He’s 22. She’s 81. Their Friendship Is Melting Hearts.<br />But she was a friend, and the joke set off a chain of events<br />that led to his flying to Palm Beach to actually meet Rosalind Guttman, the woman he had known only through the Words With Friends game on his phone.<br />“It wasn’t like anything spectacular, or different than you speaking to one of your friends.”<br />Their friendship began entirely at random when Words With Friends, a Scrabble-like<br />phone game, assigned the two strangers to play each other last summer.<br />According to Ms. Butler, Ms. Guttman doesn’t know what all the fuss is about, since “people should be behaving this way with each other all the time.”<br />But she did send Ms. Butler an email soon after they left for New York.<br />Ms. Butler, senior minister at Riverside Church in Manhattan, wanted to tell the story<br />of their friendship, so she asked if he would put her in touch with Ms. Guttman.<br />But he had no plans to meet her until Amy Butler, the mother of one of his friends, overheard him talking about his online pal.<br />After the women talked on the phone, Ms. Butler decided an in-person meeting “would really finish the story off,” she said.<br />“It was like they were magnetically drawn to each other.”<br />They didn’t have much time — just a lunch and a quick tour of Palm Beach —<br />but the photos he tweeted afterward attracted widespread attention, including from the news media.
