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Couple finds each other on Match.com 25 years after being camp crushes

Mary Bowerman
USA TODAY Network
Two miles, a handful of mutual friends, and four rows of seats at University of South Florida football games, was all that separated Kim and Evan Leech from reconnecting after twenty-five years.

They lived two miles apart, had some of the same friends, and sat four rows from each other at University of South Florida football games. But still it took 25 years for Kim Kuhl and Evan Leach to reconnect.

The couple, who met at a North Carolina summer camp when they were teenagers, hadn't again crossed paths until they came across each other's profiles on the dating site Match.com in 2013.

Kim says Evan reached out to her on Match, but was unaware they had met before because she she had changed her last name during her first marriage.

“In 25 years, you age a lot, so if he had walked by me I wouldn’t have known who he was,” Kim said. “It was his name that made me think, ‘That is Evan.’”

She tried to jog his memory by emailing him that she had a few questions about “the mid-'80s, YMCA Blue Ridge Camp.”

Kim and Evan Leach held their wedding ceremony in Paris in March.

“I told him to go to my Facebook, and he said, ‘I so remember you,’” she said.

Kim said she and Evan, who both live in Tampa, Fla., met at camp when she was 14 and he was 15. She said the pair felt a connection right away.

“Things are pretty innocent at that age; it was one of those things (where) you have eyes for a guy,” Kim said.

Kim said the young love birds saw each other once or twice after camp but eventually lost touch.

“This was before social media, so I remember looking up his name in the phonebook when we got home, and I remember going to events to see if he was there,” Kim said.

After messaging back and forth on Thanksgiving in 2013, the pair decided to meet up the next week.

Kim can’t help but cry when she remembers their first meeting, not only because she enjoyed remembering their time at camp, but because it was the first time since her divorce that she felt comfortable connecting with someone else.

“This was the first time in six years or seven years since the divorce that I opened up to someone because it was so easy,” she said.

Evan proposed in 2015, and the pair had a wedding ceremony in Paris in March of this year.

“I think it’s all about timing, people come in and out of your life for a reason,” Kim said.

She says she still can't believe Evan was literally right under her nose.

"It took a computer to find him," she said.

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