Mekhala and Tatum’s incredible Lesbian Indian Wedding at the Trivium Estate in Lynchburg Virginia.

I’ve held back on blogging Mekhala and Tatum’s wedding partly because I was overwhelmed by all the photos, and also because I wanted to give it the attention it deserves. And what better time to share it than now, World Pride week 2019?! When these two beautiful humans told me their love story and asked me to come to Virginia to document their wedding day, I knew immediately it was meant to be. It was important to them to find an LGBT wedding photographer, so they shuffled me from New York City to Virgina! Here is their love story, in their own words, along with some of my favorite photos from their wedding day.

“We met as undergraduate creative writing majors at a women’s liberal arts college in the conservative heart of Virginia. While our backgrounds couldn’t have been more different – Tatum is from Texas, and Mekhala is Indian and grew up moving around the Middle East – writing brought us together. For the first few years, we communicated largely through effusive written comments on each other’s pieces for creative writing workshops. It was only after Mekhala graduated and moved to Canada, with Tatum still in college for another year, that we realized we wanted to be together. That began four years of long distance, seeing each other for a few days after an all-night bus journey every few months, with no clear end to the distance in sight.

Our relationship never had a happy-go-lucky or cat-and-mouse or honeymoon phase. We leapt straight from friendship to love, a very serious love that we nurtured by transcending a seemingly constant series of obstacles – the long distance, cancer, graduate and law schools, hunts for jobs in the same country, finally moving in together, and evolving family acceptance. Though these experiences gave us such a sense of commitment that we never felt pressured to marry, Tatum proposed to Mekhala on the day she’d calculated that we had lived together exactly one day longer than we had been apart. The weekend we chose for our wedding was our tenth anniversary.

After a decade, our wedding was a chance for us to openly revel in our love and celebrate with Mekhala’s parents, sister, and extended family, Tatum’s cousin, and many of our beloved friends. Our guests traveled to the Blue Ridge Mountains so we could marry in the place where we met – our mutual hometown of sorts. Everything about our wedding was a perfect reflection of us as a couple, including the two ceremonies in one day. The first was a Hindu ceremony officiated by a pandita in the tradition of Mekhala’s state of Maharashtra, while the second was a Western ceremony officiated by the writing professor in whose class we first met. Ultimately, our wedding day was a culmination of a decade of our commitment, and a testament to equal love. We will bask in these beautiful memories forever.”

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Erica Camille is a lesbian wedding photographer based in NYC and Thailand specializing in LGBT and queer weddings. Named one of the best 10 wedding photographers in NYC by Peerspace, Erica’s work has been featured on dozens of wedding blogs and publications including Cosmopolitan, The New York Daily News, Buzzfeed, Refinery 29, Huffington Post, Offbeat Bride, A Practical Wedding, and World Bride Magazine.