In the early winter of 2023, sweethearts Calivé and Shannon Jackson eloped from their homes in Trinidad and Tobago to get married. They had planned to tie the knot on the beaches of Playa Del Carmen, a modern Mexican town by the Caribbean Sea. They arrived at the wedding destination on December 16, 2023, as planned. During the ceremony, something happened that made their big day even more memorable.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | edwardeyer
They had planned every detail of the wedding a year in advance. On the big day, their ceremony went smoothly, with sunlight falling on the powdery sands and turquoise waters of the Mexican beach. They both were slightly nervous. Their eyes were wet with happy tears. “It was pretty embarrassing how we were crying so hard,” Calivé told CNN.
Just then, when the time came for them to exchange their rings, the couple encountered a fly in the ointment. To their utter shock, they had lost the rings. They rummaged through their pockets and sifted through their stuff, but the rings were nowhere to be found. In this notable moment of their life, everything came to a standstill, at least for a few moments.
“Everything paused all at once then, everyone started looking; us, our wedding planner, our officiant,” she said. “Someone ran back to our room and still didn’t find them; we searched our photographer’s backpack and didn’t find them either.” Their conundrum was finally solved by an Argentinian couple, two of the onlookers who noticed that the wedding couple looked distressed and approached them to offer help.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | caleboquendo
Once they knew what was wrong, the Argentinian couple readily offered their wedding rings to the bride and groom. The couple tied the knot by exchanging the borrowed rings. They were stunned by how perfectly the rings fit them. “We didn’t think they would fit,” she said. “But they fit so perfectly it felt like some kind of magic.” However, Calivé realized that she didn’t even ask the names of the Argentinian couple. They returned with their rings, as soon as the ceremony was over.
A few weeks later, Calivé posted about the heartfelt gesture of the Argentinian couple on X. Her post has been viewed over 3.4 million times. “We are beyond grateful. Our wedding day was already special because we were there to celebrate our love, our happiness, the home we built with each other and we thought we were there alone,” Jackson told CNN.
Later that day, the Jacksons did find their rings inside a pouch at the bottom of an equipment bag. The little hiccup caused in the ceremony by the missing rings will forever remind them of two strangers who shared their priced heirlooms with them, in the most auspicious moment of their lives. “We can never thank those two enough for that,” the Jackson couple said.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.