Newlyweds who used a special app to pinpoint their first ever meeting place have celebrated their love by getting matching tattoos done of the three words showing the location.
After matching on a dating app, Lee Kingham-Italia, 33, and Aerjay Kingham-Italia, 27, a software engineer, first met on New Year’s Day 2020 in London’s Trafalgar Square after using the what3words app to find each other – signalling the start of a transatlantic romance.
Now living together in Calgary, Canada, Lee – who is originally from Banbury, Oxfordshire, said: “Like any modern love story, we first met on Tinder.”
He added: “Aerjay was on holiday in London at the time visiting friends and we matched on the dating app.
“We were chatting back and forth and Aerjay had asked me for a couple of food recommendations.
“After a few days, I suggested we try out one of the food places together.”
But, as Aerjay was unfamiliar with the city, Lee decided to use the location app, what3words, to pinpoint a meeting place.
He said: “I got Aerjay to download the app so we could find a place to meet up.
“We were going for food near Trafalgar Square and I chose a spot outside the nearby Canadian Embassy.”
Sharing the three words, sage.trick.solved, with Aerjay, which identified a three-metre radius outside the embassy, the pair met face-to-face on New Year’s Day 2020.
Lee said: “I knew it would be busy in central London that day, with hundreds of people crowding round to see the New Year’s Day parade.
“Luckily, the what3words app made it easy for us to find each other and on that day we went out for food and watched the parade together.”
But the pair only had a few days before Aerjay was due to fly back to his home in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Lee, a customer support manager, who is currently looking for a job in Canada, said: “As luck would have it, I was flying to Montreal just a month later for work, so I added on a two-week holiday to the trip to visit Aerjay in Calgary.
“Then, just two months after that, I was in Arizona, so I made a detour to Canada to see Aerjay.”
He added: “I don’t think we ever had a proper chat about whether we were in a relationship, but we were flying back and forth across the Atlantic to see each other, so it was clear that it was serious.”
But, not long after the trip, the first lockdown hit in March 2020.
Lee said: “When the pandemic hit, it put a stop to us seeing each other in person for a while.”
He added: “It was a long time before I was able to get back to Canada, but the British rules were more relaxed, so Aerjay managed to visit four times in 2020 and early 2021.”
Then, in September 2021, Lee decided to move to Calgary permanently to be with Aerjay.
He said: “We’d done the long distance thing for nearly two years before I moved over.”
He added: “I have quite a few tattoos and just before I left England, I paid one last visit to my local tattooist to get something done.
“I wanted a tattoo to mark our relationship, but I didn’t want anything clichéd, I wanted to get something different.
“That’s when I started thinking about where we first met and the three-word code we’d used to meet up.”
The what3words address was sentimental for the couple and Lee spent £80 having the words sage.trick.solved inked on to the back of his right leg at a shop called Empire Tattoos in Banbury, taking 45 minutes.
He said: “It’s something different that is special to us, so it felt like the perfect thing to have tattooed.
“Aerjay wanted to get the same tattoo done on his arm, so I paid for it as his birthday present in April this year.”
Aerjay’s tattoo was inked along the side of his left forearm at a shop called Eternal Image in Calgary, costing $150CAD (£96) and taking 45 minutes.
After Aerjay proposed to Lee at Moraine Lake in the Rocky Mountains, in September 2021, the couple tied the knot in a small ceremony in Calgary in November 2021.
And they are planning a big wedding in the UK to take place on the second anniversary of their legal wedding.
Aerjay said: “We have family from different parts of the world coming to our wedding in the UK and it’s there that we’ll be able to celebrate properly with everyone we love.”
Not taking any chances of people guests getting lost in the Northamptonshire countryside on their way to the venue, they have turned to their location app again.
Aerjay said: “We’ve included a what3words address on our wedding invites so everyone knows where to go.”
He added: “The venue is in the middle of nowhere, so it’ll be easy for people to get lost, but the location code will pinpoint exactly where they need to go.
“We have so many special places in our relationship now. The place we first met, where we got engaged and soon, our UK wedding venue. We’ll end up having a list of places tattooed on our bodies!
“The three words we have mean so much to us both and getting them tattooed felt like an obvious thing to do.
“We’re so happy with how the tattoos turned out. We love being able to pinpoint the exact place it all began.”
