A ring of orchids crowns Elizabeth Neilson’s head, while her fiancee, Rob Duncan, stands nearby, his thin reddish mustache stealing some attention from a dapper black suit. It’s 8:30 a.m., and the coffee she boiled at 6 isn’t enough. She’s already cried off her meticulously applied eyeliner and foundation, so they pop open a bottle of Macallan 12.
Questions hang on the air. Do you take this woman? Do you take this man?
They were supposed to be in Oregon today, exchanging wedding vows among family and friends. Instead, they zip up I-15 from Salt Lake City to Farmington for a 10:30 a.m. appointment at the Davis County courthouse.
Just the two of them.
They met in college, back in Oregon, though they never dated, just hung around in the same social circles, enjoying each others’ company.
They fell out of touch until serendipity brought them both to Utah for graduate school within days of each other in 2007 — him for neuroscience, her for linguistics.
They didn’t even recognize each other the day they crossed literal paths on the Cecret Lake trail. Hiking alone, she kept thinking how cute it was to see that guy out with his father. Then she realized she might actually know him. “This is crazy,” she thought, “but I’m just gonna see.”
When she caught up, Rob and his dad had already turned around to find her, too.
Still, they didn’t date. She spent five years with someone else. He bounced from bachelor pad to the back of his van, spending every spare minute climbing some rock wall.
When Elizabeth’s relationship ended in 2014, he reached out, wondering if she’d ever thought about becoming more than friends. “Of course not!” she assumed. Six months later, his persistence paid off. “He wore me down,” she admits with a laugh.
They bought a house together in 2017, though they never discussed marriage. She figured one day, they’d sit down at the breakfast table and mutually decide to go for it.
He had other plans. On Jan. 19, 2019, they climbed a 300-foot cliff at Lime Kiln Canyon in Arizona, near Mesquite, Nevada. At the top, while she scampered away for a potty break, Rob stewed over the right words to say. Then she came back and he took the ring from his pocket, dropped to one knee and blurted out whatever came naturally.
She said yes.
Rob had gone back to school again to become a physician assistant. Elizabeth had begun a new career as a physical therapist. They were busy, so they set a date more than a year later: April 2020.
They planned their perfect wedding. A secluded venue in Bend, Oregon, near their families, in the woods, bordering a creek. A taco truck. Gluten-free cupcakes for her brother, who has celiac disease. They reserved a block of hotel rooms. They picked out elaborate lighting and linens. Every detail was right.
Then, like everything else, it fell apart. “It is with heavy hearts that Rob and I have made the difficult decision to cancel our wedding celebration,” Elizabeth wrote to their 150 invited guests this March.
The party was one thing, but they’d come too far to put this off.
So Rob and Elizabeth walk up to the courthouse, just the two of them, into the sanitized office building and through a door labeled “wedding licenses.” They hand over their IDs. They speak their mothers’ maiden names. They say “I do.” A chorus of applause rises from a cluster of cubicles.
They leave with a document that makes their love official.
On their way out, somebody yells. Rob ignores them. But it’s not somebody, it’s a gaggle of somebodies, a good hundred feet away. And they won’t stop yelling.
“Do we know you?” Rob finally shouts.
“Yeah!” they scream back in unison.
Looking closer, the couple see 15 friends, loaded down with flowers and cake. One holds up a phone with a FaceTime call from another friend who’s under lockdown in Spain. Elizabeth’s maid of honor and Rob’s mom had gone behind their backs to make sure their wedding wouldn’t actually be solitary.
For half an hour, they share laughs and eat cake and take socially distanced photographs in the courthouse parking lot. But the newlyweds have to get going. Rob has virtual lectures to attend, and Elizabeth is supposed to see a virtual patient. This isn’t a normal wedding, after all, and life must go on.
In sickness and in health.