Cecilia Lee

Nowhere does love linger longer than between the lines of a New York Times wedding announcement. Since I was young, I’ve instinctively turned to the wedding section, tracing the stories of strangers who, in the grand, swirling chaos of the world, somehow found each other. These love stories —  true and distilled into elegant prose — are nestled between the weighty concerns of the world, offering a moment of quiet joy, framed and printed in ink.

I’ve always read them as modern-day fairy tales, their endings marked not by castles or magic spells, but by vows and “I Dos” and the simple, joyous promises of forever. 

I remember the couple who met on a delayed train, their conversation stretching long enough for destiny to take hold. Another who found love decades after their first meeting, as if the universe had kept them on a slow, patient trajectory toward each other. There was the bride who wore her grandmother’s gown, the groom who proposed by recreating their first date down to the very last detail. Each story is a tribute to love’s quiet serendipity, to the fleeting moments that weave themselves into something everlasting.

I’ve dreamed of my own name appearing within those pages, imagined the words that might introduce my own love story. I’ve pictured the opening line in that iconic, bolded Georgia font: “Ms. Shakya and Mr. Someone met in college, their first conversation sparked in a late-night debate that never quite ended.” I have imagined the paragraphs that would follow detailing the moment he knew, the way his voice softened when he said my name and the tiny gestures that built into something enduring. I could see the ink setting into the page, my story preserved alongside a thousand others — a testament to a love that lasted. 

That dream still lingers, tucked away like an old love letter waiting to be read. But somewhere along the way, it has shifted into something new. Now I find myself wanting not to be written about, but to be the one holding the pen, scribbling a story and cementing it into the universe. Because, as much as I long to see my own love story in print, I want even more to capture the stories of my friends — the ones I have witnessed from their first uncertain steps to the moment they became undeniable. 

I have watched love begin in fleeting glances across Bass Library, in sweet smiles exchanged while waiting in line at The Elm, in accidental run-ins on Cross Campus and in the quiet intimacy of shared study sessions in LC. I have watched my friends stumble through uncertainty — through nervous first dates and whispered confessions, through smoothie brunches in Saybrook and next-day debriefs in Trumbull, through the slow, steady realization that this has been real. I have seen them hold onto each other through it all, choosing love over and over again. 

And so, I laugh as I ponder over the idea of wanting to write their wedding announcements in The Times someday — not just of the logistics: the date, the venue, the details anyone could find on an ivory invitation, but the beating heart of their story. I would write about the way they met, the moments in between that made it inevitable and the small, irreplaceable details that make their love so uniquely theirs. Like the way he sent her a news article once after a seminar, just to let her know that he had been listening to her during discussion. Or, how he quietly took out her laundry because he knew she didn’t want her clothes to be scattered across the Bingham laundry room floor.

Perhaps it would begin simply: “The happy couple met at Yale, their first encounter a collision of fate and late-night Brick Oven Pizza.” But I would go further. I would describe the way she laughed the first time he told her a terrible joke, the way she looked at him when he wasn’t watching, the way their hands always found each other in a crowded room. I would write about the time he requested a Harkness bell serenade, just to impress her, or how they memorized each other’s favorite snacks at Gheav and brought them home after a long night out. I would write about the time they danced around the common room, spinning like vinyl, how they carried each other through the hardest years of their lives, how their love became something so steady, so real, that everyone around them believed in it, too. 

And, in some ways, it feels so natural to want to tell their stories. I have witnessed two people, once strangers, become something inevitable. To be the one who captures that, writing the final chapter — the part where their love story becomes not just theirs, but something the world can celebrate — is the greatest wedding gift I could ever give: a story, carefully told, lovingly written and meant to last forever with the words “they lived happily ever after.”

Because, in the end, a wedding announcement is more than just some old-fashioned formality — it is a love letter, a time capsule, a tribute to the years spent growing alongside each other. It is a way of saying: I have seen your love, and I want the world to see it too. 

So, to my friends, please let me share your story. Let me write your New York Times wedding announcement someday.