Ghislaine & Kevin

It feels strange to write one of these about myself. I've spent almost a decade telling other couples' stories, and this time I'm the bride. I planned it start to finish, with a good deal of help from my team, and I can confirm it is exactly as magical and exactly as chaotic as everyone says.

It started with spaghetti bolognese.

We met at someone else's wedding. I was the planner, Kevin was a groomsman, both of us in supporting roles. During the reception he asked what I was eating. I have a rule about not mixing work with anything else and I broke it on the spot, and I told him: spaghetti bolognese, which wasn't even on the menu.

What sealed it wasn't the question. It was that I spent my entire vendor meal in conversation with him, talking and laughing and being completely present, which for someone who is usually thinking ten steps ahead is not a small thing.

In the early weeks Kevin called what we were doing "flowing," by which he meant taking it slowly. I was not thrilled with the word. I let it go until one afternoon at Fuik Bay when I decided to move things along, and asked him, standing in the water, whether he wanted to be my boyfriend or not. He gave me his answer several hours later. "I guess we're official."

Since then the rhythm has held. I move at three hundred and twenty kilometres an hour, planning ahead, already onto the next thing. Kevin holds a steady hundred, present, content with where he is. Between us it works.

That first question has turned into a different one. Not what are you eating. What are we eating.

We got married in our own garden, which is a sentence I did not expect to write, and which meant the walk from the house to the ceremony was about thirty seconds long.

I wanted an enchanted garden under string lights, so we hung flowers from the lights, dressed a pergola walkway, and turned the archway between the garage and the backyard into a green portal you had to pass through to reach it. By the time guests came through, the garden did not look like our garden any more.

The ceremony backdrop was a half-moon arch full of colour. Everything else I kept grounded, because we were in a real garden and it didn't need help: wood, a little gold on the signage, nothing that fought with what was already growing.

There was no seated dinner. That was never going to be us. A burger station, a taco station, a bar, a cocktail bar, and beer in a wheelbarrow. Cocktail tables through the garden with small vases and fairy lights, so people ate standing up, moved around, and talked to more than the six people either side of them.

A steelpan player took cocktail hour. A DJ took the night. There were a hundred people in our garden and, for once, none of them were my responsibility.

This is the part I would want a couple to steal.

Every member of my wedding party was assigned their own colour, and each of them carried a different flower, chosen for them. All different, none of them made to match.

Then all of those flowers came together in my bouquet.