It was July 26 and my partner, Stefan, and I were standing on Brooklyn Bridge getting married.
We hadn’t prepared any vows, but words were pouring out effortlessly as we looked at each other, holding hands and smiling.
We didn’t promise eternal love, but the unconditional kind – travelling through life together, helping one another if we trip. We kissed, and crossed New York landmark holding hands into the new exciting chapter of our lives.
What we had intended to be a small, intimate affair (due to coronavirus restrictions) was captured by a passerby and the image was later circulated around the world.
Stefan and I met while backpacking through South America in August 2019. We were in Cali, Colombia, when Stefan invited me to dance. We immediately felt an incredible connection and were together the whole evening.
The next morning, I had a 6am bus to go to another Colombian town, San Augustine. I said, half-jokingly, that if he wanted to continue the conversation, he could meet at the bus station and join me.
I wasn’t sure if he would, but when I got to the terminal, Stefan was already there waiting. Our first date was a 10-hour bus ride on one of the worst roads in Colombia, and we talked the entire time.
‘Imagine how awkward this bus ride would have been if we didn’t end up connecting?’ Stefan joked.
We spent three incredible weeks backpacking through Ecuador and Peru together, but when we reached Cuzco it was time to part as Stefan already had tickets to return to Romania after two and a half years of traveling, whereas my South American trip was just beginning.
However, he joined me again six weeks later and during that time apart we spoke every day before finally reuniting in Argentina. Since then we haven’t been apart a single day.
We travelled together for four more months and decided that Stefan would come to NYC with me, the city where I’d been living for the past eight years.
A week after we returned at the beginning of March, the quarantine started, and unlike many couples who felt like their relationship was on the rocks from spending an unusual amount of time in the closed space, we felt that our connection and love for each other was growing stronger every day.
In June we were in the Catskill Mountains, about 120 miles from New York City, enjoying a beautiful starry night by the fire when Stefan proposed to me, and we both felt like it was the most natural thing.
It took me by surprise, but I knew the answer right away, and we were hugging and talking about future plans through the night.
Because of the pandemic, we knew that our families and friends wouldn’t be able to join us for a big celebration, and we decided to do it very intimately: just the two of us and the minister. And what can be more romantic and more New York than Brooklyn Bridge at sunset?
We wanted that day to be just for us, without extra planning, only focusing on how we felt in the moment. The only thing we scheduled was when and where we would meet the minister, and the rest of the day we were just going with the flow.
We went for brunch at our neighbourhood place, walked around the city, changed quickly, grabbed a bottle of champagne and headed to the bridge. We felt like a wedding is a celebration of love between two people, and everything else is extra.
We didn’t know Nevona Friedman – the passerby – took the famed photo until the next day, when several of my friends forwarded it to me on Facebook.
She was biking across the bridge, saw our wedding ceremony, and thought how beautiful it was. Realizing that we didn’t have a photographer or even friends to capture this moment, she snapped a picture from a distance, but didn’t want to interrupt us.
After getting home, she tweeted: ‘If you were getting married on the Brooklyn Bridge this evening, I’ve got some photos for you!’
The internet rose in search of a ‘mysterious couple’, and by Monday night we already connected with Nevona on Facebook.
We were happy to relive the moment captured, but were even more surprised when we realised how much this photo resonated with people.
We were reading the comments under the tweet that gathered more than 137,000 likes and retweets and felt so humbled and lucky to feel all this love from friends and strangers.
Our friends and family were calling to congratulate, and scolding us that they had to find out about this major event in our lives from the news.
The next morning, I woke up to the inbox full of interview requests from national and international news channels.
‘What’s going on,’ we thought, ‘we got married, it’s not that exotic’. But we realised that it’s not actually about us, but what this photo symbolises – hope and a celebration of love prevailing, no matter what.
We felt like our happiness became contagious, and more and more people were embraced inside this circle of love.
We invited Nevona and her boyfriend for dinner to thank them and to get to know them better. She has a great personality and we chatted and laughed for several hours.
We’re planning on having a destination wedding on the beach in Mexico with family and friends sometime in 2021, when traveling and socialising is hopefully safe again.
My Life Through A Lens
My Life Through a Lens is an exciting series on Metro.co.uk that looks at one incredible photo, and shares the story that lies behind it. If you have an experience you would like to share, please email kathryn.snowdon@metro.co.uk with MLTAL as the subject.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/10/19/photo-of-my-wedding-went-viral-13420512/
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