Sometimes it’s best to just obey the fortune cookie.
For dinner one night in March, David picked up Chinese food from their favorite place in their hometown of Atlanta. After they ate, they started to open their fortune cookies.
“Sealed in cellophane, the cookies looked normal,” Brynn said. “But when I snapped it open the little slip of paper read “Will you marry me.” I was so shocked I squealed ‘Yes!’ before laughing until my sides hurt.”
After the initial excitement, they realized they should open David’s cookie as well, which was just a regular fortune cookie from the restaurant, randomly grabbed by an employee and tossed into their takeout bag.
“I made him open it, and it read, “You will reach your goal within two months,” Brynn said.
Brynn and David took that as a sign. “It became immediately obvious to me,” she said. “So I said it out loud: ‘We have to get married before the end of May.'”
It must be said: These two were actually, sorta, kinda already engaged. On Valentine’s Day, around a month before the fortune-cookie proposal, Brynn found a ring box while searching for something else in David’s office and confronted him about it before she realized she was spoiling her own proposal. Since David had not gotten the chance to formally propose on his own terms, he had taken to asking her every couple of days after that, “Will you marry me?” just to see her smile. In fact, even now, four months since their wedding (and with a baby on the way), he still occasionally asks her to marry him.
Ben and I met these two at a rehearsal dinner after-party when they were guests at Kara and Jon’s Natchez Mississippi wedding last year. We were getting drinks at the same time they were, and we struck up a conversation. Something clicked, and the four of us bonded and have become great friends, hanging out both in Atlanta and here in San Francisco. We even crashed their Napa vacation last Fall.
So we were among the many friends who balked at their short timeframe for the wedding! We were already booked to shoot someone else’s wedding and wouldn’t be able to be there for them, as we always imagined we would be. Luckily, though, Aaron Morris was available, and traveled across the country to Wilmington for this sweet ceremony on David’s parents’ dock, with a small reception at Manna restaurant. “It really was more like an elopement, ” Brynn said. “But we let special people know that if they really wanted to join us they could. It was like, ‘We are going out on the dock to get married, and then we are going downtown to drink, eat and have some fun. Join us if you want.'”
I’ve said it many times on this blog, but I love when couples do their wedding their own way. And this was no exception. I especially love that their wedding date was dictated by a fortune cookie. David may have tampered with Brynn’s fortune, but that second strip of paper was 100% serendipity.