From David Runciman's review of Luck: What It Means and Why It Matters by Ed Smith:
[T]he main event in this book concerns love... Smith met the woman who is now his wife by purest chance on a train that neither he nor she had been planning to take. Other people might call this fate but he puts it down to luck. He feels he is a very lucky man.
... [But] Smith's relentless harping on his own experiences jars with the thought that our lives are shot through with randomness. Take the meeting with his future wife. It's a nice enough dinner-party story, but he makes too much of it. It's not like those cases of people who change travel plans and end up escaping death because the plane they were booked on crashes. These are spectacular pieces of luck because very few planes crash. But most people get married. Would Smith have remained loveless and single if he had missed that train? Or would he simply have married someone else? Sorry to be unromantic, but I suspect it's the second.
I agree with what Runciman says here about randomness, but I don't think he goes far enough. Let us suppose that the woman Ed Smith met on that train and later married was not just a possible and a very suitable life partner, but The One. That is to say, there was no one else, anywhere, with whom he could have been as happy. Even so, the meeting between the two of them on that train is nothing special when you consider that, for example, Betty and Igor's meeting at the party of a mutual friend - which preceded their subsequent marriage, and they too were each, for the other, The One - could not have happened had Igor not first come across the party-giving friend when the latter fell off his bike outside Igor's house and Igor went to help him; or had Betty's parents, of whom she was the only child, gone to bed slightly later than they did on the night Betty was conceived; or had Igor himself run into Sarah at the party before being introduced to Betty, since in all likelihood Igor and Sarah would have got something going that evening, having had their eyes on one another for some time and both just waiting for an opportunity - but Sarah's arrival at the party was delayed by a long telephone call from her mother in New Zealand, and the rest is history.
Betty and Igor's son Jason, who knows this history and a few other things, often reflects on the small chance of his ever having come into this world, as do a lot of other similarly fortunate people.