Technically, unless the circumstances exist at the same moment in time, they aren't coincidences. Often we use the term to refer to circumstances that inhabit the same condition completely at random, but regardless of time span.
An example of this colloquial use of coincidence would be comparisons made between the deaths of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Those events occurred 98 years apart.
Reddit user Don_tiso asked:
"What’s the most unbelievable coincidence you’ve ever experienced?"
Bus Stop
"I walked around a random corner in London on my first day there, a double-decker bus pulled up, and the only person I knew in London stepped off it and saw me at the same moment I saw him."
"I hadn't told him I was in town yet. Absolutely spooky."
~ MelodicJury
Neighbors
"My partner got into genealogy a few years ago and found out that one set of my great-grandparents and one set of their great-grandparents had actually been next door neighbors in a city in Germany back in the 1930s."
"They had immigrated separately to separate areas of the US, but by pure happenstance, had great-grandkids that ended up married to each other."
~ owlfigurine
Kismet
"When I was a little girl, there was a Sunny D commercial on TV with a young teenage boy riding a BMX bike. I had the biggest crush on that boy. My mom would joke when the commercial would come on and say 'your husband/boyfriend is on TV'."
"Fast forward, I'm 27 now getting a divorce, my mom is dying, and my life is falling apart, so of course the most logical thing to do is date!"
"I'm on a dating app, I match with a guy that lives 30 miles from me. We start talking, eventually dating and I learn that he was a commercial actor as a child."
"He tells me he was in various commercials: Saturn, a toy bear, an anti-teen drug commercial, a Sunny D commercial."
"Before he can even say another word, I start telling him that I used to love this Sunny D commercial with a boy on a BMX bike. He stares at me and says that's my commercial."
"We are now married and have kids, and I can't help but think that my mom helped somehow."
They never got to meet before she died, but I am certain my mom knew."
~ ambersavampire
Small World Wide Web
"Okay, so, I'm talking to someone in Reddit chat, right? At first I reached out to them just to thank them for being supportive with some stuff of mutual interest, but we talked a bit more, started getting to know each other."
"This goes on for a bit. The other day we're chatting well into the night and some personal details start lining up, so we start asking for a few more details from each other."
"Stuff like, oh, when were you in [city]? What neighbourhood? We keep coming up with the same answers, more or less. At this point it's getting a little spooky."
"We hammer out that I'm a little younger than them and was in the same part of town at the same time, and they ask me, did you ever play baseball in [location]? Turns out, yes. Do I remember [specific event]? ...Yeah, I do."
"It turns out we'd MET. We'd played baseball against each other as kids! And then I never saw them again, and a decade+ later I'm chatting on Reddit with them! I'm still not over this and I'm not sure when I will be."
~ moonnotreal1
Golden Moment
"Back when things got gilded more on Reddit, someone left gold on one of my comments. I am always thankful for things like that, so I replied back to the message saying, 'Thanks for the gold kind stranger!'."
"He responded (it would show the name as anonymous unless they chose to show the name, or they responded) and I recognized the name right away. It was a guy I played football with in high school and hung out with!"
"We lost contact after school, and re-connected like 15 years later randomly on Reddit because he gilded one of my comments."
~ shartnado3
Enough
"Not anything big, but when I worked in retail I was putting reduction stickers on stock going out of date."
"We had 142 cucumbers to reduce, so I printed 142 tickets, and the roll of tickets in the machine ended exactly there on the 142nd one. Story I will tell my grandchildren someday."
"I can’t recall exactly why, but it was after some big event where they over-ordered. The store was also a nightmare ordering their bread & cakes, and we’d regularly have huge amounts of those to reduce too."
"Kept me off the shop floor so didn’t complain too much!"
~ EddieOfDoom
Power Play
"I had just finished watching the final episode of Full Metal Alchemist, alone, in my parents' house, while everyone was asleep. I was in a back room with the lights on, and after thinking about the show's ending—I clapped my hands together—and slammed them down on the desk in front of me."
"All of the lights and electricity in the house INSTANTLY went out."
"It was probably a power outage, but to this day, I have never done the Full Metal Alchemist move again."
"As a result, 100% of the times I have done the FMA move, it has caused a power outage."
~ SilverMetal
"I was once watching the first episode of an anime—Darker Than Black."
"But there's a scene where the power cuts out in the show, and at the exact same time, it cut out in real life."
~ JuicyGooseOnTheLoose
"Happened to me years ago while watching the 'Silence in the Library' Doctor Who episode for the first time."
"I was on my laptop, and the power in the house went out within seconds of when the lights went out in the show."
"That was fairly disconcerting..."
~ Cessnaporsche01
Fortunate Series Of Events
"I had a really, really good childhood friend that lived across the street from me that I lost contact with after I moved to a different city."
"10 years later, I was in the city I moved away from visiting someone. I was downtown killing some time, and decided to look up my childhood friend's name in the phone book."
"I didn't find him specifically, but I found his mom. She was stunned when she found out it was me calling, tells me he should be on his way home from work, and to call back in a half hour or so—he had just moved back in with her recently."
"I tell her I'll do just that and hang up the phone. I sit on a bench and not even a minute later, he comes walking by, we made eye contact and were both just like WTF‽‽"
"Here's the kicker... just on a whim he decided to look me up earlier that same day and found my mom's number. She wasn't home, but he left a message asking how to get a hold of me."
"It was hillarious when we walked in together (at my friend's mom's house). She's in the kitchen doing something and is like, 'oh Steven, I got a call randomly from your old friend S, he's in town and is looking for you!' She comes around the corner and it's like she saw a ghost!"
"And it gets better. We're all sitting there having drinks, and MY mom calls HIS mom's number, returning his call from earlier, and I answered the phone to mess with her (caller ID so we knew it was her."
"The way it all worked out was sooo uncanny and awesomely confusing for all, words just can't really do that day justice."
~ Loki11100
...6789
"One of my college math classes used a website for our homework assignments, after submitting the answer it would tell you if you got it right or wrong."
"This assignment was 10 questions."
"I did the first 9 and got them right and just wanted to be done, so I typed 12345 randomly for the last question, hit submit, and it was the right answer."
~ Ajido
WoW Wow
"Played World of Warcraft (WoW) in the years 2006-2009 while living abroad. Was in a guild like you do in the game. Our guild leader was from Poland, but we were an international group of players, so we spoke English."
"Stopped playing in 2009 when I moved back to Poland to a different city than my home town. Two jobs later, I meet a guy who was a gamer and the topic comes to WoW."
"We both played Horde turns out, and on the same server. So I was giving the names of some well known players and he says he knew them."
"Then I give the name of the guild and it turns out he was the guild leader! Even found some old screenshots form the raids we had with both our characters!"
~ pukacz
Destiny
"Walked into math class on the first day of school in 8th grade and saw my elementary school best friend that I hadn't seen in years because my family had moved to a different area at the end of elementary school."
"Turns out their family ended up moving to the same area years later by total coincidence."
"We reconnected, became best friends again, started dating in high school, got married and now have 3 kids together so it was a really wonderful coincidence."
~ owlfigurine
Chasing Waterfalls
"I was vacationing with my parents in Jamaica while in high school and while climbing some waterfalls, I met a current classmate on the falls as well."
"Totally random that we would meet randomly at that spot."
"It took me a while to process it was really them and what are the odds?"
~ Truman48
Stick To Your Guns
"Countdown (UK TV show) has a final round where it’s a 9 letter word jumbled up. First person to buzz in gets the points."
"For years the joke in our family was me saying cardboard before the letters ever came up."
"Well, one day it gets to the final round and my mum says cardboard. I said nope, I’m changing it now to wardrobes. Letters come up, it’s not wardrobes."
"Can’t make sense of what it was. Can’t even hazard a guess."
"Answer turns around and it’s cardboard. For me to pick that one show to change my mind after years of saying cardboard..."
~ PunkDrunk777
Happy Anniversary
"On the 50th anniversary of Woodstock I was having a yard sale and selling some records when this older gentleman came over and asked if I possibly had the Woodstock record. I said, 'ya, I do, but it's not for sale'."
"He proceeded to tell me about how he had gone to Woodstock and how he married a woman he had met there, and how they bought the record when it came out but had lost it. And he wished he still had it because it reminded him of his wife, who had passed a couple of years back."
"We talked for awhile and I went inside and grabbed the record and gave it to him. He looked at me and said, 'This is my record'."
"I said, 'ya, I don't think they made a different version'. He said, 'No, this is my actual record—look, there's my name'. So I said, 'well, I guess it's yours'."
"In short, I ended up giving back a Woodstock record to a man who bought it 50 years ago, who lost it 30 years ago in Toronto, that I picked up at a yard sale in London, Ontario 20 years ago, and gave it back to the same guy who lost it on the same day as the 50th anniversary of Woodstock."
~ sherrymacc
Closure
"I was living and working in south Georgia, USA. We used to get summer workers in where I worked, some from Canada, Mexico, Europe."
"One kid (about 20 years-old) came to work with us from Canada and ended up meeting a girl. He stayed, quickly got married, and a few years later met with an accident and passed away."
"So young, nice kid. I had really liked him."
"Fast foward about five years, I meet a guy from Canada, and I end up moving to a very, very rural part of Ontario, Canada, on a farm. We're at a fall fair in a town of about 200 people one day several years later, selling our crafts/honey, produce etc..."
"Some older farmer couple walks up to buy some honey and notices my accent."
"They start asking me where I'm from. I say, 'I moved here from Georgia'. They say 'Oh, our son lived there! Where in Georgia?'."
"Yes, the kid I worked with was their son. The randomness. of this encounter was shocking. A small town in south Georgia, a TINY community in rural Ontario. The odds of me running into anyone who knew people in that Georgia town were almost nil."
"They never had got to talk to anyone who worked with or knew him well down there as the girlfriend had been not very helpful after his death. I was their first and only real point of contact."
"The poor mom and dad standing there, so overwhelmed. They had so many questions about the place, his work, his friends, his passing, what happened in the accident exactly."
"I can't tell you the chill I got standing there comforting these parents. They accidentally met me in a place thousands of miles away from where their son and I had lived and worked."
"I had ended up living near them in Ontario years later. A good eight years since he passed and they ran into me. A random meeting and I was able to give them some closure having to do with the accident he was in. I'll never forget them."
~ ThalassophileYGK
What's the oldest coincidence you’ve encountered?
