In 2021, I had finally settled back into New York City from a stint in Los Angeles—and as a fresh divorcee, I was eager to clock in for my Samantha Jones era. Jumping into a long-term relationship, let alone another marriage, was not part of the plan. I wanted to explore my newly minted womanhood as freely as possible in the city infamous for short-term flings. My decision to download Hinge, a dating app, was purely based on meeting people removed from Hollywood. It took a handful of swipes left before I landed on a profile that caught my eye: Elise, a redhead with an affinity for “crisp glassware and well-organized bodegas,” the type of texter who “does her best,” and undeniably beautiful. Like John Singer Sargent portrait kind of beautiful. I swiped right hard and was met with a notification that she liked me too. Fun!
The first few months of our relationship set the tone for how we would eventually get married. We got engaged two months into dating. To our credit, we waited a full 12 months before moving in together, so you can’t say we U-Hauled (though one might argue taking in a Great Dane puppy at our six-month mark was a smidge irresponsible). That’s the thing about falling in love though; your responsibility barometer isn’t always where it should be. Love, for us, required that nauseating combination of naivete, delusion, and fate.
Elise remains a self-respecting and grounded human—she likes her life, and her privacy. She still doesn’t follow me on Instagram and her account is private, with just a small following of friends and loved ones who she lets in. Fame, or even fame by association, was never aspirational for her; she dedicated the first half of her 20s to educating, interior design projects, and writing. On the other hand, I had never been more public-facing than in our first year together: from fashion weeks to beauty campaigns to the Met Gala. Those first few months illustrated our lifestyle differences and became a testing ground for how we would relate to the outside world. When I nonchalantly mentioned I was engaged on a podcast in the summer of 2022, it made an embarrassing amount of headlines, and so we decided as a couple to keep things private until we chose to invite others in.
We decided that, at some point down the line, we would just elope. Elise never aspired to be a bride in the traditional sense—she didn’t have fantasies of walking down the aisle or large swaths of people staring at her and her future partner as they performed the spectacle and theatrics of marriage. Simply put, she just didn’t feel the need for a big event, and since I had already had that experience at my first wedding with 300-plus guests, I happily obliged. Our love had formed and grown in a contained bubble, so why couldn’t our marriage be on the same terms? We even picked up wedding dresses one day while shopping at Dover Street Market without a specific date in mind, just to have in case we felt inspired. She fell in love with a Cecile Bahnsen set, and I, a Simone Rocha number. Off the rack, no tailoring, just right. We giggled in the fifth-floor dressing room like teenagers who were doing something naughty. Except we were adults, we could do what we wanted! (Plus, I had worked at Dover Street when I was in college, so it felt like a sweet omen to find our dresses there.)
We had some ideas of when we might elope but nothing was firm, so when the day came, it was even a surprise to us. In the fall of 2023, sitting perched above the shoreline in Malibu, Elise and I joked about same-day marriages, egging each other on. The bit turned more serious when I took to Google and actually learned there was a concierge service for this in Los Angeles (of course there was) and California was the only state that offered confidential marriage services, meaning our papers wouldn’t be in the public record and nobody would know we got married. A few hours later, a man showed up at our hotel in Santa Monica, took photos of us on our iPhones and a disposable camera I bought at CVS that morning, and we ended the day at a concert without telling a soul what we’d done.
Because of the last-minute elopement, we didn’t have our wedding dresses with us. They were wrapped up in garment bags at our home in Brooklyn. We did, however, have two Doen dresses—Folklore-coded, I’m afraid—which would have to suffice for the time, along with a pair of Miu Miu boots for Elise and Saint Laurent sandals for myself. We also wore our Foundrae wedding bands (hers a snake, and mine pink sapphires) because we’d purchased them on a whim and were feeling impatient. (We took them off and put them back on again for the “ceremony.”) The photos of that moment are mostly blurry and terribly composed, but special nonetheless. Elise ended up changing into a Collina Strada dress for the show and we danced and sang our hearts out, whispering “wife” to each other between songs.
It wasn’t until we got back to Brooklyn that we felt the urge to mark our marriage in a more meaningful way. While it didn’t feel like something we needed to flaunt publicly in any way, it was still the biggest moment in our lives together and we yearned for the memory of our love—and these beautiful dresses we bought—to be immortalized. We also wanted at some point to share our love with our friends, family, and the world. Hunter [Abrams] was the first person we thought of to photograph us: a close friend of mine for years, they fostered a safe and cozy environment for our first family portraits.
They came over one morning and started snapping pictures in their nonchalant way: Elise tying the back bow of my dress, putting on our shoes—hers a pair of classic Gucci pumps we got in Rome earlier in the year, mine custom Mach and Machs because so few brands make my size—and applied finishing touches on makeup and hair, petted our dogs, and simply lived our life at home. Once we were ready we all piled into our car and drove a few neighborhoods over where the trees were more lush, hopping out at various homes and stoops that complimented both our moods and our outfits. It was fun and perfectly executed, and all wrapped up by lunchtime.
A few months later, we got photos from Hunter and at that moment, we decided we wanted to share them with our friends and family and celebrate our love more publicly. While we won’t live our lives online in any way that isn’t well-protected, we do see the benefit of celebrating our love with the world—and, frankly, the importance of people seeing trans and queer love en vogue.