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He was a doctor. She was a dentist. And they loved each other, to the point of broaching marriage to their parents. But a romantic union between these two medical professionals fell apart over an economic indicator: the price of gold in Egypt.

Mohamed Abdel-Alim, 31, said his hopes of marrying his dentist bride-to-be earlier this year were dashed when her family wouldn’t budge on a customary gift of shiny gold jewelry known as a shabka.

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The Egyptian equivalent of a diamond engagement ring, the shabka symbolizes the beginning of the lifelong bond of marriage. But it has become prohibitively expensive in a country struggling with unemployment, stagnant salaries and soaring prices.

Mr. Abdel-Alim said his intended’s parents demanded a shabka worth about $7,885, roughly twice the price of a year ago for the same amount of gold, a result of the sharp depreciation of the Egyptian pound and a foreign currency shortage. “I could only afford half that amount,” he said. “They wouldn’t accept it, and it was such a disappointment.”

The families’ failure to come to terms ended the pair’s relationship, Mr. Abdel-Alim said, a fairly commonplace in Egypt’s complex marital marketplace. The bride’s family couldn’t be reached for comment.

Financial hardships are forcing Egyptians to look for ways to save money in realms once thought off-limits to scrimping, from marriage gifts to baby formula and life-preserving medicines. The country’s economic crisis has shaken public confidence in PresidentAbdel Fattah Al Sisi, who has staked his leadership on being in touch with the concerns of ordinary Egyptians.

Last week, dozens of desperate mothers staged a rare public protest, with their wailing infants in their arms, over shortages in baby formula. The protest prompted the government and military to reduce restrictions on importing the staple and ease the eligibility requirements for subsidized baby milk. Meanwhile, some medicines have doubled in price or disappeared from the market as the cost of basic foods has dramatically increased due to high inflation.

Behind the rising prices is a wobbly Egyptian currency whose value has been knocked lower by declines in tourism and foreign investment. Black-market dealers have done a brisk business buying dollars at a nearly 40% premium over the official rate of 8.88 Egyptian pounds per dollar, which the central bank has held steady since devaluing the currency in March. Annual inflation is currently 14%.

Moreover, Egypt isn’t generating the jobs to keep pace with the rising cost of living. Unemployment has hovered around 13% for several years, and that figure is roughly double for young people between 15 and 29 years old, who make up about a quarter of Egypt’s population of 90 million.

The country’s economic pain is set to intensify. In exchange for $12 billion in loans to the Egyptian government, the International Monetary Fund has called for Egypt to overhaul its subsidy and tax policies. Egyptian officials acknowledge that introducing those changes without overwhelming citizens with higher expenses and painful shortages is a tall task likely to face stiff political resistance.

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It all started with an invitation to my sister’s wedding. Weddings can be a source of stress for many people, but I had an extra reason to worry: I hadn’t left my house in a year. I’m not sure exactly what triggered it, but a year prior I’d started having debilitating anxiety attacks, complete with dizziness, hot flashes, and a tightness in my chest that made it feel like I couldn’t breathe. As my panic increased, my mobility decreased. I became terrified that if I left, something horrible would happen to me. So I just stayed inside—it was easier than dealing with my fear. And at just 31 years old, I had become a prisoner in my own home.

But as I thought about my sister and how much I loved her, I knew I couldn’t miss her wedding. Something was going to have to change. I realized that who I was now—a person who was mentally and physically unhealthy and who was too afraid to enjoy life—was not who I wanted to be.

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I made it to the wedding, which was great, but when I saw the pictures from that happy day I realized that my journey back to health was just beginning. That girl in the picture looked just as sick and miserable as I felt. The next day, I made an appointment to see my doctor. There she gave me the hard-to-swallow news: I was obese, pre-diabetic, and well on my way to full diabetes. But what’s more is that she also diagnosed me with an anxiety disorder. (If you’re experiencing everyday anxiety, try these tips for calming down.)

Getting this news didn’t change anything right away. Sure, I had more knowledge, but I was still the anxious, depressed person I was when I walked into his office. How was I going to escape this prison I’d built for myself when I could barely leave my house? All I can say is it started with sheer will. I was determined not to stay the way I was and whatever it took, I was going to do it.

The first step was to change my thinking. I vowed to lose weight. Not for vanity, but for health reasons. I knew that if I felt good inside it would reflect on the outside. As I looked at my diet, I realized that I was using emotional eating to deal with my feelings of low self-confidence, stress, and fear of what others would think of me—that led to me isolating myself even more. So I began to pay more attention to what I was eating and why, asking myself if I was truly hungry and making an effort to enjoy and savor my food. (It’s true—mindful eating can actually make food taste better.)

The next step was to take another step. Literally, as in move out my front door. I started slow, just taking walks around my neighborhood. Once I was able to walk for 30 minutes at a time, five days a week, I amped it up to a power walk/slow jog. As my fitness grew, so did my confidence. Within six months I was running, doing high-intensity interval training, and lifting weights.

All these healthy changes snowballed into a healthy lifestyle where I was tracking what I ate in a food journal, making smarter meal choices, and trying out all kinds of new workouts that I found on YouTube. (My favorites are Fitness Blender, Tone It Up, Popsugar Fitness, and Millionaire Hoy.) I even became a competitive half-marathoner, a feat I never would have imagined I could do just a year earlier. (The benefits of exercise aren’t just physical. Did you know sweating can get you these mental health benefits too?)

As of today, I have lost over 64 pounds and have been out of the diabetic danger zone for three years. I also no longer struggle with anxiety or depression. Where I was once too scared to even leave my house, now I enjoy regularly hanging out with friends and family, dancing, cooking, and writing. But the best part? I can say I honestly I love myself on a mind, body, and soul level.

Now I work as a personal trainer and have developed my own program, YogiPiology, to help other women overcome their fears and create a life they love. Because fitness didn’t just save my life, it gave me a whole new one—and I couldn’t be happier.

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‘”It’s a film about two families that are forced to spend time together,” ‘Country Wedding’ director Valdís Óskarsdóttir explained to the Grapevine in 2008. “They can stand each other for one hour but they get lost and instead of one hour, they are together for five hours. Then things start to pop up.”

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At a wedding, people of all ages, from all walks of life, united by nothing but arbitrary yet profound ties of blood, gather together to work their emotions up to a fever pitch. In one of cinema’s purest examples of the wedding-film genre, ‘Country Wedding’ invites more than a dozen of Iceland’s best-known contemporary actors to one place, and loads them up with repressed sexual yearnings, violent urges, buried secrets, feuds, affairs, and general mayhem.

It’s a bad sign when the groom shows up the morning of his nuptials with his head shaved; matters are not improved by unreliable friends, unwanted relatives, and unexpected detours. The wedding party is heading out of town in two busses—one for his family, one for hers, and both contributing to the generally carnivalesque atmosphere—but the groom’s deep and abiding fear of tunnels forces them to take the long way around Hvalfjörður. The caravan is looking for “a white church with a red roof” but the priest who’s set to preside is too distracted by a can of lager and a football game to give good directions.

‘Country Wedding’ is perhaps the most successful film by the Vesturport theatre company. Founded in 2001 by a collective including future Hollywood character actors Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, and Gísli Örn Garðarsson, Vesturport became known for conceptually ambitious productions, touring internationally with adaptations of Büchner’s ‘Woyzeck’ and Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ featuring music by Nick Caveand Warren Ellis. The company’s experimental, egalitarian approach extends to their films, ensemble works with deep casts and unpredictable moods, beginning with Ragnar Bragason’s black-and-white companion films ‘Children’ (2006) and ‘Parents’ (2007), featuring loosely connected stories of urban life, sometimes gritty and sometimes darkly comic.

‘Country Wedding’ and ‘King’s Road’ (2010), also directed by Valdís Óskarsdóttir, about the flamboyantly lost souls populating a trailer park, feel more like plays, with constrained settings and actors bouncing off each other like charged particles. They’re similar to the films of the English director Mike Leigh, which he develops through one-on-one character-based improv with his cast, so that each character comes across as at once a potential larger-than-life gravitational center, and a piece of the overall narrative plan. Likewise, Valdís worked on the story of ‘Country Wedding’ in individual rehearsals with each actor, independently developing the characters’ backstories, personalities, and the buried secrets—one for everyone—which would inevitably “start to pop up” once the cast was unleashed on each other.

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Summer brings wedding season in the Holy Land. And with it, a mathematical conundrum for many Israeli wedding guests: How much money to gift the bride and groom?

Wedding gift registries are uncommon in Israel Jewish tradition, as couples prefer cash gifts to kitchen gadgets. Guests deposit envelopes of cash into a large box at the entry of the reception hall, and the couple will typically use the money to pay for the party, sometimes even settling up with the venue at the end of the night.

Simple as it sounds, the cash-as-wedding-gift tradition presents a dilemma to guests who aren’t sure how to convey their well-wishes with shekels. Give too much and the average cash-strapped Israeli won’t make rent for the month, give too little and he or she will risk being remembered as “bunker,” Hebrew slang for a stingy person, as in “tight as a bunker.”

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Enter the Israeli wedding gift calculator. In the past few years, Israeli web sites have cropped up to help guests determine the appropriate amount to give based on a set of questions about the event.

The site Hogegim asks a guest to log in the month of the wedding, the day of the week, his or her connection with the bride or groom (close friend, best friend, “fair” friend, brother, sister, cousin, etcetera), the type of venue (synagogue, garden, private house, among others) and the amount of money the guest makes (a guest can mark their salary or simply say they work in high tech — known as a more lucrative Israeli field.) Then it calculates the appropriate amount.

For instance, a “close cousin” of the bride or groom who works full time and is attending a synagogue wedding on a Thursday in August, would be safe to bring 335.30 shekels, or exactly $89.

The site Mitnatchim provides an almost identical service.

The Hogegim site notes that getting the cash gift right is important “since this decision will contribute to your well-being and joy,” and presumably that of the bride and groom.

But no pressure. Just put the shekels in the envelope.

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Your wedding is the most special day of your life, but it can also be the most expensive – and costs are rising. In fact, a survey from wedding insurance specialist WeddingPlan has found that the average cost of a wedding in the UK has risen by nearly 15% in the last six years, and now stands at a whopping £24,000.

Salary sacrifice

This average cost has not only risen from the £21,000 figure of 2010, but it isn’t far below the average UK salary of £27,600, easily making it one of the biggest outlays of a person’s life.

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Considering how much time people spend planning the big day and how much of a celebration people are hoping for, it’s no wonder the cost quickly ramps up. The survey found that 47% of couples spend an average of one to two years planning their wedding, with 94% conducting online research to give them a helping hand. And, given that 44% want a full-on celebration complete with daytime and evening festivities, it’s easy to see how prices can escalate.

It’s even easier when you consider how many people the happy couple will need to feed and entertain – couples typically invite between 50 and 100 guests, with food and drink taking up 27% of the budget. However, it’s the cost of the venue itself that can eat up the largest part of the budget – an average of 63% – while the honeymoon accounts for 6% overall.

Protect your investment

There’s also been a clear shift in tradition, with the age-old custom of the bride’s family paying for the wedding thought to be out of date. This means that the happy couple themselves will typically have to stump up the cash – with a suitable savings accountbeing vital – but given the cost involved, doesn’t it make sense to protect your investment?

Insurance is an essential component for many other parts of life, and it’s also growing in popularity for weddings, with 88% of survey respondents saying that they considered insurance to be an important part of their wedding. And with good reason – it’s always wise to be prepared, particularly with such huge amounts of money at stake, and with so many aspects of the day out of your control, it makes senses to have everything covered.

Of course, it’s never nice to think of anything ruining your big day, but what if the venue had to cancel, the band was a no-show or extreme weather flooded the church? These things may be disastrous, but with the right kind of insurance, at least you wouldn’t be out of pocket. Be on the lookout for a suitable policy and have peace of mind that your day will run as smoothly as possible.

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Gone are the days when buying a wedding dress online conjures up those (hilarious) images of cheap knock-offs that look nothing like the pictures.

Nope – now there are heaps of unreal online bridal designers way ahead of the game in terms of cool, modern styling.

Sure, many people might shy away from the idea of buying a dress online because they won’t know what the fit is like, but don’t rule it out – if you buy online from within the EU, you have 14 days to return your item for a full refund (by law), and if you buy from outside the EU and it doesn’t suit, a good dressmaker will ensure it fits you perfectly.

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And as a bonus, they’re generally much more affordable than dresses from a traditional bridal shop, so you can splash out on some really swanky shoes!

1. Free People

Cut-work cotton, lace and embroidery are the mainstays of Free People’s incredible range of boho-hippy wedding dresses. The antithesis to the big, traditional white dress, these are for the brave bride who wants to stick two fingers up to convention – and look like a total ride while doing it.

2. J Crew

As expected, J Crew’s bridal range embodies the popular American clothing brand’s signature style – simple, timeless and in quality fabrics. We reckon these lush gowns, jumpsuits and separates are just the job for a cool city wedding.

3. Stone Fox Bride

Unsurprisingly, the label-with-attitude’s bridal range is dripping with rock n’ roll style. The NY brand’s dresses are perfect for the brave new bride tribe who want a totally unique, non-traditional look.

4. Reformation

The LA clothing brand has been the cool girls’ go-to for bridesmaid gear for the past few years, but it’s the more recent bridal collection that’s got us really excited. Sexy, modern-with-a-nod-to-hippy and eco-friendly, these dresses are a winner for relaxed summer brides who are averse to anything too fussy.

5. Ghost London

If you’re a vintage bride who wants a nod to the glam 20s, 30s and 40s, Ghost London should be your first port of call. We’re talking beautifully fluid silky silhouettes detailed with covered buttons and delicate trains, perfect for a fabulous winter wedding. There are sales all year round too, so there’s a great opportunity to nab yourself a real bargain.

6. Grace Loves Lace

The Aussie label’s “Hollie” dress is the most pinned wedding dress ever – and considering Pinterest is the bride’s bible, this is quite the achievement! Like the name suggests, many of the dresses are made with a gorgeous French lace, but it’s the free-spirited, boho magic they create with it that has us a-drooling.

7. Minna

London-based Finnish bridal designer Minna Hepburn started her heavenly range with no formal training in fashion. She started creating tops and dresses at home inspired by her love of vintage, and now they’ve been featured in the likes of Vogue and Elle! Her eclectic modern-vintage style is playful, ethereal and just plain gorgeous.

8. BHLDN

This US-based brand just gets better and better year-on-year. There’s something for every bride here: princessy, boho and modern-cool, but the common thread throughout is a nod to a vintage aesthetic and a heavy hand with stunning embellishment. A one-stop shop to get kitted out, you can also source gorgeous veils, headpieces and cover ups on the site.

9. Rue de Seine

Rue de Seine’s achingly cool range is Bohemian princess to its very core. The New Zealand bridal designer creates romantic, quirky dresses in sumptuous combinations of lace, crochet and barely there embellishment. Undone hair and a floral crown are the only accessories needed.

10. Indie Bride London

An antidote the stuffy, over-the-top bridal style of old, Indie Bride London creates short and long dresses especially for “the cool girls”. In the brand’s own words: “Our range does not scream bridal. We believe that you can enjoy the most important day of your life looking like you and not be swamped in heavy bridal fabrics and layers of tulle.”

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An eight-year-old girl in Yemen died of internal bleeding on her wedding night after marrying a man five times her age.

“On the wedding night and after intercourse, she suffered from bleeding and uterine rupture which caused her death,” Arwa Othman, head of Yemen House of Folklore, told Reuters of the child bride, whom she referred to as Rawan. “They took her to a clinic but the medics couldn’t save her life.”

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The girl was married to a 40-year-old man in the town of Meedi in Hajjah province in northwestern Yemen.

A local security official denied that the girl’s death had taken place.

Two Meedi residents told Reuters that the girl had died on her wedding night and that the local tribal chiefs tried to cover up her death when the news broke. A local journalist was reportedly warned to not cover the story.

Due to the extensive poverty in Yemen, it is not uncommon for poor families to arrange marriages for their young daughters in exchange for a dowry.

Othman said authorities have not taken action against the husband or the girl’s family.

In 2013, Human Rights Watch reported that nearly 14 percent of Yemeni girls were married before the age of 15 and 52 percent before the age of 18.

The marriage of young girls to older men is not uncommon in many parts of the world, including the United States.

According to Statista, some states allow girls to marry at the age of 12, which is matched by only two other countries, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, where the consent for marriage ranges between nine and 13 years old.

It was until recently legal for a girl below the age of 13 to wed in Virginia, as long as she had parental consent and was pregnant, The Washington Post reported. Between 2004 and 2013, the state had nearly 4,500 minors marry, including more than 200 who were 15 or younger.

Of the underage spouses, about 90 percent were girls, and in many cases they were married to men aged 21 or older. In some cases, the man was decades older than the girl.

Virginia changed the law in July to the age of 18, or 16 if a child is emancipated by court order.

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Devin Jones is awash in flowers, formal attire and houseware registries.

And he’s not even getting married.

The 28-year-old Royal Oak, Mich., resident is smack in the middle of his prime wedding attendance years. A fraternity brother got married in San Diego in April. Another fraternity brother in Rochester got married in May. And a high school friend in southwestern Michigan gets married this month.

Last year, Jones was a groomsman twice — for a fraternity brother and for a high school friend. Ditto for the summer before that — for his brother and for a fraternity brother. With wedding gifts, travel, wardrobe and pre-event fetes, Jones is spending about $2,000, a lot of money for someone who lives on a copywriter’s salary.

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That’s still fewer wedding guest expenditures than for most. Americans attend an average of three weddings a year at about $703 a pop, which is up 5 percent over last year, according to the American Express Spending & Saving Tracker, though for millennials, it’s $893 each. For people in the wedding party, those numbers jump to $743 for most and $928 for millennials.

“You have the wedding, but also the corresponding bachelor party that goes with it. You’re pretty much using half your summer for weddings,” Jones said. “It’s the cost of doing business. It’s all fun stuff. It’s essentially instead of taking that trip you wanted to do, you use it to go to a wedding, but you see all your friends and everyone you love. It’s a really good excuse to see everyone.”

And the expenses that come with attending a wedding aren’t likely to decrease anytime soon.

The proportion of disposable income guests — and hosts — spend on weddings has steadily increased over the course of the 20th century and into the early 21st century, except for during the Depression and World War II, according to Katherine Jellison, a history professor at Ohio University and the author of “It’s Our Day: America’s Love Affair with the White Wedding, 1945-2005.”

“The general idea is you give a gift equivalent to how well you’re wined and dined by the couple. Some of these online registries, the costs of items some couples request is exorbitant,” she said, pointing out that she attends many graduate student weddings. “Particularly for socially active and twenty- and thirty-somethings, it can be a very expensive proposition being a wedding guest.”

But spending a chunk of your income on wedding-related expenses wasn’t always the reality.

Before the period between the world wars, weddings were community affairs, with friends and neighbors making food for the reception and offering to handle special wedding touches, such as taking pictures, arranging flowers and playing music, Jellison said. The dress was from a local store, if not homemade, and the groom’s suit perhaps one he borrowed from a friend or relative. The one outside purchase was likely the wedding cake.

They were “people who had known you probably your whole life and didn’t have to try to figure out what you needed as a wedding gift, but instead knew the regular, practical items that any bride and groom would need. They’d give you a skillet or a nice tablecloth. People knew instinctively what a couple needed to start housekeeping. That’s gotten lost, but there’s no longer the idea that members of community they grew up with had to support the couple in setting up a home.”

After World War I, department stores started marketing gift registries and special bridal gowns. By the time World War II ended, the notion of hosting elaborate weddings trickled down from the upper class.

WEDDINGS AND STUDENT LOANS

Unfortunately, for people like Emily Stout, of Cato Township, Mich., this influx of “I do”-related expenses comes at a lousy time. They’re worried about student loans. They are at their first or second jobs, so the salaries aren’t great. They’re saving money for their own impending nuptials or if they’re single, they want to look their best to catch the eye of a fellow guest. They have weekly entertainment costs that would make a baby boomer exhausted just thinking about them.

Stout, a 21-year-old Central Michigan University student who got married in May in an $8,000 ceremony and party, has three others to attend with her new husband, including one where she’s a bridesmaid and one where he’s a groomsman.

She opts to give gift cards, because then she’s not limited to the items the marrying couple has selected.

“I think it’s at a lot of money, but at the age I’m at, I knew it’d be a lot of money. It’s the age where everyone is getting engaged and married,” Stout said. “I also have to keep in mind saving up for college. And I spent so much of my own money out of pocket for my own wedding.”

For her wedding, the most expensive gift she and her husband received was a Keurig machine and the least expensive were $20 gift certificates to Bed, Bath & Beyond and Subway.

HOW TO BE A WEDDING GUEST

Wedding industry experts offer the following tips for people who are spending much of the summer watching friends and relatives get hitched.

• Buy the gift early. The sooner you look at the bridal registry, the more price-point options you have to choose from. Pick one that doesn’t strain your wallet too much. Alternatively, chip in for a pricey gift with other people.

• Think outside the gift box. If you can’t afford much on the registry, consider buying a less-expensive listed item and augmenting it with a personal or sentimental gift for the couple. Another option is if you have a certain talent, offer that up. If you are artistic, consider giving them a piece of your work.

• Go the gift card route. Buy discounted gift cards to places the marrying couple like.

• Dress smartly. If you’re in the wedding party and have to buy your outfit and shoes, think of ways to re-wear it (perhaps with tailoring) after the big day. If you’re a guest, wear something you already have and spruce it up with different accessories rather than buying something new.

• Plan your travel. Book your airfare and accommodations early for better deals. Shop online for the best deals. When possible, use frequent flyer miles and hotel alternatives, such as crashing at a friend’s home or Airbnb. Consider taking the bus or train or carpooling. If it’s a destination wedding, consider making that your vacation and lengthen the trip for some “me time” without the rest of the wedding gang.

• Keep expenses for a destination wedding or out-of-town travel to a minimum. Maybe the gang is going to eat the day before the ceremony or is taking a local day cruise. Set a personal “party budget” in advance and stick to it.

• Say no to the “I do.” If you can’t afford to attend, politely decline.

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Women who are sports fans in Iran have limited options as to what sports they can see live — they’re banned from attending soccer games, for example, since the fans can get unruly. Laleh Emileh was always a major basketball fan — “since birth,” she says — and attended many live basketball games in her native Tehran.

At one of these games in 2003, at Azadi Stadium in Tehran, Laleh, then 17, witnessed something she would not soon forget: It was a matchup in theMiddle East Youth Basketball League, and the defending champion, Iran, was losing to Jordan when a tall, blondish Jordanian player purposely injured one of the Iranian team’s highest scorers. The Jordanian, also 17, was kicked out of the game, but his team went on to win the title.

Laleh, 29, left Iran in 2010, and settled in San Francisco, later moving to San Carlos. She has worked in everything from human resources to flower arranging, and now is an accountant for Baychem, a chemical company.

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In March of last year, her manager asked her to have lunch with a new hire. His name was Mutasem “Sam” Elayyoub, and he had received his MBA from the Keller School of Management in Dallas and arrived in San Jose for a contract position (that job ended and Sam is now the lead developer at Outsell in Burlingame).

Says Laleh now: “When my manager asked me to come, my first thought was ‘Why me?’ I heard he was from Jordan, and I thought, ‘He’s going to hate me for being from Iran.’”

Nevertheless, she chose the Jordanian-owned Dish n Dash in Sunnyvale for the group.

She expected Sam to be short and with a full beard; he was neither.

One of her first questions to him was about his height, and she quickly learned that not only had he played basketball, but something even more surprising: That he was the one who had made that controversial move all those years ago that had cost Iran the title.

Yet the conversation flowed so easily — especially when they learned that they shared a love of comedian Jeff Dunham’s “Achmed the Dead Terrorist” ventriloquist act — so much so that the others at the table were left out of the conversation.

Both had strong misconceptions about the other that could have easily derailed things. Sam asked why Laleh wasn’t wearing a hijab; Laleh got defensive, saying Iran’s post-revolution government does not represent her, or most Iranians for that matter. She had her own misconceptions about Sam, and quickly learned that he’s Christian Orthodox and proud of his Jordanian Christian heritage.

“Most Americans put us all in the same category as Middle Easterners,” Laleh says, “but between us, we are so different. Our language isn’t the same, nothing is the same.”

Sam’s family had been pushing him to settle down, but he hadn’t felt any urgency — that is, until he met Laleh.

“This is what I want,” he thought to himself. “I don’t need to look anywhere else.”

Finally, Sam asked Laleh to join him for a movie he was seeing with his team later that afternoon. Laleh says she accepted for professional reasons, but something more personal soon crept in. “The last thing we did was watch the movie,” she says. “We were talking and laughing the whole time.”

Dinner followed.

When Sam got home that night, he called his brother-in-law, saying: “I believe I came to California to get married. I found who I want.”

Laleh hadn’t been focused on finding a husband, but meeting Sam “felt like this happy accident. While I tend to overanalyze everything, this was a decision that just made sense.”

It helped matters that Laleh had been baptized a few years earlier.

Laleh slowly started leaving things in Sam’s apartment. Then last June, Sam’s mother surprised him by showing up unannounced. She hadn’t seen her son in four years.

Living together before marriage isn’t done in either of their cultures, so Sam did the only thing he could think of: He told his mother he had gotten married. After her shock wore off, “my mother fell in love with Laleh immediately,” Sam says. “Within days they were doing things without me.”

The couple, who now live in Redwood City, actually did marry after Sam’s mother left, June 30, 2015, at City Hall. Sam asked Laleh’s brother, who lives locally, for his blessing. And together, the couple decided Christmas would be the perfect time for a church wedding so their families could attend.

“We come from cultures where we don’t usually decide who we’ll marry on our own,” Laleh says. “But all of them were so supportive.”

The couple had a big church wedding Dec. 26 at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in San Jose, with a reception at theSilicon Valley Capital Club. The reception included a zaffa, a musical processional with drums and a belly dancer, as per Jordanian custom, and baklava.

For their honeymoon, the couple took their immediate family members in an RV to Las Vegas and Disneyland.

Guests flew in from around the world, although some, including Laleh’s father, couldn’t get visas to travel because of the timing of the terrorist attacks in Paris.

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“If we hadn’t come to America, none of this would have happened,” Laleh says. “It’s so surreal; we come from two totally different backgrounds. But when I saw my mom holding hands with his dad at the wedding, I was shocked at how these two people are walking together in San Jose. It didn’t make sense to me at all, but it happened, and that’s the beauty of it.”

Personalizing an array of decoration items can add a unique and memorable touch to the special day.

Wedding designers work with the bride and groom to create their vision for decorations and can share current trends.

Katie Brown, owner of Spectacular Settings in St. Joseph, says popular wedding colors this year are gold sequined tablecloths and table runners or plush pink and navy decorations.

Versatility can allow for decorations of similar colors to be adjusted to design a standalone event.

Here are some tips for planning an individualized wedding:

Pick a color scheme

Usually brides start the process with choosing bridal gowns and coordinate the color palette to compliment those colors. After the bride chooses a basic color scheme, the decorator needs to discuss the vision for the wedding, such as if the couple wants an antique or modern look.

Grace Dahlgren, a local wedding designer, says she enjoys working with brides to create the vision they have for their wedding days and likes to incorporate ideas the bride views online.

“Every bride has their own picture in their mind already of what they would like and it takes a special designer to be able to capture that vision and make it happen,” Dahlgren says.

Consider unique or homemade pieces

Dahlgren says she has collected around 200 mismatched china pieces. She can set up china plates for salad and dessert along with cups and saucers.

“This is about just finding pieces that somebody else doesn’t want anymore and trying to recreate a beautiful purpose for them,” Dahlgren says. “I want to share these items that make any event beautiful.”

She makes candlesticks to use for unique centerpieces on tables with the option of vases, lace backdrops and flower arrangements. In addition, she is collecting formal picture frames that can be used at the name card table.

Choose between self-setup or contract the work out

Shannon Noble, owner of Elevate Your Event in St. Joseph, says the items the bride selects can be set-up and torn-down by the decorator or the couple can set the décor up themselves or have a friend do it at the facility.

Noble is in the process of building a studio in her home and she is focusing on décor item rental. She started with collecting lanterns, candlesticks and glassware.

It is important to verify with the venue owner what dates and times the items must be removed to ensure enough time is allotted to take the items down.

In addition, be prepared to pay a damage deposit at some businesses.

Local companies usually ask for a payment to cover unforeseen losses of items. The funds will be returned if items are returned in reusable condition.

Decide on the centerpieces

The centerpieces set the tone for the reception and allow the designer to step outside the box to showcase the couple’s personal style at each table. The decorations allow for the wedding décor to personalize the experience with flowers, candles, photos and props that coordinate with the overall theme.

It has become popular for couples to mix and match the décor colors and decorate each table differently and allow for its own flare.

To choose the right centerpieces, the couple should consider how they want guests to interact with each other. Tall decorations and vases may block the view across the table while others can serve as an icebreaker.

Make an appointment with the designer

The bride can meet face-to-face with the designer to discuss the reception, wedding ceremony and dinner afterwards.

Noble says she reviews the number of tables and their shapes in order to scale designs and disperse the décor to prevent the room from appearing cluttered.

She also advises couples to remember decorations for the cake and gift tables that can add to the overall feel of the venue setting.

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