Couple get married after falling in love in their retirement village

Laura Hampson
Updated ·3-min read
Rosa and Christopher Streets met and fell in love in a retirement village.
Rosa and Christopher Streets met and fell in love in a retirement village. (SWNS)

A couple who met in a retirement village in their 80s have married, 18 months after meeting.

Christopher Streets, 82, and Rosa Streets, 81 met at a coffee morning after they both moved to St Monica Trust's Chocolate Quarter Retirement Village in Keynsham, Somerset.

They both made the move to the retirement village after their respective spouses died.

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"I saw him sitting by the window and I was sitting opposite," Rosa, a former nurse, says.

"The sun was shining on him and he had these lovely yellow socks on, which seemed to almost glow in the sunshine. Then he came and sat next to me on the couch and we started talking."

The couple quickly realised they had a lot in common, including a love of art, theatre, history, music, and spending time in the countryside.

Wedding of Rosa and Christopher Streets
The pair married in front of their families. (SWNS)

They also discovered that they had lived just 40 miles apart from each other in Zambia in the mid-1960s, where Christopher worked as a mining engineer and Rosa's husband was a teacher.

Rosa and Christopher quickly became an item, even after a chaotic first date that saw Rosa nearly choke on a banana leaf and the pair get soaked by torrential rain in a walk to their car.

"I hadn't been on a date for years and I thought 'trust me to blow it by choking on a banana leaf like an idiot," Rosa jokes.

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Christopher later proposed to Rosa during a holiday together in Northern Italy.

"If I'd got down on one knee, I'd never have got up. It was a bit of a babbling proposal, but luckily Rosa laughed and said 'yes', so we set a date for the wedding and our holiday became our honeymoon," he says.

The pair married at the Bath Guildhall and were joined by members of both of their families, celebrating with a meal afterwards.

"It was very emotional for both of us, having our children and grandchildren there and we also streamed the ceremony live to New Zealand for my family who live out there," Christopher says.

"It was a wonderful day and everything went just as we'd hoped."

Rosa and Christopher Streets. (SWNS)
Christopher proposed to Rosa after just 18 months of dating. (SWNS)

Christopher and Rosa have decided to go for the unconventional approach and keep their separate apartments as their possessions would "never fit in one apartment".

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"It was my naval officer son who came up with the solution. On every British warship, the captain has a day cabin and a night cabin, so we thought that was the way to do it," Christopher says.

"So at sunset you may see us migrating across the Chocolate Quarter, or late at night, if Rosa gets fed up with my snoring!"

Additional reporting by SWNS.

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