These 5 Couples Found Their Greatest Love Story Through Yoga

“], “filter”: { “nextExceptions”: “img, blockquote, div”, “nextContainsExceptions”: “img, blockquote, a.btn, a.o-button”} }”>

A little more than a year ago, we happened upon a social media post that began,“16 years ago tonight, I went to a yoga class in NYC. The instructor randomly placed my mat next to a young woman. She said hi.” The post continued to explain that they fell in love, got married, and had kids. It concluded with the simple truth that “sometimes the most pivotal moments in life happen when you least expect it.”

Indeed. That reminded us of the story we had read in The New York Times about the couple who’d kind of, sorta, almost connected on a dating app one morning but she had ignored his wink. Yet somehow the near-strangers ended up practicing alongside one another in a packed yoga class later that day. Spoiler alert: They also ended up together.

(Cue a very long and contented sigh.)

That’s not why we practice yoga, of course. We practice yoga because it facilitates a stronger relationship with ourselves. Although apparently, every once in a while, yoga facilitates a little more than that.

Curious, we spent the last year tracking down and talking to couples who encountered each other through yoga. Although we asked them to share how the practice initiated their relationship, we ended up hearing a lot about how it also sustained it.

To be clear, even when matters of the heart start on the mat, that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily flow as smoothly as a vinyasa. But somewhere along the way to understanding ourselves better, it seems we also start to understand how to relate to others better. Here are their stories.

Love Story 1: The Couple Who Practices Together…

Andrea DeVeau and Neil Cabral had worked across the street from one another in the town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, for about a year without encountering each other. That changed a couple years later when Cabral put his mat down in the front row of a yoga class where DeVeau was a regular.

She was a longtime yoga student. He was a CrossFitter tired of fielding injuries and willing to give yoga a try. Cabral immediately felt at ease in his practice and kept coming to class. DeVeau noticed him from her mat in the back corner of the room and thought he was cute but didn’t think much past that.

At some point, the duo started to hang out with mutual friends after class and eventually started dating. That’s when things got complicated.

“Our stuff started to come up,” explains DeVeau, referring to issues from their past relationships. Cabral was recently divorced and, after spending more than 10 years in a “not so healthy” marriage, he was emotionally unavailable, according to both of them. DeVeau had been through that before with other boyfriends and was tired of not knowing where she stood. So she was honest about her needs.

“I’ll never forget her line,” says Cabral. “She said, ‘You’re taking up an awful lot of my time for somebody who doesn’t want to date me.’”

They broke up and got back together numerous times and went through bouts of not speaking to one another. But they found that their mutual yoga community always led them back to each other. “Otherwise, I don’t think we would have been able to navigate through that,” says DeVeau.

At one point, they were broken up but still friends when they attended a concert for Krishna Das, a singer of kirtan, a type of devotional music. “During the kirtan and all the chanting, I had just opened up so much and found so much healing through that,” explains Cabral. “Since that day, we just have not been apart.”

The couple went on to open their own yoga studio, Power and Grace Yoga. On Christmas Eve in 2019, Cabral convinced DeVeau that they needed to stop at the studio on the way to dinner and he got down on one knee with a ring in his hand.

The couple decided to hold their wedding at the studio. “Where else are we going to do the most sacred or most sacred ceremonies?” says DeVeau. “Every practice is a sacred ceremony. This is where we’re offering our hearts all the time, so of course we’re going to do it there.”

Surrounded by 126 family members, friends, and people from their yoga community, Cabral and DeVeau wed on February 22, 2022. During the ceremony, the groom played the harmonium and friends sang and played the drum.

Since then, love and work and life continue to bring surprises. It’s not always easy, although they find that it is easier to navigate together as a result of yoga.  “It’s so great when you’ve got a partner that practices this practice with you. The ability to have these conversations with your partner is so much different than any other relationship that I had ever been in, in any lifetime,” says Cabral.

Love Story 2: Met-Cute at a Yoga Conference

Eric Paskel was wearing nothing but swim trunks and sandals the first time he saw Rina Jakubowicz. Standing in the elevator at a Yoga Journal conference in 2013, Paskel introduced himself to Jakubowicz, who mumbled a quick hello back. Hours later in the lobby, he was surrounded by seven women, including his grandmother and mother, when he saw Jakubowicz again working on her computer.

“I just saw her and something told me you should go over there and introduce her to everybody you’re with,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t know why to this day.”

Jakubowicz was uninterested. Yet throughout the weekend, the two yoga teachers found themselves repeatedly bumping into each other in a sort of dance with destiny. The way they tell the story, neither of them was looking for romance. “I was nine months celibate before this. Completely dating myself,” says Jakubowicz. They simply felt some sort of pull toward one another.

When he asked her to meet up just to talk, she declined. But before leaving for California that Monday, Paskel asked if they could talk on the phone. Their first call lasted three hours. “There was an antenna deep inside me ringing loud and true to something about her. I knew I had an attraction,” he says. “But it wasn’t one that I felt before in that way.”

They spoke regularly for the next three months while on opposite coasts, unaware if they’d have chemistry when they saw one another again. They made plans for Jakubowicz to travel from Florida to Los Angeles, agreeing that if they weren’t attracted to each other, they could part as friends. They kissed immediately upon seeing one another. And when he invited her to study the Bhagavad Gita alongside him the next morning, she realized she was hooked.

“I was looking for someone who had depth, and was looking for philosophy and guidance in that way. And then that’s when I knew I was in trouble,” says Jakubowicz with a laugh.

They both relished their independence and didn’t want to embrace a “you complete me” attitude. The duo have been together for more than ten years and have written about how yoga allows them to find true intimacy.

“The yoga is in every part of the relationship,” says Paskel. “So when you say we met in yoga, for me it’s like, yeah, we happened to meet that way. But we live in yoga. We have stayed together because of our relationship with yoga and what it does for us and what we give to it. It’s the foundational piece.”

Love Story 3: Meditate and Date

Ben Allison and Laura Allison frequently saw one another while waiting to enter a packed yoga class at a Charlotte, North Carolina yoga studio. “But it wasn’t like we would set our mats up next to each other,” he says.

Casually chatting about their weekend plans after class one day, Laura mentioned she was attending a friend’s concert that weekend and suggested that Ben come by. He was a no show until almost the end, when he finally walked in with a friend and realized Laura was on her own hanging out with the band. That’s when he realized there was a spark of interest. “?I didn’t know she was like, inviting me out,” Ben says, shrugging.

He actually had been standing behind her for several minutes that night without knowing. “I almost didn’t recognize her because every time I saw her practicing, she kept her hair up in a bun,” he says.

Later that night, Ben’s friend invited Laura to join them and some other friends for go-karting. But Laura wasn’t sure if Ben was interested in including her. “I looked at Ben and I was like, ‘Do you want me to come?’” says Laura. “And he did.”

When the crew was heading back to Ben’s for dinner after go-karting, Laura was again unsure if he wanted her to come along. When she asked, he said sure. Looking back, he recognizes how clueless he was at the time. “There’s a theme here,” he laughs. “I’m not the aggressive type.”

Yet something changed when he observed Laura’s comfort in the kitchen as she helped him prepare tacos. A former professional cook, Ben liked seeing how at ease Laura was in his environment.

Throughout their two-year courtship, the couple had a system: meditate and practice yoga together and then hang out. When Laura was in Costa Rica completing her yoga teacher training, Ben surprised her by showing up at the celebration dinner. Their final morning in Costa Rica, he proposed as the sun rose.

Ben maintains that it was yoga that got him to the place where he could be a true partner to Laura. “I was in a really unique time in my life when I met Laura,” says Ben. “I felt completely transformed. It was the first time I had started meditating twice a day and practicing this spiritual practice, not just a physical practice. So I was really open, natural, and comfortable.”

The couple asked the teacher of the yoga class they attended to officiate their wedding in 2022 and are currently expecting a child.

Love Story 4: Yoga Teacher Training Chums

Sophia Finfer had signed up to start yoga teacher training in person months prior to its scheduled start date in April 2020. But when the pandemic shut down the world, staring at her computer during Zoom training sessions became the highlight of her weekends.

One of those highlights was a fellow student, Ramon De Los Santos, whose outgoing nature was palpable through the computer screen. “From our very first Zoom call he definitely stood out,” Finfer recalls. “His sense of humor, and his big happy smile. It just felt easy and fun and happy right from the jump.”

When restrictions loosened a little that summer, the class was allowed to meet in the studio. Because they lived near each other in East Boston, Finfer and De Los Santos carpooled to the studio with another classmate, chatting while clad in face masks. It was during these drives that the duo bonded as friends and shared how yoga served as a grounding anchor during such a tumultuous time.

De Los Santos was in a relationship at the time so the duo originally bonded as friends. When his relationship ended later that summer, he asked Finfer to get tacos. They ended up staying up all night talking.

“I don’t think I’d ever had a really meaningful, fulfilling friendship before it turned romantic,” says Finfer. “So that was such a nice foundation.”

The following summer, De Los Santos took a job in Seattle. They thought their relationship might fall back into friendship or maybe that they would drift apart. They ended up talking daily and visiting each other frequently.

“It was very clear this connection was not going away. There was 3000 miles between us, and it was still pretty constant,” says Finfer. Eventually, De Los Santos ended up taking a job in New York. “When he got back to the East Coast, we were like, ‘Okay, let’s do this for real.’”

De Los Santos is in the process of moving to Providence to be with Finfer. The couple has matching tattoos of lotus flowers on their arms, which they feel are reminiscent of their relationship. In yoga, the lotus flower represents the expansion of the soul and spiritual awakening. “The whole thing with lotuses is that they sort of bloom in otherwise kind of inhospitable environments,” says Finfer. “And I was like, ‘Oh, it’s like us meeting during COVID.’”

Yoga remains a focal point of their relationship, whether they’re practicing together or separately. Finfer explains that it plays a role in the bigger picture of their relationship.

“More broadly, yoga has helped us be more open and honest and communicative with each other,” she shares. “All of that insight helped to open each of us up in ways we didn’t anticipate but really needed.”

Love Story 5: A Long Friendship

When Bentley Fazi first walked into the class that Heidi Grangaard was teaching, she had never done yoga before. Dragged there by a friend, Fazi had very little interest in working out. The class, called Yoga Kicks, was a cardio- and HIIT-focused class that integrated elements of yoga.

“I think I had a stroke in the middle of this class,” she says. “I am someone who does not like to work out.”

In between cursing herself for accepting her friend’s invitation, she was struck by Grangaard’s exuberance as she led the class. “She was this 5-foot-on-a-good-day, blond whirlwind of energy,” says Fazi. “I was like, ‘This woman’s like a hummingbird.”

A couple months later, Fazi started attending different yoga classes five and six times a week and fell “madly, madly in love” with the practice. Eventually, she quit her administrative desk job and took yoga teacher training.

When she later returned to one of Heidi’s classes after becoming a teacher, the potential for a relationship wasn’t on either’s radar as they were both married. Also, Fazi was a student. “We were very much just teacher and student. That was it,” says Fazi. “She was just my yoga teacher.”

Eventually, as sometimes happens, the teacher and student became friends and started hanging together when they weren’t in class. With that fundamental friendship in place came the realization that they had very strong feelings for each other. “I just happened to fall in love with a human,” says Fazi.

Grangaard made the move to teaching pilates but the couple still centers their relationship around their shared yoga practice and its peripheral activities, whether meditation, pulling cards, or setting intentions on a full Moon.

The couple has been together for the last six years. “Even though she doesn’t teach yoga anymore, which she did for a long time, we still like to prioritize our practice,” says Fazi. “There’s just something so special about practicing next to the person that you love. Yoga is always like our coming home.”