Anika & Sarne

Anika and Sarne met online, not quite two years before the wedding, and found the same thing in each other almost immediately: a restlessness about the world and a wish to see more of it. Anika grew up in Peru and works in sustainability, which is less a job than a set of convictions about nature and waste and the ocean. Sarne grew up in London. Between them they had already lived in several countries before their paths finally crossed in Toronto, which is where they live now.

He proposed while they were hiking through the largest cave in the world, in Vietnam. It is difficult to imagine a proposal better matched to two people who describe their relationship as curiosity, humor and a shared conviction that life is meant to be lived.

Sarne has a daughter, and the three of them came to this wedding as a family, which is a distinction anyone who has done it will recognize.

They came to us not long afterward, wanting to marry that summer. What they asked for was specific and, as it turned out, entirely achievable: a beach ceremony facing the ocean, cocktails at sunset, a fun dinner and a serious party. Joyful, effortless and celebratory were the three words they gave us. Nothing formal. Something closer to the best holiday any of their friends had been on.

The weekend opened with dinner at Mosa Cana for twenty-three. Anika and Sarne, their parents and their siblings.

Then they pivoted to to drinks on the beach at Avila afterward, no program, no speeches, nowhere anyone had to be.

It matters more than it sounds. Forty-nine people had flown in from several countries and most of them had never met. By the time the wedding day came around, they had.

The ceremony did not happen where Avila usually holds ceremonies. Sarne had found a spot he wanted, and after some conversation it became the spot, on the condition that it could be built inside ninety minutes. It could.

The aisle is the part worth describing. Twenty-five meters of runner, starting underneath the Blues Pier, running through the palapas and out to the arch, with rose petals laid the whole way down both sides. Drapery closed off the area so nobody was walking through the back of the photographs. The arch itself stayed deliberately simple, a square frame with curtains and two florals.

That restraint was the point rather than a compromise. Anika did not want a celebration built out of things that would be thrown away the following morning, so flowers were used sparingly across the whole weekend and put where they would actually be seen. It is also, as it happens, a decision that looked amazing. After a walk that long, the eye does not need anything more waiting at the end of it.

A saxophonist played guests in, played Anika down the aisle, and carried cocktail hour afterward. The rings came down that same twenty-five meters in the hands of Sarne's daughter, which is the part of the day the three of them will keep.

The palette was orange and dusty blue, with silver through it. Dusty blue rather than a brighter one, because the water behind everything is already turquoise and two blues competing helps nobody. The coral napkins had to be made specially, since nothing in that shade existed on the island. July on this coast means wind, so the candlelight went into clear glass, votives and pillars, low and heavy enough to stay where it was put.

Dinner was on Pool Beach. A head table of six for Anika, Sarne and their parents, with two long tables running out from it toward the dance floor, so the room pointed at the thing everyone was going to end up doing.

That dance floor was seven meters by six, the largest we have built in that space, because when we asked how big they wanted it the answer was as big as it can possibly go. The DJ played from a raised stage, under a truss dressed in white with uplights inside it and dance lighting hung above. Then Fènsi, afterward, for as long as anyone lasted.

The last day was spent on the water, which for a couple who met over a shared appetite for going places was the only sensible way to finish. Buses out, boat back, nobody making a single arrangement of their own.