Finding love with a German pilot was the last thing Adri Pendleton expected after a breakup and a struggle to get her elderly dog back home to California from the Netherlands. But less than a year after that ordeal, which went viral on social media, Pendleton and the pilot, Niklas Stöterau, have said "I do" — twice.
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00:00Do it! Show it!
00:02I don't know if I believe in fate, but if I do, this is definitely it.
00:16I was born and raised in California, but I had moved to Europe for a relationship that ended up not working out.
00:30I knew that it would be quite easy to bring my young dog back with me, but I had no idea how I was going to get my older dog back.
00:42I asked every single airline that flew between Europe and the United States, and none of them would take her on board.
00:48I'd had that dog since I was 15 myself, so there was absolutely no way that she was getting left behind.
00:56I was not moving without her.
00:59I just put out a plea for help on TikTok.
01:01Please help me get my dogs back home.
01:03I thought, you know, maybe this can get out to somebody who has some kind of solution.
01:09Please, and thank you.
01:11I saw the video sometime in November of last year, just left a comment, you know, saying I might be able to help.
01:19I had almost missed the comment, because I was getting absolutely flooded with comments.
01:29The company he flies for has a cargo route that goes from Europe to the eastern United States.
01:36Basically, we were able to put ourselves on these flights as employees.
01:40Adri was a plus one, and then obviously Nelly was our plus one and a half.
01:45From the initial messages to the flight actually happening, it was about two and a half months.
01:54The flight left from Milano in Italy about four in the morning, I believe.
02:05The class was actually a little bit shy, so I had a hard time just engaging in conversation with him on the flight.
02:12I just asked him at one point, I was like, what made you decide that you wanted to be a pilot?
02:17And from there, he just, the conversation was going.
02:22After we landed in the US, we parted ways, and somehow we ended up chatting again over text.
02:29And over the following couple days, I realized, oh, okay, yeah, actually, I think that there's definitely something here.
02:39I think at that point, we both realized, oh, we're actually, you know, matching quite well with each other.
02:45Somehow through that, I don't know when exactly you could say the relationship started, but I believe it was somewhere in February.
02:54I've had some friends that have met their partners, and they said that from the start, they just knew that that was their person.
03:03I never really understood it until I met Nick, and then I understood it from the start.
03:11It's just been so clear to both of us that this is my person.
03:17After maybe only four months or so, both of us were like, okay, we want to start figuring out how we can move in together, because long distance sucks.
03:27It is so hard. We know, we've known since the very start, a few weeks in, even that this is the person that I want to spend the rest of my life with.
03:36There has been no doubts.
03:38We talked to this immigration lawyer, and she said, yeah, basically, the most realistic option is you guys need to be married.
03:45And so we had that call with her, we hung up, and we said, okay, I guess we're getting married.
03:51We just decided to go for it, essentially. We went into the city together, picked up rings.
03:57And when we got the rings, he said, okay, I'm taking this.
04:02From what we could find, the best option for us was to go to Gibraltar, which is a little UK territory on the very, very southern tip of Europe.
04:14We decided to still make the best of it. We still went ahead, and we had our little ceremony.
04:20We exchanged vows, we exchanged our rings, and from that point, we viewed each other as husband and wife, even if we did not have the ring.
04:29We decided to still make the best of it. We still went ahead, and we had our little ceremony.
04:35We exchanged vows, we exchanged our rings, and from that point, we viewed each other as husband and wife, even if we did not have the legal paperwork.
04:44Now we are officially married, working on getting moved in together here in Switzerland.
04:51Nelly did end up passing away. Nelly was really that once-in-a-lifetime dog for me.
04:58A lot of people on TikTok have said that she led me to him, and then she knew.
05:05I don't know if I believe in fate, but if I do, this is definitely it.