When the 2008 financial crisis hit, it wasn’t easy for David to find work. Hoping for an adventure, he moved to Mallorca for a job as an airport ramp agent. “I was the coordinator between the pilot and the ground staff, telling them when it was OK to deboard the passengers,” he says. “It was minimum wage but I was having so much fun.”
The following August, he bumped into Andrea, who had moved to Spain from her home country of Germany the previous year. “I was a flight attendant for Air Berlin and we had a small base there,” she says. “I spoke Spanish because I’d studied in Barcelona, so I got the job.”
She was preparing for a short-haul flight with the rest of her crew when David came on board. “I’d never seen or spoken to the ramp agent before,” she says. “I could tell he was British because of his accent and because he called me ‘madam’.” David was immediately taken with Andrea: “After I left the plane, I was chatting to the pilot on my headset while he was waiting for a slot to fly. He said we should go out for a beer sometime and I said I would go if he brought his senior flight attendant.” Unbeknown to him, Andrea also liked the look of David. “I went into the cockpit and told the pilot that he seemed like a very nice ramp agent. He told me: ‘He thought the same about you.’”
Despite their mutual attraction, they didn’t see each other for another month, when Andrea was travelling as a passenger with one of her friends. At first David, didn’t recognise her. “She was on a standby flight but the flight was full, and she started waving at me. I thought she was a stranger trying to flirt her way on board,” he laughs. As soon as he realised it was Andrea, he managed to squeeze them on. “I made a mental note to ask for her number the next time I saw her,” he says.
He didn’t have to wait long. “In September, one of her flights came in and when the door swung open Andrea was there. She came out with a big bag of leftover sandwiches from the flight and gave them to me. I thought: ‘I’m in there!’” The pair exchanged numbers and, five days later, David asked if she’d like to go for a drink.
“He waited so long I wasn’t even expecting it,” she says. “We went out and I found him very sweet and charming.” Andrea was struck by their instant connection and says she “trusted him immediately”. David admits he was “head over heels” from that night on. “I wanted to see her every day. My job was seasonal and I didn’t work over the winter so we could spend lots of time together.”
At Christmas, Andrea told him she was being transferred back to Germany for work, as her airline would no longer have a base in Mallorca. “I called him, crying, and he immediately said: ‘OK. I’m coming with you.’” She moved in spring 2010, and he followed a few months later. While Andrea continued her career as a flight attendant, David found bar work, before becoming a consultant in the railway industry in 2012. After getting married in Las Vegas in 2014, they moved around Germany before settling in Frankfurt in 2018. They now have a daughter, born earlier this year.
Andrea says they are a really good team. “I can always rely on him, and he’ll find the right words to comfort me. In 2015, my sister died of cancer, when she was only 38, which was a very hard time for me and my family. He helped me through. If one person is struggling, the other is strong.”
David says his partner is compassionate and empathetic. “I can’t imagine life any other way. She takes care of me.” For Andrea, David is “my family, my best friend and my everything – he’s generous, funny and we just always try to have a good life together.”
