Silver linings

Featuring Theo Astillero Sandico and Camille Marie Baluyut Jimenez

If there’s one thing Theo and I learned from being together for 10 years, it’s that there’s always a silver lining. We envisioned our wedding day to be perfect—with every detail carefully thought out.

But every bride and groom knows that everything does not go according to plan. We had several meetings with our Italy-based wedding planner. We even flew to Italy a year before the wedding so we could make sure to go over the details in advance. But we couldn’t control everything.

Our wedding was set in a 14th century Abbey called the Abbazia San Pietro in Valle. It is located in Umbria, Italy, which is one hour north of Rome. It had a church on-site as well as the location for the reception, and we were able to fit almost 50 guests to sleep there for three nights. The venue was meaningful for Theo and I because traveling is very special to us, we’ve traveled together several times and it was always my dream to get married in an old castle in Europe. It felt like a fairytale.

Majority of the celebrations were set to be outside, but the week of the wedding, our wedding planner called us to say that the forecast for May 10 was rain. We had to rent a tent last minute for our dinner set-up, instead of how I envisioned it to be in the courtyard surrounded by candlelight. Another thing was that many of our guests had trouble getting to the venue because of a train accident in the North of Italy. It was a major accident that affected the majority of the train lines. Everyone had a crazy story about how hard it was for them to get there, but we were just so grateful that most of our friends and family made it.

The day before our wedding, we also planned to have a welcome dinner for all the guests, which had to be relocated from outdoor to indoor because of the rain. At the moment, it felt like nothing was going according to plan. Despite the relocation of our welcome dinner, the silver lining was that, since we were able to have everyone in an enclosed room, many of our closest friends and some of my siblings gave impromptu speeches, without a microphone, and it could be heard throughout the whole room. This meaningful touch made our welcome dinner so special, and it wouldn’t have been possible in an open-air setting.

It was raining so hard the day of the wedding that I couldn’t make it to the back of the church without my dress getting soaking wet, so we decided to use a side entrance and ask people to not look. When I walked down the aisle, it was also so special for me to see all the faces of the people I love rather than phone cameras. The priest even mentioned that there wasn’t a dry eye in the room because everyone was crying, and I think that was because the emotions were high since everyone was so present in the moment. We also felt blessed because the rain stopped right after the ceremony, so we were still able to have our moment exiting the church where our guests threw petals to celebrate us.

Looking back, the most memorable thing about our wedding was when Theo and I had our first look. We did it right before I walked down the aisle. It was a moment for just the two of us, and when he saw me it was the first time in our almost 10 year relationship where I saw him cry. It took away all the anxieties I had about our wedding, because it was a reminder that this day was just about the two of us and God. When I saw him crying, I also cried because we were both so overwhelmed with emotion. I never felt love like that and I just knew that, no matter what, everything was going to be okay.

I was initially upset that we had to have our wedding dinner in a tent, but when I saw that the tent was a clear one with the chandelier and flowers set up inside, I felt so much better. The silver lining to the rain was that we were able to set up in different venues and our guests were able to interact more and maximize the use of the space. Our dinner was held in the tent, the first dance and cake cutting in the courtyard surrounded by the 14th century pillars, and our after party was held in the dungeon which was an underground area with a different set up.

What was very personal to us was that we kept our wedding very traditional. We had no LCD screens, no cellphones allowed during the ceremony, and live music. We wanted it to be a reflection of us as a couple. We’re very old-school, and we wanted the venue and the wedding to reflect that. We wanted our guests to disconnect so we could reconnect with each other. I feel that, instead of the usual video presentations during the wedding, our guests enjoyed real conversations with each other, listened to speeches and the live band.

One of the highlights of our wedding was Theo’s mom and sisters who surprised us with a Lion King medley, with the lyrics changed to memories from his childhood and about us as a couple. This was a huge surprise for us and their performance was entertaining for all the guests.

In the end, we realized that our wedding day was perfect the way it was—like how Theo and I have been for the last 10 years, we always found a silver lining to any situation.