One morning, Ruben checked his email, and he found a note intended for someone else. “I discovered it said RP Salazar followed by two numbers,” he says. “I figured, ‘Hey, my email is the same exact thing without the numbers, so they probably sent it to the wrong person.”

Ruben, 39, noticed that this other RP Salazar was in Bangkok, so when he forwarded the email, he added his own little message. “Something to the effect of ‘Hi, Rachel, it seems as if this message came to me instead of you. I’m in Waco, Texas, U.S.A. Have a great day. P.S. How’s the weather there in Bangkok?'”

Rachel, 44, is originally from the Philippines but was living in Thailand at the time. For her, that first email exchange on Jan. 10, 2007, started it.

“Then every conversation that we had right from the get-go was just natural,” she says.