Woman Was Ready for Dating Show When Love Found Her on Words with Friends (Exclusive)

When Courtney DaCosta opened the Words with Friends app one day in 2017, she wasn’t expecting to find the love of her life. Sure, she says she was ready for a relationship, but DaCosta, now 35, was also preparing to appear on a BuzzFeed dating show.

Little did she know, she’d never film the program. Instead, she’d strike up a romance with Thomas Pistocco, a man the app matched her with as a random Words with Friends opponent — and by 2025, they’d be happily married.

But before that, they played plenty of rematches on the app — and DaCosta, an event coordinator, made the first move to message Pistocco, 35, when he filled a space on the board that she had been planning to use for a high-value word.

DaCosta, who tells PEOPLE she had been “letting” her future spouse win so they could “keep the game going,” soon caught on to the fact that Pistocco, a bartender, was using a generator to get higher-point words.

“I was, you know, helping myself out a little bit because she’s very book smart,” he admits.

DaCosta recalls, “I had a hundred-plus point word that I was so ready to use, and I was waiting for it, and he put this huge word right in that space. I’m like, ‘There’s no way, you’re cheating!’ ”

“I immediately messaged him. I’m like, ‘Cheater, I have this word,’ ” she says. “‘I can’t believe you took my space.’ And I’m like, ‘Now it is on. We’re gonna have a tournament.’ “

Messaging on the app soon migrated over to text and soon they were “calling each other all the time,” DaCosta says.

They met in person in the beginning of October 2017 for a first date at DaCosta’s home where they cooked and “talked all night.”

“The next day, he came over again and never left my house,” says DaCosta.

While the circumstances of their meeting where unusual, the couple were soon surprised to find that their paths had nearly crossed multiple times. “We had a lot of ‘almost met’ moments,” DaCosta says.

They discovered that they’d worked at the same Stop & Shop location as teenagers, although DaCosta left the job right before Pistocco started. And as adults, they had each worked at the same nightclub, but in different roles: he manned the door, while her role was inside the club, meaning they came and left at different times.

When DaCosta left to work at a different establishment, she even ended up becoming coworkers with her future in-law: Pistocco’s sister. DaCosta tells PEOPLE she had “no idea” her work friend “even had a brother” at the time, but eventually pieced the connection together through Facebook.

“Honestly, even today we’re still bringing up stories of our past,” DaCosta tells PEOPLE as Pistocco adds, “It’s just a small world that the stars aligned.”

After seven years of dating, the couple got engaged during a trip to Iceland, where Pistocco proposed under the Northern Lights.

He kept the ring in a zipper in his overalls, but says he “must have checked it 20,000 times” while waiting for the lights to appear, which finally happened on the fifth day of their trip. Then they left the axe bar where they’d been hanging out to walk to waterfall to get a better look at the sky and Pistocco checked once more for the ring before getting down on one knee.

“There were tears for both of us,” DaCosta says.

On Sept. 21, the couple got married in a Harry Potter-themed wedding that also paid tribute to their word game roots.

They invited the creators of the game, who could not attend but made their presence known with a sweet surprise on their wedding day.

“About 11 o’clock, all of a sudden this delivery driver shows up with this cake. I’m like, ‘That’s not what I ordered.’ I was freaking out. And then I looked at her like, ‘It’s Words with Friends!’ ” Pistocco says.

The company had sent a custom wedding cake for them, complete with the couple’s names spelled out with game tiles and topped with the words “I Do.”

“It was just honestly such a nice prize because I was my own wedding planner, so I was a little stressed. That came in and it just cheered me right up,” DaCosta says.

These days, she and Pistocco will still play each other in the app if they’re traveling and away from one another.

“It brings back a lot of memories,” he says.

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DaCosta tells PEOPLE she had never sent a message on the app before reaching out to Pistocco that day in 2017 — and wedding bells were the last thing on her mind.

“I never even chatted with anybody on Words With Friends,” she adds, “let alone dreamed of that happening.”