When Finlay McAfee boarded a flight from Edinburgh to Paris to surprise his girlfriend, Salma, he knew it was a grand, romantic gesture.
«I wasn’t trying to compare it to some movie or a rom-com,» McAfee says.
Still, anyone who has watched a few films in their life knows that an unexpected visit to one of the most beautiful cities in the world, not to mention a surprise reunion at the airport, is the setup for plenty of great cinematic moments.
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It was January 2017, and McAfee was a 23-year-old student at the University of Edinburgh. Before booking the ticket, he ran the idea past his roommate, Adam Jenkins. Jenkins laughed and said it was silly, but romantic.
McAfee rang his dad for the final seal of approval. His father said it was a wonderful idea, so McAfee took the plunge: the ticket was booked.
Meanwhile, his girlfriend, then 21-year-old Salma Saade, was making her way back to Edinburgh from Beirut.
Saade had a one-day layover planned in Paris, and she was travelling alone. McAfee decided he would surprise her at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
In theory, what could possibly go wrong? There aren’t many flights between Beirut and Paris, so McAfee was fairly sure he had worked out which one Saade was on.
Little did McAfee know that as he was boarding his flight from Edinburgh to Paris, Saade was already touching down in the Scottish capital.
As it turned out, she had switched to an earlier flight with exactly the same goal: to surprise her partner and reunite a day sooner.
The couple had no idea they were both in Edinburgh Airport at the very same moment. Worse still, the Scottish airport is so small that they could easily have bumped into each other. And if Saade had texted McAfee the second she landed, he might never have boarded his flight at all.
«It’s crazy to think there’s probably a spot in Edinburgh Airport where we literally walked right past each other,» McAfee says.
The Missed Meeting
Fast-forward to January 2021, and Saade and McAfee are still together, now living in London, where McAfee works as a software engineer and Saade works for the Scottish National Party.
Today they are chatting over Zoom, sharing a coffee at their kitchen table, reminiscing about the early days of their relationship and that near miss.
«We’d only been dating three months,» McAfee says.
«Yeah, about two and a half months,» says Saade. «It was our first time apart.»
«We really missed each other,» McAfee says.
«The first separation is so hard,» Saade agrees.
When Saade stepped off the plane in Edinburgh, she decided not to get in touch with McAfee straight away. She was tired from the flight, and she wanted to go home first, take a shower, get ready, and then head over to his flat and surprise him.
«I was all set to go back to my boyfriend... and then I realised we weren’t in the same place,» she laughs.
Saade figured out that something had gone wrong when, back at her flat, she messaged McAfee’s roommate.
«Hi Adam, do you happen to know if Finlay’s at the flat?» she wrote. «I’m back a day early and I want to surprise him.»
«He’s just flown to Paris,» Adam replied. «To do the exact same thing. Literally.»
Saade couldn’t believe it.
«I genuinely thought he was joking.»
She quickly fired off a message to her boyfriend: «Please tell me you’re not in Paris, lol.»
When no reply came, she tried calling him. When McAfee didn’t pick up, the realisation of what had happened started to sink in.
«It was a combination of disbelief, and I don’t know, I was upset, but I also thought it was really funny,» Saade says.
- Please tell me you’re not in Paris, lol
- COME BACK I’M HERE
- HERE AS IN EDINBURGH, NOT PARIS
- SORRY I WAS TRYING TO BE CUTE
- COME BACK NOW
- Hahahaha
- Wow
- I’m in Paris
- I KNOW
- COME BACK
- I’ve just landed
«COME BACK I’M HERE,» she typed. «HERE AS IN EDINBURGH, NOT PARIS.»
«SORRY I WAS TRYING TO BE CUTE. COME BACK NOW.»
«Hahaha,» McAfee replied, equally unable to believe his surprise had backfired so dramatically. «Wow. I’m in Paris.»
Saade booked McAfee a hotel at the Paris airport for the night, while McAfee updated his Facebook status:
«Anyone in Paris? I flew out to surprise Salma, but she flew back to surprise me, and now I’ve got 12 hours to kill.»
It got 173 likes, and the comments came pouring in: «This situation deserves a trophy,» one friend wrote.
«Your love is killing the planet,» said another.
No friends turned out to be in Paris, so McAfee took a solo winter stroll around the sights, snapping a melancholy photo of himself in front of Notre-Dame and getting that obligatory shot of the illuminated Eiffel Tower.
The next day he flew back to Edinburgh. Saade met him at the airport, her second visit in as many days.
She was just so happy to see him, she says, and relieved that everything was back under control after it had all so unexpectedly gone haywire.
«A Great Story to Introduce Yourself»
Because they’d only been dating a short while, the couple hadn’t yet met each other’s families.
Over the years it has become «a really great story to introduce yourself with,» McAfee says.
«Every time I meet Salma’s family, we tell this story, and they say, ‘This guy is just an idiot,’» he laughs.
«We’re not a very impulsive couple,» Saade says. «Other than this story, I think we have a very normal relationship. Which is why I find it even funnier that we both made a really impulsive decision when neither of us is especially impulsive.»
It reinforced something they had already begun to suspect, that they had a good foundation for a lasting relationship, and that they were falling in love.
Saade and McAfee met in the autumn of 2016 on Tinder. It was a first Tinder date for both of them, and it was a success.
They quickly discovered they had a friend in common. That friend had actually been in a student play McAfee directed, and Saade had come to watch the performance, but their paths hadn’t crossed directly at the time.
When they finally did meet, the two hit it off fast. They spent their days exploring their historic hometown of Edinburgh together, and their second date was a memorable trip to the city’s underground vaults.
The World Reacts
On 12 January of this year, Saade was reminded of the eventful trip to Paris through Facebook’s «Memories» feature, where old posts from years gone by resurface in your feed.
The memory made Saade smile, as it always does, and she decided to write about it on Twitter.
«I usually only tweet about politics,» Saade says.
But she thought this slightly more personal post might bring others a little joy, just as it did her.
«Happy 4th anniversary to the time I flew to Edinburgh to surprise Finlay, and he flew to Paris to surprise me, and this is why we don’t do surprises anymore,» she wrote, along with screenshots of their messages and Finlay’s sad Facebook status.
Since then the tweet has racked up more than 1 million likes and over 150,000 retweets and quotes. Their story went viral, much to the couple’s astonishment.
«The whole Twitter reaction was really amazing and lovely,» McAfee says. «It’s strange that so many people responded to it, and almost everything everyone said was really kind.»
Saade says people reached out to her from all over the world with sweet messages.
«Though comparing us to Ross and Emily [from the show ‘Friends’] isn’t the best comparison,» she laughs.
Over the years, Saade and McAfee have enjoyed other memorable holidays, ones where they both actually managed to be in the same place at the same time.
Among them are a snowy trip through Iceland and a visit to the stunning Roman ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon, where Saade has family.
Right now the couple are in lockdown together in their London flat. It has been a little surreal, they say, watching their story spread across the world while they barely left the house.
As for Paris, the couple still haven’t managed to get there together. They had actually hoped to go last year, but the Covid-19 pandemic put an end to those plans.
But seeing their story travel around the world, and having spent the past week reflecting on that fateful day, they’ve only grown more determined to reach the City of Light together one day.
