Darver Castle Wedding Photography | Sarah & Alish
Darver Castle. Sarah & Alish
They didn't see each other before the wedding. They sent gifts and handwritten love notes instead, the old way, the way people have always done it when they want the moment of seeing each other to mean something.
The bridesmaids wore identical dresses and carried matching bouquets. The proud mums wore great hats. The proud dads tried, and mostly failed, to hold themselves together during the speeches. Someone remarked that morning in Alish's house how classically, beautifully traditional this wedding was. The getting ready separately. The notes. The hats. The flowers all matched. The only thing that wasn't an old tradition was the two brides. Because that's a new one in Ireland, written into the Constitution on the 22nd of May 2015.
On that day four years before Sarah and Alish's wedding, Ireland voted. Overwhelmingly, generously, joyfully. We wrote it into our Constitution that marriage may be contracted by two persons without distinction as to their sex. Dublin baked in the sun that day and we partied under a sea of rainbow flags and YES balloons long into the night. I remember thinking it felt like the country had exhaled something it had been holding for a very long time.
Four years later, Sarah and Alish got a gloriously sunny October day for their own celebration. October in Ireland is not supposed to look like that. It looked like that. The light was golden and soft the way it only gets in autumn, the kind that makes everything it touches look like it was made to be photographed.
They got married surrounded by 150 people who love them. Friends and family who had waited for this day, some of them for years, some of them their whole lives. Watching Sarah and Alish together — easy and certain and completely themselves — and watching the people around them cry the particular tears that come from witnessing something that is both joyful and long overdue, is one of the things I will always feel lucky to have been present for as a Dublin wedding photographer.
The speeches were full of the specific, detailed love that only the people who have known you longest can offer. The kind where every sentence lands because everyone in the room knows exactly what they mean. The dads, who had tried so hard, didn't stand a chance.
The dancing went on and on. The night had that quality that the best wedding nights have, where nobody quite wants to be the first to leave because leaving means it's over. Nobody wanted it to be over.
It's hard, watching 150 people that happy, to believe there was ever a time when this wasn't possible. Or that there are still places in the world where it isn't. A wedding day is the same wherever you are and whoever you are — the notes beforehand, the nerves, the matching flowers, the dads losing it during the speeches, the dancing that goes on too long. The love at the centre of it. Sarah and Alish's wedding had all of it.
It would make you proud to live in a country where love is simply love.
