People Actually Fall in Love While Riding Public Transit
Love can happen in the strangest places—like MBTA facilities, apparently.
Brushing off the beggers that hole-up at South Station, and ignoring the bustling crowd rushing back and forth between train lines, Dinah Shepherd and Nick Thompson managed to seal the deal while at South Station—one of the country’s oldest, most frequented transit hubs—back in 2002, and still maintain a happy marriage to this day.
Officials from MassDOT shared the story about how Nick proposed to his wife, Dinah, as she boarded a bus at the station more than 10 years ago, when she was headed to see some college friends in Philadelphia.
The story is one of several the transit agency plans on sharing through February 14, Valentine’s Day, as part of their annual “Romance Stories” series, where riders submit intimate (but not too steamy!) details about how they fell in love or got hitched somewhere in the depths of the station, or while riding the trains that lead to it. “As it turns out, Cupid does strike on the train and bus,” officials said.
Below is the excerpt submitted by Nick and Dinah, which details their love affair leading up to a marriage proposal. To read more sappy love stories that blossomed at South Station, follow the MassDOT blog for the next few days:
Although Dinah Shepherd and Nick Thompson had discussed marriage several times while dating, Nick was determined that the actual proposal would come as a total surprise to Dinah. It was Valentine’s Day 2002, and Dinah was about to board a bus to Philadelphia to visit college friends. Nick left work early and met Dinah at South Station to see her off. As they waited for the bus to board at Gate 3, Nick offered Dinah a breath mint. Slightly offended at such a sendoff, Dinah rebuffed the offer. But Nick persisted, insisting she really needed a mint. Finally, Dinah relented and opened the box, only to find an engagement ring. Totally unsuspecting, she “freaked out a little bit, said yes, and got on the bus.” Confined on a five-hour bus ride in the pre-cell phone era, Dinah exuberantly shared her story with strangers and “wrote down how excited I was on the back of a paper bag because I had nothing else to write on.” Excusing what some might consider an insult as a way to propose, Nick said he “needed a moment that would have some romance to it when she absolutely would not see it coming, and that is where South Station fit perfectly.”
