A proactive bride-to-be decided to surprise her fiancé with a wedding after getting bored of waiting for the big day.
Nicole Arnett, from British Columbia, Canada, got engaged in 2014, when her partner Daniel popped the question with his grandmother’s wedding ring in a low-key and intimate proposal at their home.
Though the pair were keen to get married, they struggled to lock down the details of their wedding and despite talking about ‘many different options’, Nicole said it ‘never felt quite right’.
The 40-year-old, who works as a real estate agent, explained:
We realised we didn’t actually want a wedding, which is why we put it off; we just wanted to be married to each other which were two very different things in our mind.
After being engaged for six years, Nicole came up with a solution to the seemingly endless wedding planning while out for a run with a friend in December.
She told the friend she’d decided to surprise her fiancé with a ceremony, and Nicole’s pal agreed it was ‘a great idea’.
Nicole decided to hold the wedding on January 1 and incorporate it into the couple’s annual New Year’s Day party, when they take part in a ‘polar bear swim’ in the ocean.
The bride explained:
We just wanted to keep it really simple and unique to us so that was how I came up with: one, the surprise and two, making it a part of our favourite day of the year anyway which felt very special and intimate.
With the help of friends and family, Nicole was able to arrange the ceremony in just two weeks for less than $3,000 (£2,295), all the while keeping her husband-to-be in the dark.
The cunning real estate agent was able to use her 40th birthday, which fell on January 2, as an excuse for some of the bookings, like the caterer.
She said:
I booked our wedding commissioner, which was necessary, booked a caterer and told Daniel, ‘I don’t want to be the one cooking today. It’s my 40th birthday the next day so I’m just going to do this,’ and I just blamed anything out of the ordinary on that.
On New Year’s Day, with 35 guests gathered on Bonnie Brook beach, Nicole finally revealed to Daniel that it was actually their wedding day.
Recalling the surprise ceremony, she said:
I already had the dress from a friend’s wedding… Our son was the surprise ring bearer and two wonderful pals sang to us and played the guitar before the ceremony.
I got up and said how happy I was that everyone was there and then I was mentioning that I had a long to-do list this year for resolutions… and there was something that Daniel and I had been meaning to do for a long time but we’d never got around to, which was to get married.
He’d been filming me, and he just dropped his phone and he’s just staring at me with his mouth hanging open.
After the ceremony, the entire party serenaded us with the Beatles ‘When I’m 64’ and then we jumped into the ocean.
Daniel was over the moon with the surprise ceremony and said it ‘couldn’t have been more perfect’ or well-suited to the couple, adding he ‘couldn’t have ever planned a better event or dreamt of anything more fun.’
With the wedding officially in the bag, Nicole has now turned her attention to the honeymoon, though she’s decided the organisation of that event really is going to be a collaborative effort.
Hopefully it will be as much of a success as the wedding!
If you have a story you want to tell, send it to UNILAD via story@unilad.com.
Emily Brown first began delivering important news stories aged just 13, when she launched her career with a paper round. She graduated with a BA Hons in English Language in the Media from Lancaster University, and went on to become a freelance writer and blogger. Emily contributed to The Sunday Times Travel Magazine and Student Problems before becoming a journalist at UNILAD, where she works on breaking news as well as longer form features.