Man finds himself in fiancée's childhood beach photo

People in love often like to look for signs that they truly belong together — “We both love the color blue!” “My horoscope said so!” — and sometimes, those signs are there even when you’re not looking. Shortly after getting engaged, Verona Koliqi and Mirand Buzaku discovered a delightful coincidence in a photo from 10 years ago.

“My cousin found this photo on her computer, and she sent it over to me on my phone to laugh about how we looked when we were younger,” Koliqi tells Yahoo Lifestyle. The photo shows a group of kids posing in the ocean at a beach in Montenegro. She showed it to her fiancé, and they poked fun at her “tomboy” look. But then Buzaku peered closer at the kid in the background of the pic, lying on a float just like the one he used to have.

“He said, ‘Hold up, I think that’s me!’ ” Koliqi recalls. “We both looked at each other and said, ‘No way, that can’t be true.'”

Everything in the photo matched Buzaku’s memory of how he would hang out in the water — down to the white T-shirt. Because it was still hard to believe, they turned to his family, who confirmed that they’d gone to that same beach at the same time. What’s wild about this is that she was visiting from London at the time, and he was visiting from Kosovo.

“I never knew something like this could happen, even though I’ve heard a saying: ‘You will have passed your soul mate at least once way before you actually meet up,'” she says.

Koliqi still lives in the U.K., but she was visiting Kosovo (also her home country), in the summer of 2016, when her path once again crossed with Buzaku’s. This time they actually noticed each other.

“We exchanged looks every day we saw each other but did nothing,” she says. Finally, she made the first move by liking one of his photos on Instagram. A year later, he proposed to her at a resort in Turkey.

“I had no clue he was going to propose to me, because in our country’s tradition, engagements are planned and have to be agreed by both beforehand,” Koliqi says. He arranged for music and a photographer when he got down on one knee in a restaurant.

Koliqi, who usually posts examples of her makeup artistry on her Instagram, shared the photo of her engagement beside the photo of their childhood almost-meeting on her account. The post has more than 30,000 likes now. People clearly love a good romantic coincidence.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

• Female doctors share what it’s really like to be a woman in medicine

• Sidebarring is the new social media sin you’ve already committed

• Texas students were forced to do ‘bear crawls’ at school, and the internet has a lot of feelings

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.