Newlywed Love
Our friends, Heather & Steven, are newlyweds–they just got married a couple of months ago. My husband and I went up to their new house for the weekend to take photos of them and hang out. I couldn’t resist including them in the project with some photos from the weekend.
Smoochin’ in the Flea Market. ©Katarina Kojic
Name: Steven Duque / Heather Lapham Duque Profession: CEO & Founder, Momba / Financial Monitoring Control Director, North America Nationality / Origin. US citizen, from Houston, TX / US citizen from Ashby, MA
Relationship to each other: Husband & Wife How / where did you meet? When did you meet? We met in October 2010 at a party at the Back Bay Hotel to celebrate the opening of the New American wing of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston. Heather had just moved to Boston a few months earlier from NYC. Steven had gone to school in Cambridge at Harvard and had returned to the city after touring with his band, Mount Auburn, cross-country. Heather went to the MFA party with a couple of friends from London who were visiting, and Steven went to the party to meet up with a friend of his before going on to another event elsewhere in the city. When Steven arrived, his friend was chatting with Heather and her friends. (Heather: Steven made a huge impression on me that night. He was (and is) a star. He is the most attractive person I’ve ever met in my life. I just wanted to be around him.) (Steven: Going to that party was one of the most fortuitous events of my life. Truth be told, my friend and I initially intended to go to another event at the same hotel, and happened upon the museum party. As soon I met Heather, it was game over. She was and is the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, inside and out.)
How long have you been together? We’ve been together since 2010, so that’s coming up on 2 years. We knew that we were going to be together for the long run soon after we met. What is your favorite thing about Steven? That is an impossible question for me – I don’t have one favorite thing about Steven. I love his energy, sweetness, sensitivity, enthusiasm for life, and integrity… just to name a few things that I love about Steven. Steven IS my favorite thing. What is your favorite thing about Heather? Her heart. She’s one of the most compassionate people I’ve ever met, and her compassion is made even more precious, in my view, by the fact that she’s physically the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
Heather & Steven took us to town to check out the local antiques & flea market. ©Katarina Kojic
I really love it when Steven…Dances with me. I’ll dance to anything just to dance with Steven. I really love it when Heather… Holds me close to her. My heart absolutely melts when I’m close to her.
Why is Steven important to you? Steven is my soul mate – he is my other half. It took a while for me to finally find him. We had to have a lot of love, faith, and courage, to choose the path we have taken. Our life together is the beginning of a beautiful lifetime journey. I hope that answers the question. Why is Heather important to you? Because she is who she is and I am who I am. Our paths are inextricably intertwined and only complete when looked at together.
What does love mean to you? Love is…. Heather: “To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in the other the spark of God”. During our wedding ceremony, my father read an excerpt from “By the river Piedra I sat down and wept” by Paulo Coelho which included this. I think it is the truest thing I’ve ever read about love.
Steven: I think it’s incredibly difficult to articulate the substance of an ideal or value (especially one as divine as love), but I think I can explain my understanding of what it means to love, from my perspective. To love is to have the courage to believe that there is truth and goodness in the world, that these values supersede all others, and that the partner you’ve chosen is the person who inspires and empowers you to recognize this and continue your pursuit of the ideal.
With some urging, we got Steven to play some of his songs for us, one he had written especially for Heather. Engin played along on guitar — It was a great night of music and friends! ©Katarina Kojic