Her teenage summer crush unexpectedly came back into her life. ‘I felt like I was reconnecting with my best friend’

(CNN) — Years afterward, Iga Olszak often thought about the moment she first spotted Vlad Dimovski, on the sandy shores of Skotina, in Greece.

Iga was 16, Vlad was 18. He was laughing with friends. Then pushed his long hair out of his eyes, met Iga’s eye, and smiled.

“I remember feeling very excited about him,” Iga tells CNN Travel today.

Iga first saw Vlad in the summer of 2005. She was on vacation from Poland, at a summer camp in Greece. Vlad visited Skotina every summer from his home in what is now North Macedonia. The beach, in the foothills of Mount Olympus, was a home away from home for Vlad and he was always surrounded by a gang of friends.

While Iga was intrigued by Vlad, she was “also kind of reserved.” For the first few days, they circled each other, but didn’t talk.

Then, one evening Iga was sitting on the beach in a circle with her camp friends, while Vlad was sitting close by, in a separate circle, with his group.

“At some point we all started sitting together,” recalls Iga. “Then Vlad came up to me so he could talk to me, and we sat next to each other on the beach, chatting, having a conversation. And it went from there.”

Vlad noticed Iga right away, too. He had “so many good memories” of summers relaxing at Skotina beach. He knew all the regulars, and Iga stood out. He remembers the way she walked down the beach, recalls noticing her immediately, wanting to talk to her.

Once they did speak, Iga and Vlad quickly became inseparable.

“Every day we spent time together,” Iga recalls. “On the beach, or going hiking, chatting…”

The two communicated in English – a little tricky as Iga wasn’t as confident in the language as Vlad.

“But Vlad was helping me with certain words so we could communicate better,” says Iga.

Iga and Vlad spent the next two weeks in each other’s company. Looking back, Iga’s overwhelming memory of their time together was “feeling very safe.” She found Vlad to be kind, respectful, funny. She wasn’t exactly in love – they were technically just friends – but she had a pretty heady crush.

Vlad felt the same way. He describes their connection as “a friendship, but also a willingness to be together.” He felt like they were drawn to each other.

But both Vlad and Iga were realistic that this connection might not last.

“We had a really great time,” says Iga. “But I was still in high school. We lived very different lives in terms of being in different countries. There was no way for us to have a future. So that’s also what I remember feeling – feeling like it was exciting, but also knowing there was an end to it.”

This end rolled around all too quickly. Iga and Vlad said their goodbyes when the camp came to an end. Social media was still in its early days in 2005, but the two exchanged email addresses.

Back home in Poland, Iga classified Vlad in her head as “just a friend.”

“But even my mom remembers how excited I was when I got his first email,” says Iga. “We kept that conversation going for the next two years.”

Over that period, Iga and Vlad wrote back and forth about their thoughts on family, friends, travel, their studies, their hopes and dreams.

“Both of us were having our own lives, but we just felt connected,” says Iga. “We exchanged probably over 100 emails.”

“I couldn’t wait to receive an email from her,” says Vlad. “They meant a lot to me.”

The two found other ways to stay connected, including chatting via instant messenger.

“We’d download songs and listen to the album at the same time,” recalls Vlad. “Then we’d sit all night, talking about the songs for hours.”

In time, Vlad realized he was talking more to Iga than any of his other summer friends – really more than anyone in his day-to-day life.

Iga had a similar realization.

“We spent a lot of time chatting and writing emails. We sent each other pictures of what’s going on in our lives,” recalls Iga, who found herself often looking back at photos they’d taken together that summer, posing together.

Occasionally, Iga and Vlad would float the idea of meeting up again, but no concrete plans ever materialized.

And in time both Iga and Vlad entered relationships with other people.

“After that, I felt like, ‘I cannot really meet up with you, because I have a boyfriend,’” recalls Iga. “It felt like a great friendship, and I really wanted to meet him again – but I felt stuck in that I couldn’t do it, really.”

As their respective romances got more serious, the emails gradually died off.

“At some point, we just stopped having contact,” says Iga.

But Vlad never deleted his emails from Iga. He often thought of her fondly.

Meanwhile, Iga always felt grateful for her friendship with Vlad, and sad that it had dwindled.

When Facebook became omnipresent, the two connected there. They communicated sporadically – one time when they realized they just missed each other in Germany, another time Vlad posted a throwback photo to the summer in Greece – but it was intermittent and surface level.

“Losing touch was natural,” Vlad reflects today. “It comes with the distance.”

10 years later

Time moved on. Iga went to college, graduated and relocated from Poland to Germany. She got married, and then divorced within a year. It was a tough period.

Meanwhile Vlad’s work took him to the US, and he moved there permanently in 2015. Vlad saw the move as a new start following a recent break-up.

“I promised myself, when I go to the US, I won’t get into a relationship for at least a year,” he recalls.

Vlad had only been living and working in Chicago for a month or so, when, out of the blue, a message popped up on his phone. It was from Iga.

She was transiting through the Republic of Macedonia (which changed its name to North Macedonia after a 2019 referendum) and had a layover in the airport, not far from Vlad’s hometown. She’d dropped him a message, on the off chance he might be around and interested in a catchup, 10 years on.

But Vlad was on the other side of the world, in the US. When he saw Iga’s message he went from excitement to disappointment in the space of a few minutes, surprising himself by how sad he felt to miss Iga.

Vlad’s reply – explaining he’d moved to the US, saying how he wished he could have seen Iga – started a back and forth between the old friends on Facebook messenger.

The messages – just like their teenage emails – went deep quickly. Iga and Vlad started talking every day, catching each other up on their lives, filling in the blanks over the past decade.

“It got really intense quickly,” says Iga. “I felt like I was reconnecting with my best friend, with someone very dear to me.”

“It was so nice and refreshing to talk to Iga,” says Vlad.

Iga talked about her divorce, and Vlad mentioned he was also single. They felt connected to each other – just like they had when they were young, although neither necessarily assumed their connection had romantic potential.

But when, in early 2016, Vlad mentioned he was planning a trip back to Europe, to visit family, the idea he might stop by to see Iga in Germany almost went without saying.

“The day that he was coming to see me, it was very, very, very exciting,” says Iga. “I remember making banana pancakes for him. I woke up at five. I wanted to make him breakfast because he traveled overnight.”

Pancakes prepared, Iga drove to the airport to meet Vlad.

“The moment I saw him again was probably the best day of my life,” says Iga. “The emotion was really, really intense. It was even better than I imagined.”

Vlad recalls being overwhelmed by how surreal it was – and yet it also just felt right.

“She looked amazing,” he recalls. He knew what Iga looked like, he’d seen photos, but he realized he’d forgotten what it was actually like to be in her presence.

Plus, they’d both grown up. They were in their late 20s. They both were – and weren’t – the same people they’d been a decade before.

Iga showed Vlad around her city, Bielefeld, in northwest Germany.

“It was a lot of talking,” says Vlad. “We had a great time. You could see there was something going on. It was a short period of time to understand if we’re meant for each other, or if we want to build a relationship. But it felt good.”

Next steps

While Vlad and Iga were together in Germany, they talked about the potential of Iga visiting Vlad in the US.

A few weeks later, they connected on a video call to talk about this plan, and discuss where things stood between them.

Iga initiated the conversation.

“I knew I’d fallen in love with Vlad,” she says. “I knew I wanted to be with him, but he was more reserved. So I just felt like I needed to know, ‘Where do we stand?’”

As someone who’d gone through a divorce, good communication was important to Iga.

“I felt a lot of shame about what had happened to me,” she says.

She’d opened up to Vlad about her previous relationship, and he’d been understanding and supportive.

“He created that space for me where it felt really good and I finally felt okay to say the truth,” she says.

It was one of the many reasons Iga had fallen in love with him. The thought he might not feel the same way was heartbreaking. But Vlad assured her that wasn’t the case – not remotely.

“I was just really scared to get hurt,” says Vlad today. He was concerned about the realities of maintaining a long-distance relationship.

“I wanted to be with Iga. But I was trying to live in the moment,” Vlad explains. He was worried labeling things, moving too quickly, could derail matters. But when Iga voiced her concerns, Vlad assured Iga he loved her too, and said he also wanted to try to make their connection work.

So Iga booked her plane ticket to visit Vlad in Chicago a couple of months later.

That visit was a turning point.

“At that point, we were very serious,” Iga says.

In May 2016, Iga took the plunge and moved to the US on a more permanent basis. She told herself that if it didn’t work out, she could always go back to Europe.

But she and Vlad wanted to give their romance a proper try, so Iga applied for a work visa that would allow her to live in the US full time.

Iga’s parents were encouraging. Her mother remembered how happy teenage Iga was whenever she received Vlad’s emails.

​”I had full support from my parents, and they were very excited for me,” says Iga. “But my brother was very anxious, like, ‘Oh my god, you met him on the internet.’”

Iga told her brother that wasn’t strictly true – she’d known Vlad since she was 16. But she appreciated moving to the other side of the world to be with him was a big step.

“The first six months we were just kind of learning how it feels to be together and to have that life together,” says Iga. “It was definitely a tricky position. We are both from different countries, and left our countries to live in a separate country.”

“And I’d never lived with anybody in my life other than my family,” adds Vlad. “I’d never had roommates, never lived with a girlfriend in a shared flat. I’d always lived on my own. It was definitely an adjustment.”

Developing a stable relationship

Iga and Vlad only grew more sure they were meant to be as the months rolled on.

“We developed a great, stable and strong relationship,” says Iga. “We needed to depend on each other. We just had each other in our lives in the US. We didn’t have any family there, neither me nor Vlad, so we created that little spot together.”

Iga started building the foundations for a life coaching business. The couple relocated from Chicago to Florida, then regretted the decision and returned to the familiarity and comfort of Chicago.

Somewhere in between, Iga discovered she was pregnant.

Children were something both Iga and Vlad had hoped for and talked about early on, but Iga’s pregnancy was unexpected. It was a surprise – but a good one.

Midway through Iga’s pregnancy, Vlad’s beloved grandmother passed away, and he had to fly back to North Macedonia.

As he waited for his flight, Vlad sat at the airport reflecting on life, loss and love. His grandparents had shared a great romance, one he always hoped to emulate.

“They were an example of true love to me,” says Vlad.

Vlad knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Iga. He thought about their first meeting on the beach in Greece. An idea started to develop.

“I wanted to propose in Greece,” he says. He called a friend and asked to borrow their car, explaining he had a plan brewing. The friend offered to drive Vlad to Skotina beach.

“So me, my friend, his girlfriend and my brother, we drove over there,” says Vlad. “It was September, out of season. I went to the spot where Iga and I met, and I recorded a video.”

In the video, Vlad spoke directly to the camera, recounting meeting Iga when they were teenagers. How it felt to reunite a decade later. How much she meant to him. His excitement at their upcoming child. His hopes for their future.

“Then I wrote, on the sand, the words: ‘Will you marry me?’” recalls Vlad.

Later on, back in the US, Vlad took Iga for dinner, requesting a private table at the restaurant. Then, he took out his phone, loaded up the Greece video and pressed play.

Iga was moved to see the beach again, touched by Vlad’s words on the screen, but she had no idea where it was going.

“Then, at the end, I see the beach, where he’s written: ‘Will you marry me?’” recalls Iga. “I just started crying. Then he gave me the ring.’”

Vlad had also written Iga a letter – he’d been inspired by his time at home, and recollections of his grandfather “who always wrote letters and notes about how he felt.”

In Vlad’s letter to Iga, he described how important she was to him and how it felt to visit the beach where they met, all these years later.

Some of the things he wrote down he’d never really said to her before – how he’d felt the moment he first saw her. The way he remembered her walking along the sand. How he’d saved all their emails.

“It was so beautiful and romantic,” says Iga. “And then this beautiful video on the beach, when Greece is so symbolic to us…”

Iga and Vlad welcomed their son, Luca, in 2018. The couple got married a month later – a small ceremony, with only their close family in attendance – and welcomed a second child, daughter Klara, a year later.

A recreated photo

Today, Iga and Vlad still live in the US, where they’re raising their kids with an international outlook. Iga runs a life coaching business and works as a project manager for a tech company, while Vlad’s now the director of operations for a freight brokerage.

The couple are pretty established in Chicago, but they still regularly visit Europe.

“It’s very important for us as a family to maintain those relationships with our family,” says Iga. “Even though we are so far away, we still want our kids to know what Poland is, to know what Macedonia is, to know Europe.”

This past summer, Iga and Vlad returned to Greece together, taking the kids to the beach where they met for the first time.

The couple have a favorite photo from summer 2005, of the two of them standing by a blue door. Iga’s joking around, pouting, while Vlad’s gazing at her.

“It’s an important photo,” says Iga.

This summer, the couple recreated the picture, 19 years later – with the help of one of Vlad’s longtime friends, who was there when they met. The group found themselves all reminiscing on that summer.

“You cried when she left,” said the friend to Vlad. Iga raised her eyebrows at her husband – he’d never admitted that before.

Then, Iga and Vlad posed in the same spot, by the blue door, with their two kids in tow.

“It was really special,” says Iga.

Iga and Vlad also marked the moment by getting matching tattoos to symbolize their meeting, depicting the ocean waves and nearby Mount Olympus. Iga’s tattoo is on her left arm, Vlad’s on his right. They might lose their wedding rings, or forget to wear them, but the couple figured these tattoos would last forever, always symbolizing their love.

Iga says the summer in Greece was very meaningful.

“I saw the mountain, and right away I just felt very emotional, because this is the spot where I met Vlad,” she says.

She enjoyed being there with their friends, treasured the time with their kids, but she tells Vlad today she also had the urge “just to lay down on the beach with you, and have you only for me.”

It was strange, Iga says, to reflect that she wasn’t a teenager anymore, enjoying a summer crush. Life had moved on, turned into something she could never have anticipated, yet is so grateful for.

“I think my younger self would be very proud and happy,” Iga reflects. “I had a different life in between. I had another marriage. And sometimes I would kind of regret things. But you cannot regret anything, it had to happen for you then to find yourself in this situation. Everything in my life brought me to this moment.”

Today, Iga and Vlad both feel like everything happened the way it was supposed to, in the end.

“I’m not usually a believer in those things,” says Vlad. “But with everything we’ve been through, and then everything leading back to each other – I cannot believe it was not meant to be.”

“Our story is, for us, a foundation,” says Iga. “I believe that even if we get into crazy fights or misunderstandings or whatever is going to happen in our life, we are always going to remember where we came from, what we have built, and why it’s so important.”