The Lovettes: Introducing Aisling and Rupert and their Travel Inspired, Country House Summer Wedding

It’s time to introduce you to another of our team of brilliant blogging brides, aka, ‘The Lovettes’. We building up a whole Lovettes community right now and I’m absolutely loving getting to know all these wonderful ladies! This evening, I’d like you to join me in welcoming Aisling to our team.  Each of our Lovettes has a different perspective of planning a wedding to bring to the blog. For Aisling, this will involve planning a wedding from overseas.  I knew when I read her Instagram strapline ‘Living in London and Singapore. Planning a wedding in Ireland. What could possibly go wrong?‘ that I wanted to know more. Aisling, I’m most looking forward to reading about the trials (and tribulations?) of planning a wedding when you’re located several thousand miles away from where it’s actually happening! Welcome to our little team!

___________________________

I’m writing this post from beside our apartment’s pool in Singapore. It’s relatively cool today, just 31°C at 10am, with 74% humidity.

There’s a slight breeze, which is a blessing, because we’ve only just arrived on our year-long stay here and the sticky heat takes some getting used to! My iPhone tells me we are 6,750 miles from our home in London.

Like our fellow Lovettes, Caroline and Will, Rupes and I could have met at university, but didn’t….

Although I lived with one of his best friends from school, Chris, for a year, and Rupes’ mother remembers meeting me at one of their matches, for whatever reason our paths never crossed. We were once at the same party. Rupes had heard Chris had an Irish girlfriend and assumed that was me and I spent most of the evening asleep in a corner having driven across from Ireland that morning, so no dice there either.

Fortunately, Chris threw a housewarming party a few months after we graduated and, having finally met, Rupes and I hit it off straight away.  True love never running smoothly, I’d moved to Ireland by then, and the two years of ‘will they, won’t they’ that followed kept all our friends highly entertained.

One particular moment I’ll never be allowed to live down was when Rupes flew to Dublin to help me with some fundraising, and put up with being paraded around town, his face painted bright blue for the day. My friend’s mum heard about it and gave me a right telling off for not ‘putting that poor boy out of his misery’ and going out with him!

We did eventually get our act together. I won’t deprive Chris (now upgraded to the Best Man) of his wedding speech glory by going into the details, suffice to say it only took six months before I’d upped sticks and moved to London.

There’s an old Chinese quote that says being loved by someone deeply gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. That’s how I feel with Rupes, when we are a team the possibilities just seem endless.

We spent nearly three years living in London, though we both love to travel and have managed plenty of far-flung adventures to places like Burma, Colombia and Turkey. It wasn’t until I was looking for photos to go with this post that I realised how sweaty and dishevelled we look in most of the pictures of us together (sorry!).

Once you get engaged, it’s so easy to (re-)write your ‘perfect’ engagement story, but actually, I was dead-set against the idea of being proposed to. The whole bit where the girl is meant to sit around and wait patiently and/or drop endless hints while she waits for the guy to man up seemed really weird to me, and I said so. Repeatedly. But Rupes was absolutely adamant he was a Man and he was going to Propose so I should just stop overthinking it because I was going to love it. I didn’t really have much option but to concede, and kind of just resigned myself to humouring him and pretending to be surprised.

Of course, Rupes was right and I had to eat my words. Despite how stressed I was about having to go along with the whole proposal thing, and how it wouldn’t ‘reflect us as a couple’, I have to be honest now and admit it was wonderful. I was completely and utterly surprised to the point I couldn’t speak and so many people asked us afterwards how we got engaged that I was really glad we had a lovely story to share with them. (Rupes has been smug about this for months).

It was the Friday before Christmas, and London was the quietest I’ve ever seen it, so many people had already left for the holidays. Rupes suggested a trip on the London Eye, and because we have a little ‘Christmas treat’ every year, I really didn’t think anything of it. Besides, one of my favourite things about living in London was crossing over the bridges on our way home from a night out and seeing the city all lit up so it seemed very sensible really.

We walked from our flat down along the Southbank, and again, I really didn’t suspect a thing because it’s something we do all the time. I should have copped on when it turned out Rupes had booked a private capsule and we got truffles and champagne, but he brushed it off as being part of the Christmas treat, and honestly, I just remember being a bit exasperated at how extravagant he was being!

The London Eye was wonderful (I really do love the lights) and just as we got to the top, I spotted our flat. I was incredibly proud of myself because I have the most horrific sense of direction and routinely confuse left and right. At this point, I’m a bit disappointed Rupes hasn’t been more enthusiastic about my amazing accomplishment so I turn around to him and as I do I see he’s dropping to one knee, ring box in hand.

I think he said some lovely things, but honestly, the shock kicked in and I only remember the first six words. What happened next is disputed, because while we both agree I was stunned into silence, I do at least remember nodding, but Rupes says this didn’t happen! Eventually, Rupes placed the beautiful antique ring he’d picked on my finger. And I cried.

After a wonderful Christmas celebrating with family and friends, we got thinking about wedding planning, and I have to admit so far I’ve loved every moment of it. We decided to get married in Ireland and set 27 August 2016 as the date for our wedding. We’ve been guided by our wedding planning mantra of “Be decisive and work with nice people”  and have chosen a lovely venue and some wonderful suppliers that I’m looking forward to sharing with you in future posts.

In a strange way, I think the Great Proposal Debate (and how much I loved my proposal in the end) has made me a lot more open to traditional parts of the day that I wouldn’t really have considered including before. I’d love to know if any other readers found themselves swept up in the engagement process in spite of themselves, or if traditions you never considered have suddenly become central to your wedding day?

Aisling x

 

 

A little background on Aisling

As this is Aisling’s first post for Love My Dress,  we thought it would be nice to share some of her original Lovettes application with you all – to help you get to know her a little better.  We’ll be doing the same for all our new Lovettes when it comes to sharing their first posts.

Aisling O’Dwyer is due to marry Rupert Walter on 27 August 2016
You can find Aisling on Pinterest and Instagram
Amy French of Rubistyle Photography will be taking their wedding photographs

How They Met:

We pretty much covered this above.

About their wedding:

We’re at the very early stages of planning our wedding, but the fact we’re about to move to Singapore for a year and so will be doing some of the planning long-distance has helped motivate us to sort a few key contracts!

Both of us have winter birthdays, and after a lifetime of indoor birthday parties, we were clear that we wanted a summer wedding. I have a traditionally massive Irish family, and we both have a wide circle of friends in London, so we’ve accepted the guest list is going to be sizeable (c. 170). Funnily enough, Rupert felt very strongly that we should get married in Ireland, and the size of our guest list combined with the fact that we didn’t want to get married in a big hotel made it quite easy for us to narrow down a list of venues. As we were over celebrating with my family after Christmas we decided to book a viewing or two so we could get an idea of what was on offer. We fell in love with the first venue we saw, and frantically ended up booking a few more viewings so we could check our instincts! Nothing compared, and in the end, we booked a wonderful country house with glorious gardens, lots of accommodation for our guests and the most beautiful interiors (always important in Ireland!) for the August Bank Holiday 2016 just over a week after we got engaged!

We share a love for photography, and having seen some amazing shots in an Irish wedding magazine we immediately got in touch to book the photographer. Aside from that, we’ve been engaged for just over a month so we’re still considering the rest of the details (and trying desperately to get hold of the priest from the local church… I’ve resorted to sending him a letter!).

Rupert really wants the chance to wear a morning suit, and I would like a vintage or vintage-inspired wedding dress (I’ve yet to try anything on, but the 1920s is my decade, on paper at least!) so we probably will go for an understated glamour theme. We travel a huge amount together and have been to some very exotic places so we also want to incorporate this into the day – perhaps by playing on the 1920’s theme an introducing a sense of the ‘Age of Exploration’. Though we are having a lot of traditional elements (large guest list/sit down meal/morning suits) we don’t want a day that feels stuffy, and the most important thing to us is that our guests have a brilliant weekend and that our personalities are reflected in the ceremony and throughout the day. (We’ll probably also need to incorporate the Irish tradition of going to the local pub to pull a pint together on the way back from the church at some point!).

What does marriage mean?

Two years ago, I quit my job and went back to law school. I wasn’t very sure about it when I suggested it first, but the moment I did, Rupert was one hundred per cent supportive. He stopped me from second-guessing myself when I saw the challenges it would present, and supported me through the sometimes demoralising job application process (in law, you start this before you finish, or in my case, start studying!). I think it sums us up really, we are each other’s people.

Some people say their partner is their best friend, but I already have one of those and she doesn’t need replacing. With Rupert though, I can voice things that are irrational, or where I don’t know what I’m feeling and he’ll help me figure it out. We have a print in our flat that says, ‘Oh darling, lets be adventurers!’.  (I saw if first in a LoveMyDress wedding!) and to me that sums it up. I don’t know where marriage will take us, or what we’ll be doing in ten years time but I do know that I want to be doing it in Rupert, and that whatever challenges life throws at us, we’ll be there to help each other through.

Favourite Hollywood Icon?

Katherine Hepburn: gorgeous, glamourous and fiercely independent, need I say more?

Favourite Love My Dress wedding:

There are so many! Picking just one is both really difficult and incredibly easy, because while there are loads where I have loved the wedding, or the styling or the photography, there is one wedding that has stuck in the back of my mind. I think about Clara and Jason’s relationship every time I think about what marriage means, and I cry every time I read their story.