Their First Date Was Exploring an Abandoned Asylum (Really!) and Mutual Hobby Led to Romance (Exclusive)

"There was this large glass atrium in there and somebody had spray-painted on the wall, ‘What if we kissed in the lobby?’ And I read it off the wall and turned around and he was ready"

The writing was already on the (asylum) wall when well-matched Denver couple Louis Inghilterra and Fletcher Petrucci first met.

The two bonded over a love of exploring abandoned buildings and decided to have a date, of sorts, at an old asylum hospital last fall.

Despite how that may sound, the setting helped spark a romance.

“There was this large glass atrium in there and somebody had spray-painted on the wall, ‘What if we kissed in the lobby?’ And I read it off the wall and turned around and he was ready to kiss me,” Petrucci, 22, tells PEOPLE. “We ended up kissing but I don’t think [he] realized I was reading the prompt off the wall!”

After that, the two continued to see each other, but only sporadically — because of the holidays and Inghilterra going home to help his mom in Pennsylvania. When Petrucci went home himself for Christmas, back to Maryland, the two were able to meet up to explore different abandoned buildings around Baltimore.

When both returned to Denver, Petrucci was ready to step up the relationship.

“We were going to go back to that abandoned hospital where we had our first date, so I put flowers in the backpack but unfortunately the plan did not go as I wanted,’’ he says. “There were security guards there and we couldn’t go in.”

Instead, when the couple returned from exploring other buildings, Petrucci pulled out the worse-for-wear flowers and proclaimed his love.

“We had this whole cheesy moment,” he recalls now, beaming. “And ever since then we’ve been together.”

The couple originally met through Tinder after Petrucci, a United Airlines flight attendant and videographer, moved from his childhood home in West Virginia. How he opted to relocate to Denver is as serendipitous as how two people with a similar interest in decaying buildings were brought together.

In an interview on abandoned: The All-American Ruins podcast, Petrucci details how he met a couple on a cruise and said he wanted to get out of West Virginia.  They invited him to come live with them in Denver.

On a whim, he took them up on it. Petrucci quickly decided he might want to settle down out West.

“I was looking for new friends, but I was also looking for a relationship,” he says. “When we matched on Tinder, I saw [Inghilterra] had a picture of him in a bathtub in an abandoned asylum. So the abandoned thing tied in from Day 1.”

Petrucci says he has “always been interested in the history of places,” and had a retired park ranger grandfather who often would aid him in his adventures. He was the kid, he says, who always wanted to check out basements and other interesting out-of-the-way areas because he was “nosy.”

For his part, Inghilterra’s love of abandoned buildings and antiquities grew from a childhood shadowed by the loss of his father at the World Trade Center in the Sept. 11 attack. He was only 5 at the time and has very few memories of his dad, who played in a band, loved music and worked for Fiduciary Trust Company International.

“I inherited a large collection of vinyl records and guitars and so at a young age, I had a curiosity for antiques because I was surrounded by my dad's possessions,” Inghilterra, now 25, says.

He grew up in the Hudson Valley in New York before leaving to attend college at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He moved to Denver last August after graduating.

Inghilterra says he dated women for most of his life, only coming to terms with his sexuality in college. But his friends and family have been very supportive, he says.

“I actually have never been in any relationship before Fletcher,” he says. “I discovered I was gay about three years ago and had just been exploring the gay culture. So I guess it was love at first sight with Fletcher.”

And though Petrucci had to endure being outed in middle school, he says he never really tried to keep his sexuality a secret.

Being with Inghilterra is different, though, he says: “I feel like this is my first real relationship.”

Both say they weren’t necessarily looking for a long-term relationship when they first met, but that spark has blossomed into something deep and real.

“I thought at first it was just going to be this friend thing, where we meet up and explore [old buildings],” Petrucci says. “I didn’t completely know what I was looking for. When we talked, we had so many similar interests and it was so easy to talk to each other. And it turned into this is somebody I would want to be with.”

For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on People.