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Before my western wedding ceremony, I kept tearing up thinking about what I wanted to say for my vows as the make-up artist was applying things to my face. Every few minutes, she’d stop to blot my tears. I warned, “I’m going to be crying for the next few hours.” I wept thinking about how much Amit and I loved each other and how lucky I was to be marrying him. All my prior promises and contracts had been about protecting me for when the other person inevitably broke my trust, but this time it was different.
On our first date, I was scared. I’d been assaulted before and hadn’t fully felt it, so part of me really thought he might attack me while I was on his Kauai turf, alone with him without anyone I knew. I made him promise not to touch me unless I said it was ok. After a hike, when he held out his hand for a high five, I felt a stab of fear. “He’s trying to push my boundaries and expects me to have sex with him because I came all this way for our date!” But then seeing how nice he was to everyone, I realized that he wasn’t at all like the person who’d hurt me in the past, and I wasn’t the person I was then either and could trust myself to protect myself more. I didn’t have to be scared of him or extract this no-touch promise to create the illusion of safety. I was safe with him, at least physically.
Years later, after Amit proposed and was at peak happiness with me, I told him that if he ever cheated on me, I wanted all his money. Amit is a very frugal person and surviving leukemia has made him even more scared of getting sick and not being able to work again. Thus the prospect of losing all his money is a visceral, traumatic fear that I wanted to use to my advantage. If he ever left me, I’d be devastated, so I figured the very least that I could do in return would be to threaten to render him penniless. Amit said, “I’ll never cheat on you, so sure.” Then I think he got nervous because when he went surfing, he told Doug, “Nancy told her lawyer that if I ever cheat on her, she gets every last cent.” Doug said, “That’s not legally enforceable so it doesn’t matter.” I seethed, “Doug, you’re supposed to be MY friend!” But as marriage approached, I found I didn’t even care anymore.
I saw how I was trying to use this agreement to avoid pain, but heartbreak is part of loving someone. Risking pain is part of love, and I wanted to take the risk because it was worth it.
I never knew that it was possible to trust someone more than I trusted myself. What would that even mean? But Amit is such a good person and in many ways sees me better than I do. Anyone who knows him knows we can trust him to make the best choice not just for him but for everyone. He cares about everyone else and thinks about them before doing anything.
I love and admire him so much and feel lucky to get to love him and risk heartbreak with him. The best vow I can imagine is devoting myself to loving him more every day.
Dmitri said he teared up during my vows and Gemma told him, “This is how her weekly Apptimize all-hands were too.” I miss giving speeches and living with my friends and seeing them every day for hours. The wish that kept recurring for me while seeing everyone during our wedding was that I wanted to deepen my love with everyone. Even though I don’t live near many of my friends anymore, I hold each of them close to my heart. I have pictures of you guys around my house that I see every day and I can’t wait to hang out together again.
Our weddings, in particular my outfits
We first got married legally last year with only our parents present because I wanted to lock Amit down before we started trying to have a kid. We hadn’t set a date for a formal ceremony and I feared Amit would die or leave me before we could actually wed and I’d be left a single mom who no one would ever want to marry so I’d have to eschew romance and pretend momming was my #1 joy all along.
An unforeseen side effect of this fear driven choice is that when Lisa’s NYT reporter friend offered to write about our wedding in the NYT vows section, we couldn’t do it because we were technically already married and that violates one of their rules. I wondered, “Should we get our marriage annulled?”
Honestly, if I thought that that would’ve worked, I would’ve done it to get the article, but I didn’t get the sense that the NYT would like that we were playing fast and loose with the sanctity of marriage. The NYT supposedly sends their own photographer to your legal wedding and now this was impossible, so we were sad and I felt bad that my fear had caused us to lose out on this status symbol, especially because our love story is riveting, our wedding was going to be cinematically unique and fun, and I love status.
Amit’s parents planned an Indian wedding for their friends. I think they spent 5x more on this wedding than we ended up spending on the Western one. I knew almost no one there and expected the whole thing to just be a random sequence of events involving fire rituals that held no meaning for me, but to my surprise I did feel more connected to Amit’s family afterwards. Why the change when we were already legally wed? I guess it’s a primal human thing where we need group ceremonies to digest things.
About 2 months later, I couldn’t even sleep because I felt like shit. After several covid tests, I learned I’d gotten pregnant a week after the Indian wedding. We wondered, should we go ahead with having a Western wedding next year as planned, or should we wait until after I was done being pregnant? After some debate, we decided to have a tiny wedding in a few months. This didn’t give our guests a ton of time, but almost everyone said yes and RSVP-ed their kids so that we were actually kind of oversubscribed. Having lost 10 pounds in 1 month due to nausea, I felt weak and sick and worried I’d barf at the wedding. We kept wondering if we should cancel, but decided to push forward. I consoled myself that one day we could still have a California wedding as originally envisioned. Almost all the planning went to Amit. I did secure the locations and accompanying permits, but the food and everything else was Amit. Thankfully, many of our friends helped tremendously and organized and volunteered everything from finding our DJ, making our playlists, to making dessert.
Just in time, I started feeling better a few weeks before the wedding and sprang into action by fretting about what I was going to wear. I couldn’t sleep because of both pregnancy insomnia and anxiously scouring the internet for ideas. Love is Blind always has a wedding dress scene so I wondered, “Should I go shopping in an actual wedding dress store?” This hadn’t occurred to me before seeing the show because I never leave my house and do my shopping online, but I didn’t want to deprive myself of what seemed to be a rite of passage. Would I weep when I saw the dress like these women did? That seemed unlikely, but I wanted to try.
When setting the appointment, I told them my criteria: I was 5 months pregnant so I didn’t want anything pressing down on my stomach, and I wanted something unique and channeled the wholistic power of the divine feminine versus just the “princess” or “lover” archetypes. In retrospect, it should’ve been obvious that my art direction would make no sense to the average wedding dress boutique, or probably any normal person. Arriving at the store, I immediately knew they had zero dresses that held allure for me. All the dresses looked exactly like every wedding dress I’d ever seen, and their solution to the pregnancy thing was just to ignore it because the sample dresses kind of fit me the same anyway— huge with clamps holding everything together. Plus, at 5 months pregnant, I still weighed less than when I’d gotten pregnant because I couldn’t keep food down. Nevertheless, I enjoyed validating that I looked great in any dress template from mermaid to princess even though I felt like a mess.
Having failed at human interactions for wedding dress shopping, I ended up describing my dress vision (“futuristic sculptural, beautiful, strange, next-level-what-is-she-wearing-crazy”) to Midjourney, who generated tons of designs, and I made Amit rank the dresses I found that accompanied each design. I teased him, “You always choose the most expensive dresses.” Alarmed, he said, “I change my ranking— you should go with the cheapest one!” I wished that I had a woman to discuss avant garde fashion with, but I don’t think my girlfriends have an interest in looking weird, whereas Amit is a designer and encourages me, “You should go weirder.” Amit is my Kanye. I love looking bizarre and telling a story with my clothes. I prioritize storytelling elements above being beautiful because I know I’m always beautiful.
With the wedding 2 weeks away, I had very little time and finally ordered my dress online 8 days before the ceremony. It arrived 4 days before the ceremony and is one size fits all, so all I had to do then was worry about how I was going to style it. When we finally saw the dress in person, Amit said, “You’re like a sculpture. Where even are your arms?” so I knew it was the right choice.
Our vision for our wedding was to create a romantic adventure vacation for everyone. Our friends helped organize group activities for everyone, so people went hiking, surfing, and hung out at the beach. I hoped to seduce people into coming to visit us more or, better yet, move to live near us. For weeks, one friend foraged for rare tropical fruits that are impossible to buy, stashing them in refrigerators around the island so that he could present a never before seen fruit spread and have people taste previously unheard of exotic fruits. Another friend made custom ice cream made of all local ingredients. I felt FOMO at my own wedding because the group chat was rowdy with everyone bus-ing around together and singing drunkenly. People formed friendships and now hang out without me!
Although we’d wed twice before, I felt even more married after this wedding. I felt so full of love and gratitude for everyone that I cried constantly and didn’t want anyone to leave. I vow that we will do it again with ever more friends and families!
