What’s the Weirdest Coincidence You Ever Experienced?

Whether you believe in fate, or destiny, or that some other higher power exists that influences who we meet or what we do, we’ve all experienced coincidences that seem too wild to be true. I came across this coincidence in my Twitter feed yesterday, and it might as well be the plot of a rom-com that I would absolutely watch:

I found this sock & note in my lobby 4 yrs ago & posted w/the caption: “Whoever wrote this is my new favorite neighbor.”

Since then I’ve gotten divorced, moved out of the building, & started dating someone

& I just realized the person I’m dating is the one who wrote this note pic.twitter.com/e9YdkSHBrJ

— Amy Shearn (@amyshearn) January 21, 2021

That tweet prompted the Lifehacker staff to spend a full 45 minutes talking about the various coincidences we’ve each experienced (in-between actually working, of course). Partners who once lived in the same apartment building but never crossed paths. Discovering a “social media friend/acquaintance” you’ve interacted with online for years but never actually met lives next door. Two coworkers who once figured out that their dads lived next door to each other — and were best friends — when they were little kids.

Lifehacker Senior Health Editor Beth Skwarecki met her husband in college. It turns out they both also had the same second-choice college in mind — which they both almost attended. And both were two small and fairly random schools, especially given they were studying different majors.

“So there’s a parallel universe where absolutely nothing is different except that there’s a different name on the old college sweatshirt that I still wear sometimes,” she tells me.

The one that made me laugh the most came from our personal finance writer, Mike Winters:

“My life only has inconsequential, small-yet-improbable coincidences,” he tells me. “I was talking about ASMR once while walking around the neighbourhood, and mid-sentence I saw ‘ASMR’ on a licence plate (I have a witness).”

Don’t doubt him — he has a witness. (This was in Ontario, he says, in case you think he’s adding an extra letter to embellish the story.)

My favourite genre of these coincidences is the “could have/should have met my partner much sooner than I did” variety, but I’ve learned that any old “was saying a thing and then saw it on a licence plate” coincidence will entertain me. So tell us in the comments: What’s the weirdest coincidence you have ever experienced?