Sources: Google.com
The traditional love-story roadmap expects you to fall in love, get married, buy a house and then have a child and raise a family. Well, this is no longer the prescribed path that many modern couples take.
Partners today are forging their own, less-anticipated path by choosing to invest in a home together before getting married or even becoming business partners before becoming life partners. For others, the alternative path they choose – visa concerns may require a couple to be married before the wedding ceremony, or the post-marriage road to a child is longer than anticipated.
“The only traditions I’m concerned about are the ones we create ourselves. You have to do what’s best for you and your family in whatever order that happens to be.”
These couples, by choice or by fate, have tossed that traditional route to happily ever after, and discovered a new path together. As one bride put it, “The only traditions I’m concerned about are the ones we create ourselves. You have to do what’s best for you and your family in whatever order that happens to be.”
Ahead, we asked seven couples who forged a non-traditional path to their happily ever after to share their stories. While we may feel expectations to follow a certain map to a happy relationship, know that a little off-roading can be just as fun.
A Bright Idea Lead to Marriage and a Move Abroad
Andrés and Carolina Quintero are the husband-and-wife founders of sustainable accessories brand Min & Mon. However, when they first met in college at the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia, it was not love at first sight. Over time through a shared friend group, their own friendship blossomed. Eventually, Andrés and Carolina would become roommates. During this time, they discovered a shared entrepreneurial spirit and started a lamp line together. While their first business venture didn’t work out, it was the spark that ignited a relationship of nearly twenty years and counting.
“Upon graduating, the couple married and then moved to the United States, where they started their third business, Min & Mon, in 2016. As Andrés puts it: “We find it comical that two people who weren’t fond of each other at first were able to see past the first impression and become friends, then roommates, followed by business partners, and now a family running a business.”
Planning a Second Marriage and a Child-Free Future.
Alexis Hilton met her husband Greg as a student of his acting studio. After eight months of classes, she invited him out for coffee, having a feeling that her crush may have been reciprocal. It was. After dating for three years, the two decided to marry. Remembering the pressure and stress of a big wedding from her first marriage, Alexis wanted to do something more intimate the second time around. She and Greg decided to have a private ceremony in the desert with just two friends in attendance, but have a big celebratory bash the evening before with 60 friends and family. While it was difficult to share the news with her family, Alexis felt it was important to have the ceremony be a private moment just for her now-husband and her.
With a local photographer and a set of coordinates to a location in the Red Rocks area of Las Vegas, she and Greg wed. At the ceremony, they had a cake baked by Bouchon Bakery and a bottle of champagne. Afterward, they explored Vegas. Four years later, the couple has added two cats to their family and are “happily child-free,” relishing that they can go on vacation whenever they want and enjoy a gorgeous white couch without fear. One day, she says, they may get a dog.
First Comes a House and Baby, Then Comes Marriage
After moving in together with her now-husband Mike, Robyn was due to replace her IUD. However, she thought to herself, “Oh my god, I’m gonna be 35 soon. Isn’t that when your uterus shrivels and dies?!’” As she grappled with her feelings of biological pressure and the label of ‘geriatric pregnancy’ for women over 35, her now-husband suggested she not replace her IUD and, as she puts it, “not ‘try’ but not-not try. In my mind, it was definitely going to take years to possibly conceive.”
When Robyn learned she was pregnant, she told her husband by “placing the positive test on top of the fresh beer he asked me to grab for him while I was up.” At the time, the couple was living in a one-bedroom loft in Downtown LA. She describes that the “bedroom was so small, you could only walk around two sides of our queen bed and back again like Pac-Man.” So, they combined their life savings and purchased a fixer-upper. Once moved in, Mike proposed while on a lake trip where Robyn had grown up. Their daughter was strapped in her carrier during the proposal. The couple eventually married in 2019—with their daughter participating as an 18-month-old flower girl.
A Postponement, a Small Ceremony, and a Celebration of Life
Dara Patel and her husband Kunal never looked forward to a large wedding, but with parental encouragement, they chose to have a large Jewish and Hindu wedding in 2020. Upon the 2020 Covid shutdown, not only did the wedding have to be postponed, but Kunal’s Tanzania-based parents and sister also had their visa approvals indefinitely postponed. Knowing that Kunal’s immediate family would likely not be able to make it to the first-postponed date, the couple planned a small ceremony in Santa Rosa with the couples’ California-based family joining.
During this time, Kunal’s father grew ill with tuberculosis. While Dara and Kunal struggled to embrace having a ceremony with Kunal’s father sick on the other side of the world, they moved forward with a small ceremony and family gathering. Kunal’s family coordinated Zooming in guests from around the world. All the while, they reminded the couple that Kunal’s father would be happy knowing they were married.
Shortly after the small ceremony, Kunal lost his father. While nothing is what they had envisioned at the beginning, Kunal’s mother just recently had a visa approved to visit in the fall of 2021. The couple now plans to have a one-day Hindu ceremony where Kunal’s father will also be honored.