Starting out as a long-distance couple, Adriana and Chris made travel their preferred way to meet. That’s why, when they began planning their wedding, jet-setting seemed the best way to celebrate their union. The Caribbean, a destination the couple was familiar with from past family vacations, seemed the best option. An Anguilla destination wedding, specifically, won them over as it’s the place where Chris popped the question.

“We learned that our relationship could be built anywhere and ‘home’ was not a specific place but rather wherever we happened to be with each other,” Adriana says. “Travel has been an integral part of our journey together and how we experience the world, and that’s something we wanted to share with our friends and family.”

Now, keep the tissues close by because Chris and Adriana’s origin story as a couple is a bit of a tear-jerker. They met in Italian class at Duke University when Chris happened to sit at the desk right next to Adriana.

“After hearing that Chris didn’t have any food points, I offered to buy him ramen at the dining hall,” Adriana says. “Having lunch together after class became a weekly tradition, and we became fast friends (but nothing more). Over a year and a half later and after graduating, I finally asked Chris out, and we began a long-distance relationship while I attended grad school.”

So sweet, right? Okay, back to the wedding story…

Bumps in the wedding planning road showed up early. Adriana and Chris originally planned for their ceremony to take place at the sea arch located on the west end of Anguilla. But when the arch was suddenly closed to public access, the pivot began.

“Our backup ceremony location at the Malliouhana turned out to be greater in many ways than the original plan,” the couple says, “and we still got to have a private moment at the arch that culminated in a beautiful rainbow coming out over the sea. This felt like a sign that things were happening exactly as they were supposed to.”

There was also a domino effect of flight cancellations that threatened to derail half the guest list at the last minute, but everyone rallied, even if that meant sleeping in the airport or white-knuckling it through an unplanned, seasick-inducing ferry ride. Somehow, in the midst of pre-wedding chaos, Adriana and Chris didn’t have much time to feel the stress. “Plus our guests were so, so thoughtful about tackling the issues themselves and not letting that stress rub off on us,” the couple says.

The Malliouhana delivered for the couple tenfold. “It’s one of our favorite hotels in the entire world,” Adriana says, “which is saying a lot if you know how much we travel.” Perched on Meads Bay’s cliffside like a real-life sandcastle, the resort’s playful design details (ruffled yellow pool umbrellas, mirrored tiles underfoot) made it feel like the ideal backdrop for both their Night Before celebration and the ceremony itself.

Their reception venue, Savi Beach Club, was designed to be equal parts posh and relaxed, like a European disco on the sand. Owner Eduard, who is Italian, made the couple (especially Chris) feel instantly at home. “No request was too big for Eduard,” Adriana says. He ferried to St. Martin just to track down specific pasta shapes they’d requested, built an entirely off-menu vegan dinner around Adriana’s diet, and even sat the couple down at the bar to concoct a custom signature cocktail based on their live taste-testing feedback.

Personalization was the name of the game all weekend long. Adriana hand-wrote a letter to every single guest, tucked inside their reception place-cards. She designed connect-the-dots-style games to get guests mingling and, in her words, “highly entertaining” to watch unfold. The couple skipped a traditional guestbook in favor of an audio guestbook for off-the-cuff voice messages, and handed out wind-up cameras at every event so the wedding could be remembered through dozens of unpolished, candid perspectives. There were even bride and groom cake toppers fashioned from Barbie clothes, an homage to the couple’s pet rabbits back home, and banana-shaped flasks of a signature cocktail passed around the dance floor, described by guests, the couple laughs, as “something out of a fever dream.”

But the most emotional moment of the whole weekend arrived the night before the wedding, at an impromptu open mic night. Adriana kicked things off by revealing she’d been secretly learning Italian (Chris’s first language) for an entire year, then delivered a four-minute toast to his family entirely in Italian. “Everyone was so surprised and emotional,” the bride tells us. From there, friends and family took turns sharing their own words, sending the couple into their wedding day still riding the high. Their advice to other couples? “We would strongly recommend ‘open mic night.'”

The ceremony itself took place just before sunset on the Malliouhana Bluff, with steel pan music drifting through the salt air. Chris’s childhood best friend, Nick, officiated, and made a point of honoring the guests’ journeys to be there,  reciting aloud every state and country represented in the crowd. “We were all welling up with tears of gratitude for this congregation of loved ones who had come from near and far,” the couple recalls. A ring warming allowed each guest to hold the wedding bands and silently bless them before the exchange.

Adriana’s sister read a series of poems on love’s persistence beyond death, while Chris’s sister read from Dante’s “Paradiso” in its original medieval Tuscan. That included a line inscribed on the couple’s late grandparents’ tombstone: “L’amore che move il sole e l’altro stelle,” or “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

Then came the vows, which, without either having read the other’s beforehand, echoed each other almost word for word. Chris spoke of a dream in which he recognized Adriana across lifetimes and would always wait for her; Adriana promised the same, vowing that in every lifetime, “I’ll be at my desk in Languages 211, waiting for you to open the door and come sit by my side.” Profound one moment, playful the next, the ceremony wove in self-deprecating jokes, Doctor Who references, and song lyrics, a balance the couple says captures exactly who they are together. And rather than a traditional dip kiss, Chris scooped Adriana up and carried her back down the aisle. “This was way more our playful style,” they say.

Looking back on the two years they spent planning, Adriana and Chris have plenty of wisdom to pass along to other couples dreaming of a destination wedding of their own. Their top piece of advice: play to your strengths as a team. “Adriana was the artistic visionary, personal touch extraordinaire, and guest experience coordinator, while Chris was our logistics expert, Chief Financial Officer, and vendors’ point person,” they say. “Neither one of us could have executed the whole event alone.”

They also recommend thinking less like a couple planning a wedding and more like a travel agency planning a group trip, designing detailed “travel brochures” for guests with FAQs, dress codes, and even an accessibility guide, plus mood-board slide decks for every vendor from florist to stationer. It added plenty of extra work, but the payoff was obvious: Adriana’s grandmother, who had never left the country before, called it “the most well-organized wedding.”

Above all, though, their advice comes down to this: don’t be afraid to get sentimental. “Personal touches, surprises, and emotion make your wedding memorable, so don’t be afraid to cry, be mushy, and get weird,” the couple says. “Say those eight-minute-long personal vows, ask your loved ones to make speeches, and guzzle cocktails out of banana-shaped flasks served on the dance floor. In the end, if you’ve invited the right people to witness your day, they’ll support you no matter what.”