Sometimes you go on blind dates and the other party turns out to be a tin toy enthusiast who lives in his great-grandmother’s attic. Other times, you meet an Icelandic graduate student who will one day whisk you from your Ottawa-area home to a life (13 years later) as that country’s first lady. 

The latter scenario is how a Canadian writer and editor named Eliza Reid ended up as Iceland’s newest prime minister’s very important right hand woman. While both were studying in the UK, Reid met Gudni Johannesson, and the pair eventually fell in love and settled back in the history professor’s home country. 

Fast forward about a decade (and four kids) and the pair—in an unlikely turn of events, given Johannesson has no previous political experience—are now the first couple of the tiny northern nation. 

And Reid’s Canadian-ness may have actually have had something to do with it:

“”As a Canadian, my stereotype is a bit that I am grounded and regular and don’t try to be something that I’m not,” Reid said in an interview with the Canadian Press. “I think those are things about us that appeal to the electorate. We’re just what you see is what you get.”