- Bride-to-be Audrey Roberts tells PEOPLE she recently was deleting old videos on her phone when she noticed a man in the background of one of the clips and recognized him as her fiancé Ethan Somoza
- The video had been taken three months before the couple ever met
- Now, Roberts credits the “invisible string theory” for bringing the pair together when the timing was finally right
A bride-to-be made a startling discovery while deleting some old videos on her phone to make room for her newly-taken engagement photos.
Audrey Roberts tells PEOPLE she noticed a man in the background of one of the clips and immediately recognized him as her fiancé, Ethan Somoza. “I was like, ‘OMG that’s Ethan in the background! I can’t delete this!’ ” she recalls thinking.
While Somoza, 28, makes plenty of appearances in her camera roll — after all, the couple has been together for more than two years — it was the date of the video that stopped Roberts, 29, in her tracks. “The video was taken in January of 2023, which was three months before we ever met,” she reveals.
The video was filmed when Roberts was living in Greenville, S.C., and happened to be attending the hockey game of a friend’s boyfriend. As it turns out, Somoza was there, too, as one of the players on the ice.
“I was trying to take a cute video of my friend Abby hugging her boyfriend as he came out after the game to see her,” Roberts says, describing the clip. “I sent her the video and never looked at it again — until recently, when I saw Ethan in the background.”
Roberts and Somoza once again ended up in the same place at the same time three months later, when Roberts joined Abby and some of her friends — including Ethan, who played on the same hockey team as Abby’s boyfriend — at a brewery.
While Roberts says she never saw Somoza that day, he definitely noticed her, later asking Abby who she was and tracking her down on Instagram. “A few weeks after that, he introduced himself and asked me on a date,” she recalls.
Their relationship grew, and in August 2024, Roberts quit her job as a nurse and the couple moved together to Budapest, Hungary, for Somoza’s hockey career. They got engaged in the scenic city last month.
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After finding the old video — and being struck by just how serendipitously their love story came to be — Roberts shared the clip in a post on TikTok that has since gone viral, garnering more than 5 million views.
She wrote over the video, “She doesn’t know it yet but the random guy that looks at her in the background of this video will end up being her fiancé and she will quit her job and move across the world with him.”
Reflecting on how it felt to discover the 2023 video, Roberts tells PEOPLE, “I was shocked getting a glimpse of Nathan before we ever knew each other and comparing it to where our relationship is now. It’s so weird to think there was a point in time that neither of us knew the other existed and now we are about to get married.”
Somoza was equally floored by the fateful footage. “When we saw the video, we couldn’t stop watching it and double-, triple-checking the date on it,” Roberts says. “We couldn’t believe it. It was just so random!”
The bride-to-be credits the “invisible string theory,” a concept that suggests that the universe keeps two people apart until the timing is right. When the pair finally do get together, they will discover certain coincidences as if a greater force was guiding them all along.
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“Even though there was reason Nathan was in the background of the video due to him being on the same team as Abby’s boyfriend, I do think this was the invisible string theory because I feel like there was a reason we met when we did,” Roberts tells PEOPLE.
“When the video was filmed, neither of us were looking for relationships or in the right place for one, then meeting several months later at what felt like the perfect time, I just [think] there was no other way to explain it,” she continues, adding, “I’m so thankful for all the little things that added up in order for us to meet and get to this point.”
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