Same Name Facebook Couple Plan to Marry

By Sarah Klein

Meeting people online is no longer looked down upon the way it often was before the popularization of online dating and social networking sites. And in October, a true testament to this fact will take place, when two people who met on Facebook tie the knot.

This cyberspace love story began late one night last year, when a 20-year-old student from Florida named Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt was cruising around the social networking site. She decided to search for her own name to see who else shared it. (Not a strange thing to do it turns out, as there are even Facebook groups devoted to uniting people with the same name, like this one, with over 300 members all named Matt Smith!)

At the time, Kelly Hildebrandt’s search only had one match—Kelly Carl Hildebrandt, a 24-year-old from Texas. Female Kelly Hildebrandt sent a message to male Kelly Hildebrandt saying hi and pointing out the coincidence. According to CBS News, he was pleasantly surprised and continued the correspondence over Facebook and email for the next three months.

The messages turned into occasional phone calls, which soon became regular phone calls, which soon became hours-long daily phone calls. The Guardian claims they even made sure to check that they weren’t somehow distantly related. A few months later, male Kelly visited female Kelly in Florida and claims he “fell head over heels.” In December, he proposed, leaving an engagement ring hidden in a treasure box for her to find on the beach.

“I thought it was fun,” he said about the first message she sent him. “I had no idea that it would lead to this.”

The Kelly Hildebrandts plan to wed in Florida in October. They’ve decided to include their middle names on the wedding invitations to avoid the confusion that seems to follow them wherever they go – like when a travel agent almost canceled one of their tickets for a cruise, thinking someone had entered the name twice. And despite the “star-crossed” nature of their story, female Kelly does not plan to subject a future generation to similar mistakes. “We’re definitely not going to name our kids Kelly,” she said.