Books have always brought people together. My first love grew during lunch breaks in the sixth-form library, whispering over a copy of The Dharma Bums. For Victoria and Jonathan O’Brien, it was the Twitter feed of the Oxford Street branch of Waterstones bookshop. He ran it, she followed it, and 10 days ago they got married.

As with all the best plots, however, there were impediments to love. In 2012, when Victoria kept noticing the @WstonesOxfordSt account, she knew nothing of its author. All she knew was that she felt compelled to keep checking the tweets: “I was actually searching for it.” Jonathan used to publish a zine called The Rooting Tooting Times – jokes, short stories, that kind of thing – and his Waterstones tweets struck an idiosyncratic, non-corporate tone. (Sample tweet: “BOOK FACT. Cheetahs can type faster than any other land animal but, sadly, their works are often poorly plotted and/or emotionally naive.”) After Waterstones dropped the apostrophe from its name, he storyboarded its new life in a retirement village. This was a provocation too far.

“I’m in love with whoever’s manning the Waterstones Oxford Street Twitter. Be still my actual beating heart,” Victoria tweeted. “Book nerds are not that dreamy,” Jonathan replied. “Book nerds are > dreamboats,” Victoria retorted. But there was only silence. Maybe this was because Jonathan was inured to advances. Victoria later learned that “the marriage proposals came from all over the place”.

“I usually had stock responses. ‘Sorry, I’m already married to the books.’ That sort of thing,” Jonathan says. What, he never bothered to check out the person’s profile? “Not really, no. It would be unprofessional.”

He was roused into action only after Victoria implied in an exchange with a friend that she had met him for gin in Bloomsbury. “From my personal account, I asked what she was talking about,” he says. They followed each other, chatted a bit, and when Victoria, a circus performer, was on a tour break, she noticed Jonathan tweeting a hankering for doughnuts. She had time to spare, so she bought a bag and went to the shop.

“My legs were taking me and my head was going: ‘What are you doing?’” Upstairs, she worked out who he was. “And he was so much taller than I thought he would be. I’m only 5ft. I stood in the queue waiting. He went: ‘Hi, how can I help you?’ and I just said: ‘There you go, there’s a doughnut. As requested.’ Then I bottled it and ran away.”

Three days later, her phone pinged with a DM. Jonathan was going on lunch: was she nearby, did she fancy hanging out? They walked around Oxford Street, talking so much they didn’t actually buy lunch. That was three and a half years ago. “We haven’t stopped talking,” Jonathan says.

Twitter has already changed their lives – they are married, of course. Jonathan has stopped being a bookseller and become a social media writer for Innocent drinks. They have matching Twitter handles and there have been a thousand new followers for Victoria overnight. But this is not necessarily the start of a married life lived out on Twitter. “It’s how we started,” Victoria says. “But it’s not integral to anything.”