HANNAH + BRADLEY by Melissa Marshall

Tell us a little about yourselves, what you do, what you love, what is unique about you and your relationship …

I (Hannah) am a strategist by day that moonlights as a florist. I thrive creating meaningful experiences for others, whether that’s working with clients at my day job to uncover meaningful ways to communicate or designing a bouquet as a passion project.

I love to travel, to design floral arrangements, to spend time in the desert, and to listen to all things true (and untrue) crime-related. Bradley works in the white collar world of the construction industry – he works tirelessly to improve processes and streamline efficiencies. It’s the work you don’t see, but the work that’s essential for projects that keep the city running. He’s also a coach, he’s spent a decade coaching youth wrestling for his alma mater here in Portland, building a team from scratch to invest in kids who have an interest in learning about wrestling – and about being a good human. “Shitty kids become shitty adults,” he says, so he thinks of wrestling practice as a time and space to help kids form healthy relationships, understand teamwork, accept feedback, and learn how to act with grace.

So much of our relationship is built around the city we live in – Portland. When we met, we had very little in common. But we spent our first dates biking miles around Portland, we’d ride for hours and find new neighbourhoods and dive bars. I learned the layout of the city on our bike rides, and it became a way for us to find pieces of the world that could be shared, that could be ours. We’ve made it a point to bike in every new city we visit. We’ve ridden bikes in different cities including Vancouver, Chicago, Boise, and New Orleans – we even rode along the coast of Portugal a couple days before our elopement. It’s an experience we both love, it takes us out of a world driven by technology and speed and transports us to a place where we can only move as fast as our wheels can take us – we get to slow down and enjoy the world in tandem.

How/where/when did you meet?

We met through our phones. Tinder reached peak popularity the summer of 2015 when we met, and I (Hannah) had just moved to Portland Oregon so I made a Tinder profile with a bio that read: “tell me something interesting.” Bradley did. He sent me a quote from Aziz Ansari’s latest book at the time, Modern Romance that talked about how many couples meet online these days. I didn’t respond, but he persisted. We met through our phones, as many “You’ve Got Mail” millennials do. But our interactions moved quickly from screen to the real world, where we’ve spent the past few years exploring our city, falling in love with its broken sidewalks, its best pizza slices, its local music acts, and its most endearing dives. Between sets of blues and under neon lights, we found a love that inspired us to spend the rest of our lives together.

What’s special about your relationship? What do you love most about each other?

Our love is unfiltered and honest. I love that we treat every day as a new day, to play together, grow together, and to be unflinchingly honest as we push one another to continue becoming better humans.

We also share a strange sense of humor. We’ll riff on quotes from comedians and people we overhear in town, finding small moments where we can continue to make each other laugh.

Have you faced any challenges you want to share with readers?

We’re incredibly different. I (Hannah) have lived my live in different cities, states and countries, and my community is spread in different directions. I was raised in a whimsical follow-your-passions, explore every opportunity type of household. And I’m incredibly impulsive. I spend the first couple years of our relationship learning how to truly be in relationship with someone. I say yes easily, especially to opportunities that take me far from home, to travel, to grow – and these are all experiences I’m incredibly thankful for. But I remember Bradley asking me once “if you’re always away, how can we really build a life together?” It was a real question. Bradley is a realist. Steadfast and logical, raised to make decisions rooted in stability and routine. I love this about him. Thank goodness opposites attract. We’ve learned to be open and honest about our wants, our desires. He knows I put so much value in traveling to sustain relationships with friends from different points in my life, but I now know that building our life together, in a shared time and space, is foundational to having a real life together. We’ve learned to love and like the parts of ourselves that are so different from one another with open communication and empathy – those two things have helped us overcome so many challenges.

Was there a proposal? Tell us a little about it…

On our third dating anniversary, we were planning to go out to this beautiful Korean restaurant in Portland called Han Oak, but we had a few hours to kill between getting home from work, so Bradley suggested we grab drinks at a spot down the street.

Turns out, the spot down the street was where we had our first date. Our table was set up with beautiful flowers, and I just thought “wow, third year dating anniversaries are a big deal!” We started to exchange dating anniversary cards, when Bradley said “I actually made a video, instead of a card.” He then showed me a video of “finger dancing” – an inside joke – where the fingers proposed to one another! Then I looked down, and he was on one knee with a ring!

Tell us about your special day…was there a specific theme or style? Tell us a little about the setting, the styling and some of your favourite details…

In September 2018, we found an image of an old island home: a pink house resting on Sao Miguel, an island in the heart of the Atlantic. We learned the history of this home – it belongs to an Azorean family that has lived off this property for six generations, and a couple of years ago, the current owner’s daughter returned home from Milan to renovate the family barn into a modern, timeless retreat – and we knew we had to visit. We loved the barn’s old bones: the pink walls are original, the exposed wood beams are too. And before we knew it, we’d booked our tickets to stay in this home on an island with more cows than people, and more waterfalls and hot springs than you could dream of, making it the perfect place for an intimate elopement.

We didn’t have a specific theme to our day, we just wanted it to be beautiful, intentional, and intimate. Eloping, the day held no agenda, no timeline, just an open schedule to truly experience every moment of the day, exactly as we wanted to. We woke up at noon to share a breakfast before we parted ways to get ready and write our vows in different wings of the Pink House. We only spent an hour apart, but it was enough for anticipation to rise and tears to swell as we shared our first look outside our beautiful pink home.

I loved our reception. After the vows, we returned to our beautiful pink home where we enjoyed homemade meal arranged on the home’s roof, with a tablescape styled by Mae&Co, and a floral arrangement from Goodseed Floral – made from foraged Azorean blooms in conversation with flowers carefully shipped from Lisbon. We shared our first meal and our first dance (to Father John Misty’s “I Went to the Store One Day”) as the sun set on Sao Miguel. Then our community of vendors (Mae&Co, Melissa Marshall, Goodseed Floral) and even the AirBnb hosts brought out wine and made a fire to toast to the start of our new beginning, a moment we’ll never forget.

Above all else, I love that eloping gave us complete freedom to enjoy the start of our marriage in a way that was meaningful to us, unique to who we are as a couple.

Tell us about your main outfits.

I’ve always loved Elizabeth Dye. Years before I met Bradley, or ever even lived in Portland, I admired her work at her small shop called The English Department. I love the way she designs every dress to express the uniqueness, creativity, and spirit of the women who wear them. And when I saw the Dunaway gown in all her romantic elegance, I knew this was the dress I wanted to get married in. While Dye now designs full-time and another owner manages The English Department, I came in to the shop on a whim with my sister, and I tried on the Dunaway gown and fell in love. They sold it to me on the spot and I took the dress home that day – nothing to be altered, it was just meant to be.

What were some of the most memorable/unique moments from the day?

Our vows. We exchanged our vows on a peak overlooking Lago da Fogo. Encircled and held by the surrounding fog, we shared vows that were eerily similar. Through tears and laughter, we forwent traditions that didn’t make sense for us – no witnesses, no liturgical proceedings – just an honest exchange as we started the next phase of our journey together. I read to my groom, “I don’t know how to tell you how much you mean to me. You’re my world, my laughter, my temper’s saving grace. And in all of these vow “starts” I kept hoping to find a prompt that would help me distil the incredible weight of what I feel for you, into something light, something palatable. But there isn’t a quote, a tradition, a prompt, or a ritual that truly communicates my love for you. A love like ours can’t be neatly packaged, our love has weathered a valley of speed bumps, ones we didn’t always know we’d see the other side of. So to find a linear narrative is too big an ask.”

Time stood still on that mountain top. We stood apart from the rest of the world as we found a small piece of this earth that could hold our honesty, and that could encompass our love. And it was perfect.

But even before we shared our vows, we set off to explore Parque Natural da Ribeira dos Caldeiroes – and this place holds such a special place in my heart. Here, strangers greeted us with excitement and words of wisdom, spoken through broken English and exuberant Portuguese. An elderly local came up to Bradley, telling him to “live every day with your best love.” We delighted in these words, as we walked barefoot through waterfalls, until we stopped to enjoy beers poured from an old mill café. Here local women asked me to hold their umbrellas so they could touch my dress, smiling as they said “a bride, a bride to be!” We were both so touched by the sense of shared celebration, even across generational gaps and language barriers.

What went to plan and what didn’t?

Before we decided to elope, we started planning a full wedding. But as we started to put together all the details, I got totally overwhelmed. I wanted our vows to be real, to be honest, and I didn’t feel like I could really share my most vulnerable self in front of distant relatives I didn’t know.

So we pivoted. I emailed Manda at Mae&Co, and asked if we could switch our wedding coordination package to an elopement – anywhere, anytime. And she let us know there was a spot open in Portual on April 30th (ish). In that moment, we were sold. April 30th was the first morning Bradley and I shared in our first home together, the first morning we woke up realizing there were no more bike commutes to each other’s houses, no more packing overnight bags, no more scheduling when we could fit into each other’s lives, just a shared space, a shared home for the two of us. It was crazy that this was the date that Mae&Co suggested, and even though we never would have picked it on our own, it was one of those things that wasn’t in the plan, but turned out to be so perfect.

For our elopement, we arrived in the Azores with zero expectations. We wanted the day to be beautiful, we wanted the day to be fully about our connection. So when we woke up at noon, and spent the full day exploring a beautiful island before we shared our vows – this was everything we wanted.

Behind the scenes, our vendor team was amazing – our elopement was on a holiday, so while we were sleeping, our team went from store to store to find the perfect details for our reception set up, to find the only open grocery store to source ingredients for our reception, and to find a park where we could explore hikes without crowds before our vows. They jumped through so many hoops when things didn’t go to plan, but they made it work!

Any advice for other couples planning to spend the rest of their lives together?

For starters, do what matters most. Don’t think of your wedding day solely as a ritual, or an event you’re working towards. Think of it as an experience that represents the start of your journey together. Think about the experience before the logistics. I loved thinking of our wedding day as a representation for how we want to spend the rest of our lives together. As we were planning our elopement, we asked fewer questions about what we wanted a wedding to look like, and instead we started asking questions about what we wanted the rest of our lives to look like together. We started to ask: what experiences do we love sharing? What are our most meaningful routines that we’ve built into your relationship?

As we started to fold these things into our elopement timeline, we not only planned a day that would represent the start of our marriage, we were able to think through what we want spending the rest of our lives to look like.

What does being married or being in a union mean to you? And what is married life like so far?

People keep asking us, “how does it feel to be married?” And I feel obligated to have some sort of profound answer. But the truth is, that things feel pretty much the same. We’re still committed to building a life together, to loving each other through trials and joys, to supporting each other through seasons of discovery and seasons of routine. These things were true before we tied the knot, and they remain true now that we’re married. Our decision to be in a union and to get married serves as an opportunity to publically invite our friends and family to acknowledge our decision love each other now and as we move forward through life together. It’s a declaration to ourselves, to choose to love each other every day with intention.

Ceremony location: Lagoa do Fogo, Azores  | Reception location: The Pink House | Photographer: Melissa Marshall | Styling & Planner: Mae & Co Creative | Flora: Goodseed Floral | Bride’s Getting ready dress: Vintage from DANO | Bride’s Wedding dress: Dunaway gown by Elizabeth Dye | Groom’s Suit: Indochino | Bride’s Ring: Vintage ring from the groom’s family | Groom’s Ring: Handmade by a Friend | Bride’s Shoes: Chloe clogs from Bryr | Groom’s Shoes: Danner Boots | Bride’s Hairpiece: Mignonne Handmade | Bride’s Earrings: Amanda Hunt | Fragrance: Yasameen by Siela