Mutual Weirdness ‘Tinder’ Wedding With A Vintage Vibe: Sean & Freya

Today’s real wedding is all about mutual weirdness… in a good way! Sean and Freya met via Tinder and had a lovely vintage inspired wedding.

I absolutely adore their wedding favour ideas… so sweet and such an adorable ‘cute meet’ story. Enjoy!

Words by Freya. Images by Charlotte Maddison.

I wanted a vintage type wedding dress as I felt the classic style suited me best, but there was nothing ‘off the peg’ that lived up to my expectations.

My friend and my event planner recommended Caroline as she specialised in vintage, so we went to have a look at her work.

I fell in love with the fabrics she used in her example dresses and the styles, so she drew me up a design of what I’d described and what I’d liked from what I’d tried on and it looked amazing.

My friend and her daughter were the first people we told when we got engaged and her daughter immediately went onto pinterest to find me wedding ideas. I just liked the vintage idea and it went so well with the venue that we decided to go with that.

With only eight weeks to plan we didn’t have a lot of time to dawdle over themes which I was quite glad of as I’m so indecisive. I think if I’d had longer I’d have been tearing my hair out. The 1950s inspired my dress as I just thought it suited me.

It’s hard to say what my favourite thing was as I loved all of it. The silk buttons and the low back really suited me, but if I had to choose I’d say my favourite thing about the dress was the lace she used as the overlay over the silk.

Unfortunately it had been discontinued so Caroline wasn’t sure if she could get it, but in the end she managed to find a supplier with a roll of it left that she could acquire which I was ecstatic about!

She went above and beyond to make my dream wedding dress, I couldn’t have asked for a better seamstress.

My necklace was my Nana’s who sadly passed away when I was six. My auntie had kept it and when she heard I was getting married, gave it to me as my something old. It was brilliant as it felt like she was included even though she couldn’t be there.

My earrings were a present from the same Aunt who couldn’t attend.

We ‘met’ on Tinder in September which we’d both got after our friends had suggested it as a laugh and to get to know new people. Sean just happened to be visiting his brother in the area on the night we’d matched.

I had no intentions of meeting anyone I had matched with on there but we ended up talking nearly every day to consider adding to the feature and then exchanged phone numbers.

Later in September I ended up moving down to East Sussex for work for a few months which was closer to where Sean lived than my parents. On weekends I didn’t really have a lot to do as driving home took four hours and I only had a day and a half off so it wasn’t worth it, and I didn’t know anyone in the area to go out with; so Sean suggested we went out for the afternoon.

He drove two and a half hours to come and pick me up from where I was staying, having never actually met me, and even brought me a Costa hot chocolate which I’d told him was my favourite in previous conversations. We went out for the afternoon to the beach in Worthing and went for fish and chips and seemed to get on extraordinarily well.

We carried on talking but I only saw him once more when he came to my house to see me and meet the other love of my life (my horse) the day before he left for America for a month and I went to Australia for work.

We spoke every day, and when I came back from Australia in February Sean picked me up from the Airport. After that we spent every weekend together that we could.

We decided we wanted to move in together after a few months and after looking at some flats that weren’t really suitable we started joking about getting married as with his job houses would be cheaper that way.

The jokes started getting more serious until I said ‘okay, but you’re telling my parents’. A week later Sean came down to stay with me at my parents and bought with him a giant Thornton’s Easter egg. When I cracked it open I found a box with an engagement ring inside of it. He’d melted the back out of it and put the ring inside before sealing it back up.

Eight weeks later I was walking down the aisle on the happiest day of my life. I love how we met; we got to know each other so well through just talking so we know we made the right decision.

We’re still learning things about each other having only been together a relatively short while compared to most, but we knew this was what we wanted from the beginning.

Charlotte Maddison was our photographer. She had so me lovely ideas for the photographs and made us feel so comfortable as neither of us is overly keen on having our photographs taken!

I absolutely love the black and white photograph of us kissing outside the pergola; I think it sums up the whole day, a beautiful real-life fairytale.

On the top table we’d made bunting to run along the edge with a plaque on hessian that we’d printed ‘Mutual Weirdness’ on.

I just liked the look of these flowers and they suited our vintage theme so well, the Rosa Menta especially. I had the Sea Holly included as a nod to my Scottish family and to tie into the men’s buttonholes which looked fabulous.

We ordered them from a wholesale intending to do them ourselves, but after attempting a bouquet I realised it’s a lot harder than you think !

Luckily a friend of a friend contacted Alison and she managed to save the day with her amazing arrangements! You’d never have guessed they were so last minute.

I made my wedding favours. They were ‘matchboxes of happiness’ I filled them with…
A plaster to heal all hurts
A stone to keep you grounded
A rubber to erase your mistakes
A paperclip to keep you organised
An elastic band to stretch you to your full potential
A lucky bean for luck
A star for all your wishes
A coin so you are never broke
A marble in case you lose yours
A heart so you know someone loves you
A seed to help you grow
String to hold you together in tough times

I got the idea online. I liked it because it was like sharing our happiness on the day. Everything in the boxes came from craft shops. On the back we wrote ‘Thank you tinder’ as a nod to how we met.

Our cake was three tier with baileys and cream sponge on the bottom, rich fruit cake in the middle and chocolate cake on the top as Sean is a bit of a chocoholic!

I’ve always loved looking at Leanne’s creations on Facebook so I knew exactly who was going to make our cake when the time came. I wanted it to tie in with my dress and flowers so I sent Leanne pictures of them so she could recreate the lace on the bottom tier and the flowers on the top.

On the middle tier we had her make a plaque saying ‘Mutual Weirdness’, from a quote by Dr Seuss.

It reads…

‘We’re all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love’

This was a quote I found when we’d first got together, which we both thought was quiet apt. The main colour of the cake was ivory to match the vintage theme, with white detailing. I wanted it to be simple as I’m not overly keen on frills. Leanne did a beautiful job.

If you could impart any words of wisdom to a future brides planning their marriage wedding days, what would they be?

The best advice, which was given to me by the hotel owner, was not to panic about little things that aren’t done the night before. You are the only person that knows it’s not there, no one else will notice.

And it’s true, anything I’d wanted to do and hadn’t been able to, no one notice and the day was still amazing. I wish I’d taken this advice after surviving my wedding day on three hours sleep.

What was your most memorable moment of the day?

There were so many moments that I absolutely loved, like when I gave my mum her gift of a napkin that I’d had appliqued a personal message and we both burst into tears, and when my best friend and maid of honour Rachel came upstairs with a present from Sean which was a Pandora charm of two rings on a pillow for my bracelet, and when I first put my dress on with my hair and makeup done and it looked amazing.

But probably my most memorable moment was preparing to ‘walk down the aisle’ and holding my dad’s arm so tight because I was absolutely terrified, until I walked into the room and saw Sean smiling at me.

When I got to the ‘altar’ I couldn’t look at him for the first five minutes because I thought I was going to cry and I didn’t want to ruin my makeup but he kept smiling at me to try and make me to laugh.

Then after we’d done the first kiss after the ceremony words he had red lipstick all over his face which made me laugh.

wedding credits / photographer: charlotte madison

View the Gallery