Two 96-year-old childhood friends born on the same day have married in China after spending more than 60 years apart, the Shanghai Morning Post reported over the weekend. The couple, who were not identified in the report, reunited after a chance meeting at a dinner party when the man accidentally ran into his future wife’s brother and reconnected with her in 2019. Although they had been out of touch for more than six decades, the couple decided to spend their remaining years together and married in 2020 when both were 94. They now live together in a nursing home in Shanghai. Born just hours apart in 1926, the couple were friends growing up as their fathers ran a photo studio together in Shandong in eastern China before both families moved to Shanghai when the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937. They gradually lost touch with each other after the woman’s family moved again a few years later to another province. It was not until 2019 when the man bumped into the woman’s younger brother at a retired workers’ dinner party in Shanghai that they would see each other again. ‘Fat beast’: Pallas’s cat dies after choking on chicken piece, mourned by millions The man asked for the woman’s address from her brother and later visited her, but said: “She didn’t recognise me at first.” “We were both very happy to see each other. We were both widowed and she wanted to find a partner. So I told her she can have me,” the man said. “It’s fate for us to meet each other again. Unexpected fate,” he added. “It’s not like young people’s love between us. It’s caring for each other and looking after each other,” said the woman. The couple have been flooded with good wishes after their story was made public. “This is a good ending for a life. They are so lucky,” one person commented on Weibo. Shanghai is one of the first cities in China to develop a large ageing population. According to government data, by the end of 2021, more than one in three of the registered residents in Shanghai aged 60 and above. Shanghai had 15 million registered residents among a total population of about 25 million last year. In 2019, the number of elderly people living alone in Shanghai totalled 317,400.