CARDIFF — A chance holiday friendship that began on a Greek island in 1994 has become a marriage three decades in the making. David McArdle and Jodie McArdle, who first exchanged addresses as teenagers on the island of Kos, now live together in Cardiff and return each August to the same apartments where their correspondence started.
David, from Newcastle, was vacationing with his family when he joined a group of 12 children from different families who spent the week together. Jodie, then 15 and two years his junior, was among them. The pair decided to keep in touch after the trip, and theirs was the only friendship from the group that survived the holiday.
"You know how kids hang out on holiday, we were all just around the pool table and we decided to swap addresses and be pen pals," David told Talk to the Press. He added that he and Jodie were the only ones who stayed in contact, exchanging a letter roughly once a month for years.
The correspondence ended after three years when David moved and the two lost track of one another. They followed separate paths for the next two decades. Then, roughly 20 years after the letters stopped, a message from Jodie arrived on his mother's phone: "Happy birthday from me and the girls."
"I couldn't believe I found her again," David told Talk to the Press. "I said to my mum, 'I didn't know you had Jodie's number.'" He responded at once to identify himself, then waited 15 anxious minutes for a reply from Jodie, a teaching assistant.
The delay, it turned out, was emotional rather than indifferent. Jodie told him she was overjoyed to hear from him and had been sobbing while reading the message. She had wanted to reach out previously but held back because she believed he was in a relationship and did not want to cause trouble.
The two spent the next two years on the phone before arranging to see each other in person for the first time in 24 years. David made the 300-mile drive to Cardiff, where they sat on a sofa and talked for 12 hours. He returned to visit her again two weeks later.
After three years of dating, David proposed at the top of the London Eye Ferris wheel, and the couple soon married. "And we haven't looked back since," he told Talk to the Press.
The McArdles' story spans 32 years from that first meeting on Kos to their life together in Cardiff, with an annual August pilgrimage back to the island serving as a reminder of how it all began.
