The story of Atlanta’s tweethearts
What began as simple Twitter interactions blossomed into full-blown love.
Sumita Dalmia has social media all figured out. The 27-year-old attorney and freelance social media manager has used Twitter to score nearly $10,000 worth of prizes, tickets, and merch — everything from VIP access to a Backstreet Boys concert after-party to a private dinner with Atlanta Hawks CEO Steven Koonin. “I started Twitter in law school just as a way to keep up with news, sports and celebrities,” Dalmia says. “Then I started to realize the value behind it, and I used it for networking and reaching out to people in the fields I was interested in—I got a lot of internships and job opportunities that way.” If you ask Dalmia, though, she’ll say the best thing she snagged via Twitter is her fiancè.
On Sept. 13, 2013, Dalmia sent a tweet to IMG partner services assistant representative and digital marketing pro Anuj Patel, 26, who had tweeted about an extra ticket he had to Zoo Atlanta’s annual Jazzoo event. He’d already given the ticket away, but the Atlanta natives got to chatting online (she saw he did sports marketing and mentioned that was one of her passions), which turned into texting, which culminated into an in-person friendship and, eventually, a relationship. The pair have been together since that first date to an Atlanta Dream basketball game the following August.
Because of the digital nature of their romantic roots, it only made sense to Patel that, when he decided to pop the question, that his proposal would have a social-media spin. He sent his bride-to-be on a tweet-based scavenger hunt that took her all around the city to spots like Drybar, Philips Arena (the site of their first date), Zoo Atlanta, Cafe Intermezzo, the Atlanta Botanical Garden and finally, to the rooftop helipad of the W Atlanta - Midtown, where Patel got down on one knee and held a poster-sized printout of a tweet asking “will you marry me?” (complete with the ring emoji, of course). Naturally, Dalmia said yes.
As far as the wedding goes, “we definitely want to incorporate Twitter in our plans,” Dalmia says. “It’s going to be this fall, and we’re going to use the hasthag #tweethearts2016. Indian weddings are super expensive because it’s like a four-day event,” she adds, “so we’re trying to catch the attention of Twitter and see if they want to help us out, maybe through using their color scheme or having the Twitter birds in place and hashtags everywhere.”
Looking back, Dalmia is still in disbelief that her prowess for scoring free swag on Twitter led her to the love of her life. “I still remember that day, sitting at my desk and the law firm I was working for, thinking he was just another person who had a ticket that I was interested in,” she says. “I think that’s the key to situations like this — you can’t over-analyze it, you just have to take a chance and see what happens. I never thought we’d end up where we are today, but that’s kind of the beauty of it.”