Our story

Hi there! Welcome to our wedding website.

Who we are

We presume you know at least one of us, but some of you may not be so familiar with either the bride or groom. So here’s a quick overview. Introducing…..

The bride

Name: Ciara

Age: a little over 10,000 days

Nationality: Hiberno-European

Profession: super-heroine 🦸‍♀️ (disguised as a parliamentary assistant)

Languages: English, French, German, Irish (but not Spanish, shockingly)

Most impressive skill: following receipes to the letter

Achilles’ heel: jar lids that are impossible to open

Guilty Pleasure: chocolate (Belgian, ideally) 🍫

Pet peeve: plants (at least the ones that are still alive) 🌱

Most likely to become famous for: historic C0₂ emissions reform 🏭

The groom

Name: Émile

Age: not yet as old as Jesus (but soon)

Nationality: as Belgian as French fries 🍟

Profession: Web developer by day, Roleplay game-master by night (and weekends, and lunchtimes)

Langues: Ajax, CSS, Javascript, Entish

Most impressive skill: beard maintenance

Achilles heel: punctuality

Guilty pleasure: Picardy thirds

Pet peeve: overcooked pasta 

Most likely to become famous for: writing the definitive Lord of the Rings Wikipedia entry… in Walloon

How we met

In the land of comic books, nothing could be more normal. The story of how we met is a tale of bubbles 💬

Between the first two lockdowns, it was necessary to come out of our holes from time to time 😷. Summer 2020 was the first moment when the masks could be put away for a little while. What better excuse than to include some new people in our ‘bubbles’… particularly when they are so nice!

Ciara had recently arrived in Brussels, and Émile had just returned there. After a small party, a few steps of a folk dance 🕺🏽💃🏻, and an outing to Dinant, all the signs were clear: this seemingly ephemeral bubble would survive the lifting of restrictions…

Ciara returned to her island for three weeks ☘️, and Émile to the wilds of Belgium. From that moment, the bubble gave life to speech bubbles, sent via chat. Hundreds, thousands of bubbles filled with tales of beer, linguistics and dreams.
It was then that a call 📳 – purely accidental – suddenly burst our personal bubbles. And then a dinner by candle-light, one fateful Brussels summer night!

And so it was, in the last days of Lúnasa 2020, that the winds of love began to blow!

What marriage means to us

In the FAQ you will find some more practical points about what a religious marriage looks like and signifies. Here, we would like to share what this commitment really means for us.

Our wedding is an opportunity to build a project that will be a real mission, as a couple 💑. Even if we do not know where or what we will be called to at different points in our lives, we feel this call to live a life of service not as two separate people, but as a couple. For us, God plays an integral role in this call.

Building a loving family is part of this project, as well as transmitting our faith to the children we hope to have, and to the people we will serve. Another part of this project is the call we both feel to live in simplicity, without material attachments.

(Well done for reading this far – are you one of our mothers, by any chance? 😘 )

The role of our wedding day in this mission

Our wedding is not only a celebration for us. We want our couple to always be at the centre of the communities that have made us who we are. Your presence at our wedding is central to this.

By coming to our wedding mass, you are witnesses to our commitment. By coming to the party, you fill us with even more joy ❤️