After everything — the high-school beginning, the long-distance year, the moves across the world — we got married in Bali.
Choosing where to do it wasn't simple. When you're a couple whose lives are stretched across countries, a wedding isn't just yours. It belongs to two families, with two sets of traditions and two ideas of what the day should even be. Bali became the answer almost on its own: close enough for family to reach, beautiful enough that nobody felt short-changed, and neutral enough that the day could belong to everyone at once.
A day that had to hold a lot
A wedding like ours has to carry more than two people in love. It has to honour the people who raised us, the cultures that shaped us, and the distance everyone travelled — literally and otherwise — to be in one place at one time.
So we didn't try to shrink any of it. We let the day be big. Two traditions sitting side by side. Colours and rituals that meant something. Both families in one place, some of them meeting for the first time, finding a way to celebrate together even across language.
The day works when everyone in the room can look around and recognise something of themselves in it.
What we actually remember
Ask us about the wedding and we won't tell you about the logistics, or the budget, or the hundred small things that almost went wrong. We'll tell you about the faces. The people who'd doubted a teenage romance, standing there years later watching it become a marriage. The quiet relief of realising that two worlds really can hold each other, if you build the day with enough care.
We're still figuring out most of married life. But that afternoon — both our worlds in one place, by the sea, saying it out loud — that's one we got exactly right.
More from the wedding is coming to the journal soon. If you want the films, they're over on YouTube.
