08.08.2026 — We Got Married.
· 5 min read
08.08.2026 — We got married. There are moments in life that somehow feel bigger than the moment itself. For Danny and me, this was one of them. On 08.08, on the Lion’s Gate Portal, I stood opposite the person who has seen me in all my colours — the beautiful ones, the complicated ones, the ridiculous ones, the wounded ones, the hopeful ones — and I married him.
Not because I believe another person completes you. I don't. But I do believe there is something extraordinary about finding someone beside whom you are allowed to be completely yourself, and still hearing: I choose you. That is what Danny is to me. My love. My best friend. My safe place. My partner in the madness. The person I want to tell things to. The person I want beside me when life is spectacular, but perhaps even more importantly, when absolutely nothing spectacular is happening at all.
Our civil wedding was deliberately tiny.
Danny’s parents were there, his grandma, his brother and his girlfriend, and three of our closest friends. My dear Mom and our wonderful friend Lydia joined us on FaceTime from Johannesburg.
There were empty spaces in my heart too.
I wished my Dad could have seen me marry Danny. I wished my Auntie and my grandparents could have been there. Grief is strange like that. Even on one of the happiest days of your life, you can still profoundly miss the people you would have given anything to turn around and see standing there.
I cannot know what happens after we leave this life. But I chose to feel that they were close that day. That somewhere, somehow, they knew. And that gave me comfort. One of the most important parts of the ceremony was something Danny and I had decided from the beginning: we would write our own vows. We didn't want somebody else's words. Because the promises you make to the person you intend to spend your life with should sound like you.
So we stood in front of one another and spoke words that the other had never heard before. There is something incredibly vulnerable about that. No hiding behind the standard words. No performance. Just: This is who I am. This is what you mean to me. And these are the promises I am making to you. Listening to Danny read the vows he had written for me is a moment I will carry for the rest of my life.
And giving him mine felt less like making promises about some imaginary perfect future and more like saying:
Whatever life actually looks like, I want to live mine beside you.
We made another decision that turned out to be one of the best decisions of the day.
Our phones stayed in our bags.
We didn't want to document ourselves being present. We wanted to be present. I wanted to remember Danny's face, not the photograph I took of it. I wanted to hear his voice without thinking about whether somebody was recording it. I wanted to hold his hand with both of mine. So for those few precious hours, the outside world could wait. We laughed. We cried. We ate. We hugged the people we love. We looked at each other probably a thousand times.
And we were there. Completely. 08.08 — the Lion's Gate Portal — was also chosen deliberately. Whether you believe in portals, synchronicities and the symbolism of dates or not really doesn't matter. We do. For us, 08.08 represents courage, transformation, abundance, love and the conscious crossing from one chapter of life into another. And perhaps most importantly, infinity. Not the promise that life will always be easy.
But the intention to keep returning to one another through all the versions of ourselves we haven't even met yet.
And this isn't the end of our wedding story.
Next year we will have our larger celebration and handfasting ceremony, surrounded by more of the people we love. Handfasting speaks to us because of what it represents: two lives being bound together by choice. Not possession. Not losing yourself inside another person. Two whole people saying: I am still me. You are still you. And I choose to walk beside you. We also plan to receive a blessing from Tibetan Buddhist monks. Not because we need another ceremony to make our marriage real.
But because we want our marriage to be about more than romance. We want compassion when one of us is struggling. Patience when we don't understand each other. Kindness when life makes us tired. Humour when everything goes spectacularly wrong. The ability to forgive. The wisdom to grow without growing apart. And the humility to remember, again and again, how fortunate it is to be loved and to have someone to love.
So our civil wedding on 08.08 was not the finale. It was the foundation. The quiet, intimate moment when we looked at each other and said: This is my person. This is my choice. This is my family now.
And Danny…
Of all the lives I could have lived and all the roads I could have taken, somehow mine brought me to you. I don't know exactly what the next thirty or forty years will look like. We'll change. We'll get older. Life will surprise us. There will be extraordinary days and incredibly ordinary ones. There will probably be far too many animals, ridiculous ideas, adventures we haven't planned yet and occasions when one of us drives the other completely insane.
But I know what I want those years to contain. You. Not because I need you to complete my life. But because I love the life that exists when we stand beside one another. And finally, to every single person who has sent us a message, called, commented or simply thought of us: Thank you.
We have received so many beautiful wishes that we haven't managed to answer everybody individually yet. Please know that we have read them and felt them. To have so much love sent towards us as we begin our marriage has meant more than we can properly express. And yes — the photographs are coming.
Because our phones stayed tucked away, we don't have hundreds of instant pictures to post. Our photographer is still working her magic, and as soon as the photographs are ready, we'll share them with you. For now, though, I'm rather grateful that the first memories I have of marrying Danny aren't sitting inside my phone. They're inside me. 08.08.2026 My husband. My best friend. My Danny. I chose you when I said yes.
I chose you when I said my vows. And for all the versions of us still to come, I will keep choosing you.
Photography: Nicole Imhof.