Josh + Bec by Rachel Leiner - Together Journal

We’re both lawyers from Melbourne, Australia and after spending nearly two years in lockdown, we were ready for an adventure so we relocated to New York City at the end of 2021

Josh – We were set up on a surprise lunch date by a mutual friend in 2012 and didn’t exactly hit it off or keep in touch after that. It wasn’t until we bumped into each other at a house party a few years later after Bec had returned from a year travelling abroad, that we reconnected. It took me a further three weeks to muster the courage to slide into her DMs and ask her out for a drink.

Bec – I don’t think either of our first impressions were good! Josh is very loud and funny, which is one of the things I love the most about him now, but I remember feeling frustrated and impatient because I felt like he’d ambushed the lunch plans. But he wasn’t particularly impressed with me either.

Josh – I wanted the proposal to have a New York vibe but didn’t want to propose in public, so I organised for bagels and lox to be delivered to our apartment for breakfast from our favourite Jewish deli. Unfortunately, they caught me off-guard by arriving two hours early and waking up Bec, so I ended up getting down on one knee at our kitchen table and proposing to her with the washing machine whirring in the background.

Bec – We wanted an intimate, romantic, sophisticated and “old” New York vibe for our wedding… It was important that the wedding reflected us as a couple, and given that one of the things we connected over early on was our love of food (particularly Italian food) when we came across Don Angie – a Michelin-star American-Italian red sauce restaurant in the West Village – it was a no brainer. Our bedeken (traditional veil ceremony) was at the Crosby Hotel and our chuppah (the actual ceremony) was at a photography studio called Blank Studio which is a 300m walk around the corner.

For weeks leading up to the wedding, we were debating whether to arrange transport for our guests between the two locations or take a gamble on the weather. Unfortunately, we made the wrong call, so we all had to walk through Soho in the rain. Luckily, our photographers did a fantastic job and some of those photos are our favourite from the night. I’ve always loved Bianca Jagger’s YSL wedding suit and knew early on that I wanted to incorporate a tailored element to my look. A few days after we got engaged, I saw a complete stranger on Instagram wearing a beautiful white coat. I DM’ed her thinking I would never hear back, but to my surprise, she sent me the link to the exact coat and there was only one left in all of the UK, but it wasn’t my size. I bought it immediately and luckily a tailor worked her magic.