Frannie & Dustin

Frannie noticed Dustin as they boarded a flight. Airline seating did the rest, putting them next to each other for a few hours, and by the time the plane landed something had started that neither of them was going to leave on board.

They have been travelling together ever since. So when the wedding came up, choosing Curaçao wasn't really choosing a venue. It was choosing another trip, and inviting a hundred and twenty people along.

What they asked for was a wedding holiday rather than a wedding day. Three days, their favourite people from all over the world, and enough happening that nobody would have wanted to arrive late or leave early.

We opened at Grand Café Gouverneur de Rouville, up above the harbour in Willemstad, with the coloured houses of Handelskade across the water. A walking dinner while the sky went from gold to deep blue, and fireworks over the harbour once it had.

Then Frannie surprised Dustin. A cookies and cream cake, topped with small replicas of Bernie and Rexx, their dogs, who could not make the trip. He cried. So did most of the room.

The next day belonged to tradition. Frannie and Dustin signed their ketubah and held their Shabbat service at Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, the synagogue everyone here calls Snoa. It was consecrated in 1732 and is the oldest in continuous use in the Americas, and the floor is covered in sand, a practice the congregation carried across the ocean from Spain and Portugal and has kept ever since.

That evening everyone gathered at the Marriott for Shabbat dinner. Low light, pink and blue florals, one long stretch of people who had flown in from everywhere sitting down together for the first time.

It started with a run. The Bernie and Rexx Marathon, a 5K named after the two dogs still at home, with cardboard cutouts of them at the finish line and pink medals for everyone who crossed it. Not the usual way into a wedding morning, entirely the way into theirs.

The ceremony began at half past five on Paradise Beach at the Marriott, under a chuppah wrapped in flowers with open water behind it and the light already turning. Guests found their seats through an escort wall of miniature Blue Curaçao bottles, which did the job and then went home in people's luggage.

Inside, the room was built around the dance floor. A floral installation across the ceiling above it, white draping moving along the walls, floating candles, napkin holders stamped with their own wedding logo, and a cake wall carrying three tiers. Even the DJ booth glowed with their logo, which turned out to matter, because at some point in the night Frannie and Dustin got behind it themselves and took the microphone.

The floor did not recover, and nobody wanted it to. The DJ said afterwards it was one of the most electric weddings he had played. Three days earlier, most of those people had never met each other.