NEWLYWEDS FIND OUT THEY WERE CHILDHOOD SWEETHEARTS
Heidi and Ed Savitt, a married couple who met as students at Newcastle University in 2011, discovered they were childhood sweethearts after Heidi’s mom dug a 20-year-old holiday photo album out of her attic. The pictures showed the two of them holding hands as kids on a family trip to Turkey, when Heidi was six.
The Savitts, both 26 when the story went public on December 26, 2017, had spent years believing they met in a student house in Newcastle. It turned out they had a head start of about two decades.
A dinner, a name and an attic
It started at a dinner with both mothers, Kay Parker (Heidi’s mom) and Fiona (Ed’s mom). Kay mentioned that Heidi once had a “holiday boyfriend” called Ed. The two kids had spent two weeks together in Gumbet, Turkey, and held hands for most of it.
Everyone agreed it was a funny coincidence about the name and moved on to other topics.
About two weeks later, Kay was poking around in her attic when she found a photo album from that holiday. She took one look at the boy named Ed and recognized him as the same Ed her daughter had just married.
“I was screaming, it was just unreal,” Kay told the New York Post.
She sent the pictures straight to Fiona. “Of course, I sent it to Fiona. Then loads more photographs came out,” Kay said. Heidi told The Independent that Ed’s family found “about five other photos” of the two of them together and with their siblings. The images then made the rounds among friends and family on social media.
“None of us had any idea whatsoever that Heidi and Ed had met before university. But during that two-week holiday, they held hands most of the time,” Kay said.
She had a theory about why the grown-up version of the romance went so smoothly. “Perhaps they just had a subconscious realization they had shared that time together when they met as adults,” she said.
Heidi was a little more stunned than philosophical. “It’s crazy to think we could have got married, shared our lives together, but then never found out about this,” she said.
The tumble dryer that brought them together
The second meeting, the one they did remember, came down to laundry.
At Newcastle, Ed moved into a student house that Heidi had lived in before him. He could not work the tumble dryer, found Heidi’s name on some mail and messaged her for help.
That message turned into dating. “From the moment we started dating we were inseparable and knew we were going to be together forever,” Heidi said.
The Independent reported that Ed studied Psychology and Business, while Heidi studied Economics and Management. The paper said the couple lived in London and that Ed owned DropShot Coffee in Southfields.
The wedding and the parents
The couple married in the summer of 2017. The Mirror reported that the ceremony took place in the long gallery at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, and The Independent put the date in August 2017.
The photo album came to light only months after the wedding, which means two families had already toasted the match without knowing the first chapter. According to the Mirror, Kay and her husband Keith Parker became friends with Fiona and her husband Jonathan Savitt, and the two sets of parents regularly holidayed together afterward.
