Wedding Giveaway Winners Announced: Get Your Champagne Flutes Ready

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Robin Roemer had this awesome idea to celebrate the achievement of Marriage Equality in her state of New York by sponsoring a giveaway of her photography services. Her idea inspired other generous people to participate. Lots of adorable couples entered. We were supposed to narrow the field down to five, but we’re such rebels we break even our own rules and gave you six to vote on, which was no easy feat for you. Well now we officially have a winner!

Wait.

Wait for it…

WA-BAM:

Abby and Lani

I know this felt like Sophie’s Choice for you guys, so we wanted to reward your generous voting and tough decision-making with a special peek into the lives of this super lucky couple! Let’s learn a little bit more about them in their own words:

How we met:
We met ONLINE! Can you believe it? We should be poster girls for OKCupid.com. I found Lani and immediately was smitten just by looking at her photos and reading her profile- she felt warm and easy and calm (oh. and gorgeous). Well, she played hard to get and didn’t write to me, excepting a tiny “Thanks for the sweet note, I’ll get back to you,” for TWO WEEKS! But at least she did. Thank goodness. We met that night- I walked into the restaurant and she was sitting at a table, legs crossed, reading. No makeup, just came from a yoga class, in a white yoga top and cutoff jeans. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. We had an amazing night, and we knew very, very quickly that this was it.

Our relationship:
We are self-proclaimed cooking show junkies (do not tell us who won MasterChef. We have it DVRed). We went for a month living on $20/day (combined) when I was unemployed, and blogged about it. Our biggest guilty pleasure is karaoke, and we are total fiends. Oh, and if we had our ‘druthers, we’d vacation with Sweet all the time. Vacationing with them was the ultimate luxury of our lives last year, but had that warm, welcoming feeling of summer camp (lesbian summer camp!). We went to Cozumel in ’10 and had the most unbelievable, relaxing and rejuvenating time imaginable.

Vacationing in Cozumel with SWEET, fall 2010 (photo by Julie Yunk)

Wedding Details:
As you know, the wedding will be in June in Londonderry NH. Londonderry is all farms, apples, and country New England beauty. The ceremony will be outside in the labyrinth garden, and the reception will take place inside the sanctuary, which, when the alter is taken out, is a gorgeous post-and-beam event space. My mother helped to build the church some 20+ years ago, and I grew up in it. It feels like home there for both of us. We’ll have 100-150 people present for what will be the biggest Lani-Abby LoveFest you’ve ever seen. It’ll be absolutely gorgeous, but will feel like a cookout. Relaxed, no pretention, all friends and love and singing around the piano. A real, down-home rustic family wedding.

Us with our GORGEOUS new puppy, Bodhi! July 2011

Congratulations Abby and Lani — we can’t wait to see your wedding photos! Big thanks to everyone who entered and voted. We really do wish each couple the very very best!

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