Karakter, Curaçao · December 2023 · by Ghislaine van de Laarschot
Planned by Caribbean Blue Weddings
They were roommates first. Years later they married in Curaçao with nobody watching.
Their story
Jen and Wes met as roommates more than a decade ago and became best friends long before they became anything else. Careers pulled them in their own directions and the friendship held through all of it. Eventually they stopped pretending that was all it was.
He proposed under the La Fortuna waterfall in Costa Rica. They're living by the ocean now, which had been the plan for a while, and they intend to spend the years ahead seeing the rest of the world.
For the wedding itself they wanted no audience at all. Jen's work is demanding and neither of them had any appetite for a production. What they wanted was to be married, somewhere warm, without the machinery that usually comes attached. We had three months to put it together, and three months turns out to be plenty when the guest list is two.
The day we created
They married at Karakter, under the palapa at the water's edge, white linen moving in the doorway and open sea directly behind them.
The palette stayed pale and cool. White roses and hydrangea, pale blue hydrangea, eucalyptus and blue thistle, with white coral and starfish set among it. Dusty blue cheesecloth ran the length of the table and pooled off the edges. Jen carried coral roses, warm against all of it.
An officiant from the civil registry married them, which makes it a legal marriage under Curaçao law rather than a symbolic one. Six witnesses stood in, which is the part of an elopement nobody pictures and everybody needs.
Afterwards there was one table on the sand, laid for two, woven placemats and glass catching the last of the light. Music came from a speaker. There were no speeches to sit through, no seating plan, no first dance to get past. They had dinner, and the sea went dark in front of them.
The wedding ended that evening. The paperwork did not. A Curaçao marriage certificate has to be collected, apostilled, translated into English, apostilled a second time and mailed. This one had to be signed twice, so Jen and Wes came back on the Monday with all six witnesses and did the whole thing again. Then they flew home, and the rest of it carried on without them, which is rather the point.
