Unable to send photos to each other, the pair were forced to describe their physical appearances over text – something which sounds like a cat-fishers dream.
Recalling how Donovan described himself over text, Kirsty said: “I asked him what he looked like and he said he was 6ft 6ins and I thought ‘is he really?’ Luckily he really is that tall so I wasn’t being catfished via text.”
It would take six months from the initial messages being sent before Kirsty and Donovan met in person, after she travelled from Cleethorpes to meet him in Coventry.
“I said to my stepsister, I’ve got to go and meet this guy, and she was like, ‘He could be anyone’, and I was like, ‘Yes, I know’, but I was 18 and didn’t really think about consequences,” she said.
“I just got on a train and came to Coventry.”
Donovan would take her to a local nightclub before getting a kebab and the rest, as they say, is history.
The couple later tied the knot in 2002 and now share two children together – nine-year-old son Stirling and six-year-old daughter Alora – proving that a ‘happy ever after’ can come from the most unlikely of places.
“She is an amazing woman,” Donovan said of Kirsty. “She’s so intelligent and we know each other so well, she’s my best friend as well as my wife.”
