Sam and Bryan: Love Him, and Let Him Love You
Sam and Bryan’s Sydney wedding was a perfect blend of love and loads of laughter. They aimed for a celebration that felt like a big, joyous party—a true reflection of who they are. Their main priority was to have a great time surrounded by the people they love the most. “We weathered the marriage equality referendum together, and felt the massive importance and burden that I think a lot of queer people felt during that time. It definitely fuelled our vision during our wedding planning, to have a huge ‘fuck you’ party and a massive sigh of relief.”
Photographer Hungry Hearts Co. | Location Sydney, AUS
“…he excused himself to go to the toilet, and I nervously told the bartender that this was a first date and I thought it was going well. She replied that she assumed we were old friends catching up as we were so familiar with each other, and it really felt that way.”
How and when did you meet?
Sam: We met six years ago on a Tinder date. Bryan had just flown in from a visit back home to the UK and was severely jet lagged, I was churning through a year of dates after my first big relationship. Bryan was 6 months out of a ten-year relationship, and I think neither of us was expecting to connect in the way we did. We met at The Rover in Surry Hills for a drink, talked incessantly for 4 hours and then relocated further into the city for an impromptu dinner.
Tell us a little about that first time you met…
Sam: Bryan maintains that he fell in love at first sight, but maybe 10 years of being out of practice was showing because I had no idea he wanted to be anything more than friends. He excused himself to go to the toilet, and I nervously told the bartender that this was a first date and I thought it was going well. She replied that she assumed we were old friends catching up as we were so familiar with each other, and it really felt that way. After ‘drinks’ turned into a 6 hour dinner date, we shook hands and said goodbye under the fluorescent lights of Central Station. I took a big swing on the train ride home and texted him, saying I wished I had kissed him goodbye. He replied, saying he would have liked that. We saw each other the next night, and every night after that for the next 6 years till now.
What was the first thing you noticed about each other?
Sam: I noticed that Bryan was incredibly well put together, extremely handsome, and very engaging. I could tell he was just a little uptight (he blamed it on jet lag), and I thought I could have fun with this. Bryan has incredible eyes and the most beautiful smile, and making him laugh was a winning drug I couldn’t get enough of.
Bryan: Sam was immediately the most effortlessly charming person I had ever met. In the first five minutes alone I found all my walls start to come down. He was maybe little bit ‘scrappier’ than I was expecting (the ripped jeans were more rip than jean), but he was handsome and funny and put his hand on my knee, and being with him gave me butterflies.
Tell us about the standout moments in your relationship…
Sam: There hasn’t been a day since I met Bryan that I haven’t been completely sure that he would be in my life forever, and vice versa. I thought during that first date that maybe we would be best friends, and that’s all that was on the cards, but we both got lucky. This means that even the hard times are easier, and as queer people I think we bring a lot of baggage and things that need unpacking into a relationship, but it all felt easier with Bryan because we never doubted that there was any way we weren’t going to be each other’s constant. We light up while travelling, and doing amazing things around the world with each other is some of our favourite times. Building a home together and welcoming people in, for dinner or for six months while they find somewhere to live, has been a highlight. My mum’s long-term same-sex partner Polly passed in the first two years of my relationship with Bryan, and I watched him quietly and fiercely support me, be by my side every step of the way, love me and hold me. For all of the huge, amazing fun times we’ve had together, it’s these quieter, harder moments with just he and I that stand out.
Have you ever faced any issues of non-acceptance?
Sam: We weathered the marriage equality referendum together, and felt the massive importance and burden that I think a lot of queer people felt during that time. It definitely fuelled our vision during our wedding planning, to have a huge ‘fuck you’ party and a massive sigh of relief, and to celebrate queer joy with so much love in the room. Bryan is a black gay man that has moved from the United States, to the United Kingdom, and then here to Australia, and there are acceptance and racism issues that he experiences every day, on a personal level and a global societal level. I’m a ex-Christian pastor who grew up in a smaller coastal town and I struggle to travel back into these places I’ve left behind. We went to the Blue Mountains for our first anniversary and I surprised Bryan with a luxury stay away in a beautiful hotel. When we checked in, the person behind the counter apologised, saying, “I’m sorry, we seem to have you in a shared King bed room, not two singles.” I think we experience moments like this when we leave Sydney, or any city, where the assumed preference is straight. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it reminds you constantly that you are not always seen, not recognised as the norm, and it creates this constant state of coming out, even on a day as special as your anniversary. It makes the giant, accepting hug of a community around us so much more important; we are not othered, we are not tokenised, we are Bryan & Sam.
What does marriage mean to you?
Sam: Bryan and I both grew up religious and were raised with very traditional morals. I think when you come out, you walk a mental tightrope between gains and losses. Something I think we both thought we had lost was the gift of marrying someone and starting a family. The marriage equality referendum was more taxing than either of us realised, and being able to participate in an institution that we had both grown up planning for, being told was the acceptable next step in a relationship, was extremely exciting when legalised. We could have, and would have, been together forever regardless, but being able to write our own rules, throw out what we didn’t like and embrace the parts of it we loved, was overwhelmingly exciting. My mum found the love of her life later in her life, and her partner died of cancer a year after marriage equality was legalised. The day that the marriage equality vote was announced as a ‘yes’, my mum drove to visit her partner in hospital who was recovering from surgery, and proposed. They never made it down the aisle, and so the fact that we could legally marry the love of our life feels even bigger than the two of us. We know we got to do something that so many have only ever fantasised about, because they were born too early for society to catch up. We feel incredibly, incredibly lucky and grateful for all of the epic love stories that came before us and paved the way.
Who proposed and how?
Sam: I’m the shotgun, emotional decision maker, and Bryan is the voice of reason. I told him in a very inebriated state at Burning Man that I was planning to propose to him, and he told me absolutely not as we didn’t even live together yet. So being the stubborn person I am, I told him fine, he can propose to me. We moved in together shortly after, and then came COVID and all of the lockdowns. Finally when the lockdowns lifted we were on the first plane to the UK to visit his family, including a trip to Switzerland just the two of us. During this week, we visited Grindelwald and trekked up the mountains to visit the sunny, snow-covered villages. Bryan wore VERY inappropriate shoes that skated all over the packed-down snow in the streets, and after suggesting we take a walk up to a mountain lake he immediately slipped over. There was a cliff walk right near us, so we did this instead as the elevated walkway hugged the mountain and provided amazing views, and Bryan’s shoes wouldn’t slip. About half way along, we stopped for a photo, and after thrusting his phone and blurting very strict and nervous instructions at a bewildered tourist, Bryan got down on one knee and completely surprised me by proposing.
When did you get married?
We got married on the 28th of January, 2023 on a beautiful, perfect sunny Sydney day.
Sam and Byran’s story continues below, as well as their wedding film by MoreLife Films ↓
What was the main influence behind your wedding day?
Sam: We have a huge community of queer friends and family, so we wanted the day to feel like a new benchmark for queer joy. We wanted to combine our style and need-to-control-every-last-detail tendencies (we are both Virgos) to throw a classy, entertaining and absolutely love-filled day. Our style influence was classic black-and-white silhouettes. We wanted the ladies of our wedding parties to look cohesive, but still bringing their own style. My groomsmaids wore black, and Bryan’s wore white, and we gave them licence to find something that they loved. Our boys all wore tuxedos (with a few twists to signal the different wedding parties), and we extended the black tie brief to all the guests. We wanted to have a huge, once-in-a-lifetime, look-your-best celebration for everyone involved. We love everyone in our wedding party, and because we wanted to hear from everyone on our wedding day, we took inspiration from the Oscars and decided to structure our speeches differently. For our best man speeches, we had two of our wedding party get up first and do an introduction warm up for each of them (which might have became a roast…). Similar approach for ourselves; we had the others in the wedding party introduce each of us respectively. This was staggered over the evening; one set before entrees, one before mains, one before dessert and then one after. The room absolutely lit up every time a pair of speakers would get up to the podium, and because we tasked everyone in our wedding party with a moment in the spotlight, they knocked it out of the park. The speeches were the highlight of the evening, and had the entire reception roaring with laughter.
What was the most important thing to you surrounding your wedding?
Sam: The most important thing to us was that it felt like us and we were having a great time, with the people we love the most. An example of this: I hate posed photographs, and I’m not a huge fan of orchestrated images of Bryan and I gazing into each others eyes in a field by a mountain. So instead of traditional photos, we escaped for an hour with our wedding party and did what we do best: we went to the Rover, the bar we first met in, and drank martinis and negronis with our favourite people, while a photographer took candids. It was the best.
Did you incorporate any family sentiments or traditions?
We’re hoping never to get divorced, which appears to be a family tradition on both sides!
Where did you find the bulk of your inspiration?
Sam: We found this hard. It’s can be exhausting watching straight wedding videos, and seeing straight photographs for inspiration. In the end, we found one or two gay YouTubers that had thrown a wedding in the style that we wanted and loved, and then we made the rest up as we went. Theodore was a big reference point too, we loved the classy photoshoots and love stories we found here. I’m a designer and Bryan is in advertising, so we brought a very controlling mentality to the brief. We are best when solving a problem creatively, so we spent countless hours talking and drinking way too much wine while we ideated and made Pinterest boards and spreadsheets. A great example of this is our search for a ceremony venue: we wanted something that felt grand, cathedral-like, without the religious connotations. We searched a lot outside of Sydney, but everything felt very geared towards a bride and groom; the country houses and stables and vineyards just didn’t really feel like us. Then just as we were feeling defeated we stumbled on some photos of the Utzon Room at the Sydney Opera House, and we were immediately taken aback by the beautiful oversized tapestry on the wall facing the ocean. It’s the one room that the architect, John Utzon, was brought back on to the project to design. He had the tapestry commissioned and it’s an abstract interpretation of Bach symphony, the only artwork in the building that Utzon designed. It is timeless, stunning, has connections to Bryan’s musical past and translates a musical experience into a visual one, which is my realm. It was the perfect marriage of us both, and the room is a brutalist, concrete masterpiece, smack bang in the middle of the city where we met. So much of our wedding day was finding these perfect, non-traditional meeting points that felt like us.
How did you choose your suppliers?
Sam: We chose our suppliers through a mix of Google searching, Instagram and Pinterest browsing, weighing up price points, and not wanting to compromise. Bonus points if we could work with queer suppliers. Our DJ is an amazing queer person who we met through friends; our reception venue is a Greek restaurant with an amazingly aesthetic event space that features crumbling brick archways; we found our wedding band on YouTube through ONE video they had posted, and the flowers we did very last-minute, but absolutely smashed. All design and printing was done by me.
What was the most difficult thing about planning your wedding?
Sam: The balancing act between creating an event that we wanted everyone to enjoy us much as us, navigating through all friends and family arriving from around Australia and overseas, and then the crunch two weeks out where everything becomes very time sensitive. We had to sit down at one point and communicate that the frustrations that arose from these things weren’t directed at each other, and that none of this would be happening if we didn’t love each other and want to do it. Talking and deciding in that moment that we would not blame each other or be against each other, but instead be a team in pulling off the biggest event we had tackled as a couple, changed those last few weeks from a stressful hurricane into an enjoyable opportunity to bunker down as the unbeatable team we are and love each other.
Where did you spend your honeymoon?
Sam: Bryan had never been to Bali, and after the huge marathon of the wedding we decided to go somewhere close, hot and spend big on the luxury accommodation there.
Any advice for other couples planning their day and finding it difficult to navigate the journey?
Sam: Communicate well. You are only doing this because you love each other. At the end of the day, it could be 150 people or just the two of you and it will mean the same thing. Also in Grand Designs style you WILL go over budget and you will say yes to things in the final run to the altar that would have seemed over-the-top six months earlier. Also, spend time talking to each other and figuring out what you both want, this is not an individual day, it belongs to both of you. Finally, GET A VIDEOGRAPHER. The best advice we got was to just spend the money and hire a videographer. The day goes by in a beautiful blur, and to be able to watch it all back was worth every cent. We thought about it like this: your wedding day is likely be the first and last time that everyone we love is in one place, so we want to be able to look back on it in all its glory.
Sam and Bryan’s Team
Photographer Hungry Hearts Co.
Videographer MoreLife films
Suits Brent Wilson
Rings Cartier
Ceremony Venue Sydney Opera House
Reception Venue Beta Events
Reception Venue Lighting Dave the Lighting Guy
Wedding Cake Stacey Brewer Cakes
Ceremony Band Limited Edition Band
Reception Band Ep Entertainment Syd
Flowers Eden and Bell
Design Sam (one of the grooms)
Bar The Rover Sydney
Celebrant Emily Married Me (and our close friend Georgia Reid)
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