Some people dream about getting married on a mountain top, others in a beautiful church with stained glass windows, but not Sue Berkeley. All Sue cared about is that she and her husband-to-be, Eli Bob, tie the knot in a place near and dear to her heart, surrounded by all the things and all the people that make her happy. Which is why the Australian couple decided to hold their ceremony at their local Costco store, in Sydney.

At first, the idea of getting married in a store was purely sarcastic. “We were joking one Friday,” Eli explains in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. “People were asking when were were getting married – so I suggested Costco. I know how much she loves it there.”  

Read More »

The internet has revolutionized crowdfunding by creating an unprecedented interconnectedness that allows people from all over the world to hear each other’s stories and help those whose stories touched them in particular. Today, you can send aid to hurricane victims in Florida, help a single mother start her small business in Ohio, and even help this couple from Saskatchewan make their dream wedding a reality, all in just a few clicks.

Jason Mielke and Rebecca Winter Hansen from Saskatchewan, Canada are engaged to be married, but they need some help making their wedding a special one. Young couples ask friends and family for help planning their big day all the time, these two lovebirds are actually asking complete strangers to basically sponsor their nuptials. They’ve set up a website where they try to explain why they opted for crowdfunding to celebrate their union with a wedding that accurately captures their unwavering love instead of simply eloping, and hope that their love story will make people and corporations want to give them a hand.

Read More »

A jealous woman was somehow able to control her ex-boyfriend’s life – forbidding him from seeing other women and even going to certain bars – for two years, by posing as police officers and convincing him that he was part of an investigation.

21-year-old Lauren Adderley and Mitchell Lloyd, 22, both from Shrewsbury, UK, were in a romantic relationship for only two months, in 2014, but even though Lloyd made it clear he wanted nothing more to do with her after that, the young woman spent the next two years making his life a living hell. She put together a sophisticated blackmail plan that was put into motion right after the breakup. Lauren told her ex that she had been the victim of a crime and asked him to provide a statement to the police. He accepted, and was soon contacted by a certain Robert Hay, supposedly a police officer and a friend of Adderley’s family, asking for the statement by email. Little did Mitchell know that Robert Hay was actually an online alias of Lauren’s, and that he would become his biggest nightmare.

Read More »

Proposing with a diamond ring is nice, but it’s been done millions of times, so, in a n effort to be more original, a Chinese man decided to pop the big question to his sweetheart with a different kind of rock – a 33-tonne “meteorite”.

Liu Fei, a young man from Urumqi, China, recently made national headlines after proposing to his girlfriend with a large boulder that he claimed was a “33-tonne meteorite”. On March 14, Liu took his beloved to a public square, where he got down on one knee in a heart made of rose petals and asked her to marry him. As soon as she answered “yes”, a couple of the man’s friends unveiled a strange boulder strategically placed in the middle of the square. Apparently, this wasn’t just any rock, but a meteorite that Liu had bought for 1 million yuan ($145,000), money he had originally saved for a new apartment.

Read More »

They say love knows no boundaries, and the touching story of how a 28-year-old man in Indonesia fell in love with a woman 54 years his senior over the phone and ended up marrying her despite objections from both their families seems to confirm the old saying.

About a year ago, Sofian Loho Dandel, a 28-year-old warehouse worker from the Indonesian island of Mantehage, received a call from an unknown number. Upon answering, he learned that the women on the other end of the line had dialed his number by mistake, while trying to call someone else. Only instead of hanging up and moving on with their lives, the two started making conversation and getting to know each other. Little did either of them know that they were talking to their future spouse.

“A year ago, I received a phone call from an unknown caller, I answered and we came to know each other,” Sofian recently told Indonesian reporters. “Since then, we have constantly kept in contact without knowing her age. I had never dated before, I felt in love.”

Read More »

Open relationships are not that uncommon nowadays, but they usually imply that both partners are allowed to see other people. That’s not the case of Adam Gillet and Beatrice Gibbs, from Milton Keynes, Britain. 27-year-old Adam has agreed to let his 22-year-old girlfriend sleep with other men, for fear that he would otherwise lose her. However, Beatrice is not ok with him seeing other women.

Adam, a warehouse worker, and Beatrice, who works as a makeup artist, met in 2014, on a pub crawl. They had a one night stand, but didn’t officially become a couple until April 2015. However, their romantic relationship appeared to be short-lived,as Beatrice, who wasn’t ready to commit to just one man full-time, decided to end it after just one month. Adam was devastated, but upon hearing that she loved him, but didn’t think she could resist other men, he did what any other men in his shoes would have done – he agreed to let Beatrice have her one nigh-stands, as long as she gave their relationship another chance. They’ve been together ever since.

Beatrice is free to sleep with whoever she wants, whenever she wants, as long as she’s honest with Adam about it. He doesn’t have the same privileges, though, as his girlfriend claims that she couldn’t handle the thought of him being with another woman. Luckily, she apparently has nothing to worry about, as Adam insists he’s not interested in chasing other women.

Read More »

Leading artificial intelligence expert David Levy recently said that he expects human-robot marriages to become commonplace by 2050, and the recently revealed romantic relationship between a French woman and a robot she 3D-printed herself seems to confirm the beginning of this trend.

The first time I saw this story circulating online, I was almost convinced it was just a prank, not because it seems impossible to believe, but because the media tends to blow things out of proportion to attracts as many eyes as possible. However, this one appears to be legit. The woman in question, known only as Lilly, or by her Twitter handle @LillyInMoovator, describes herself as a “proud robosexual” and told News.com.au via email that she is attracted only to robots and actually dislikes physical contact with human flesh.

Read More »

When a code-enforcement officer in Frankfort, Illinois decided to donate half his liver to someone that had never met before, in order to save their life, he had no idea that person would one day become his life partner.

In March 2014, completely out of the blue, 27-years-old Heather Kruger was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer, and learned that she only had a few months left to live. Doctors told her that her only chance for survival was a liver transplant, but with so little time left, waiting for a liver from the state’s transplant list was not the best option, so they suggested finding a living donor. “They immediately told me I was going to need a transplant,” she recalls. “There was not much time to find a donor. By that time I could really feel my body shutting down.”

Her salvation came from a total stranger. Code-enforcement officer Chris Dempsey was in the lunch break room when he overheard Kruger’s cousin, Jack Dwyer, talking about her health problem and how she needed to find a donor or she would die. Dempsey had never heard about this person, let alone met her in person, but he immediately knew he wanted to help. “I spent four years in the Marine Corps and learned there never to run away from anything. So I just said to myself, ‘Hey, if I can help, I’m going to help,'” he says. So Chris just approached Dwyer and told him he wanted to get tested to see if he was a compatible donor, and it turned out that the two were a perfect match.

Read More »

It sounds like one of those funny news articles you read on sites like The Onion, but this one is sadly true. A man from the United Arab Emirates divorced his young wife just days after their wedding, after seeing her makeup free for the first time.

The bizarre news was reported by psychologist Dr Abdul Aziz Asaf, who claims that the 28-year-old woman contacted his clinic to help her overcome the psychological suffering caused by the swift and unexpected divorce. Asaf did not reveal the woman’s identity for reasons of confidentiality, but told Gulf News that she had been engaged to a 34-year-old man for six months, before marrying him. Apparently, he had never seen her without makeup during all that time, because the first time he did, he hardly recognized her. The man accused Asaf’s patient of deceiving him by wearing so many cosmetics, including fake eyelashes, and not looking as pretty as before the wedding.

Read More »

It may not be the classic fairy-tale romance, but the story of how a British 51-year-old trucker met the love of his live is definitely one for the books. Believe it or not, he just found her number scrawled on the wall of a public toilet.

They say love happens when you least expect it, and that was certainly the case for Mark Ellis, a trucker from Brighhouse, West Yorkshire. He was on his way to meet his friends for a drink at a pub in Garfoth when he decided to stop at a public restroom. While going about his business, he noticed a raunchy message scrawled on one of the toilet walls – “If you want a good shag call Donna on . . . [phone number]”. Mark apparently founded very intriguing, because he ended up texting the mysterious number with the message “Hi. What are you up to?” “I was curious to know if it was a real human being,” he recently told The Sun newspaper. “We still laugh about it.”

Read More »

41-year-old Peter Cirk, from Holland, was recently hospitalized after spending 10 days at Changsha Airport, China, hoping to meet a Chinese girl he had met online.

Cirk had met his 26-year-old love interest known only as Zhang on a social network, 2 months ago. The two apparently hit it off, and sick of having 4,500 miles between them, the Dutchman decided to apply for a Chinese visa and go meet Zhang for the first time. He told her he was coming, and even sent her a photo of his travel papers, but when he arrived at Changsha airport, she was nowhere to be seen.

Convinced something was holding Zhang off, but that she would eventually arrive to meet him, Cirk decided to wait for her in the airport. Photos gone viral on Chinese social media show the Dutchman patiently waiting on one of the benches, barefoot and with his baggage by his side. With each passing day, his hopes of meeting his Chinese sweetheart deteriorated, and so did his health. After 10 days spent in Changsha airport, Peter Cirk was exhausted and had to be hospitalized. One photo shows him being taken away in a wheelchair with an IV drip in his arm.

Read More »

When 29-year-old Nina Zgurskaya, from Krasnoyarsk, Russia, started dating the charming director of a law firm, she thought she had finally met the man of her dreams. Little did she know he would one day take her to court for all the expenses incurred during their relationship.

Nina met 38-year-old lawyer at a ski resort and the two of them instantly hit it off. She remembers that the businessman seemed perfect in every way – he was attentive, courteous and calm, offered her flowers and picked her up from work. As their relationship evolved, the man confessed he had been married twice, so when he asked Nina to go on a romantic vacation, she thought he was going to propose.

She dreamed of traveling to a popular tourist destination abroad, but her boyfriend insisted on Feodosia, Crimea. As long as it involved romantic walks on the beach under the moonlight and an unforgettable marriage proposal, she didn’t mind the destination too much. But time passed and her dream guy didn’t seem to have any intention of popping the big question, so after losing her patience, Nina threw a tantrum and the pair got into a fight. The next day, her perfect gentleman threw her out of the hotel room, claiming he had paid for everything. The woman had to call her parents and ask for money for a return ticket, just so she could get back home.

Read More »

Three decades after locking eyes with the woman of his dreams, a British man is finally trying to track her down. It was in 1986 that Vernon Burton briefly glanced at a beautiful woman while traveling on a double-decker bus in the New Forest area of southern England. Most people would forget such a fleeting encounter, but Burton never quite managed to put the mystery woman out of his mind and is now looking for her everywhere.

Vernon, aged 62, was born and grew up in Hythe, a small town on the south coast of Kent. He moved to Canada in the 1970s for work but briefly returned to the UK in 1986 for a holiday. He boarded the top deck of a Solent Blue Line bus from Mousehole Lane to Southampton city center, which is when he made eye contact with a woman on the top deck of another bus headed in the opposite direction.

“For some reason I looked back at that other bus and saw a woman looking back at me,” Vernon recalled. “I came over all light-headed, my stomach felt like it had butterflies and my legs started to shake. The buses started to pull away and I just had to reach my hand out to try not to let her go. To my surprise, she did the same.”

Read More »

Mere minutes after meeting in person for the first time, a California woman and a New York man got hitched at the Ontario International Airport on Friday. They’re now calling their meeting an ‘insta-engagement’ and ‘insta-wedding’, paying tribute to the fact that they first got in touch on Instagram in March last year.

After three days of wedded bliss, Erica Harris and Arte Vann claim they are still madly in love. “I didn’t realise how much I love this man,” Erica, a mother-of-three. “Now we’ve they’ve spent three days together, I can’t believe how much I love him.”

The decision to marry was premeditated; reporters from CBS News were waiting at the airport to film Erica Harris and Arte Vann tie the knot. In fact, Erica was the one who informed CBS about her wedding plans and invited them to record it, so that her new mother-in-law could watch it on TV. “I believe this man deserves a lot of love, and I want to give him the love he gives me,” she said. “[Calling CBS] was a present to his mom, because she wouldn’t be at the wedding since we were eloping.”

Read More »

A Chinese man was recently presented with the ultimate test of love – he was forced to choose between saving his current and ex girlfriends! The two love-struck women jumped into a river to see which one he would save.

The poor man in question is 21-year-old Wu Hsia, who recently broke up with his long-time girlfriend Jun Tang, 20, after falling in love with 22-year-old  Rong Tsao. The ex-girlfriend took the split rather badly and began to harass Wu in the hope that he would leave Rong and come back to her.

Tired of the bickering women, Wu decided to meet with both of them and make his intentions clear. “I was sick of being nagged from both sides,” he said. “Rong was moaning about Jun and Jun was moaning about her and it all got too much.” Unfortunately, the meeting turned out to be a bad idea. Jun and Rong got into an argument, which ended with Jun throwing herself into the river. Rong quickly followed suit.

Read More »