Man and woman enter into marriage a few hours after their first meeting

On Boxing Day, a man and a woman who hardly knew each other and only saw each other a few hours earlier, married each other on the next hour.

The New Zealander Sarah Elliott, who lived in the UK, ‘matched’ on December 15 via a dating app with the Brit Paul Edwards. On 22 December they spoke to each other for the first time by telephone, after only a few days exchanging messages. On December 23, the couple decided to get married, which they actually did on December 25 in Las Vegas.

The two met for the first time in Christmas Eve, on wedding attire at Gatwick Airport in London, where they took the plane to Las Vegas to marry and celebrate their honeymoon at the famous Bellagio hotel and casino.

Click

“Normally my life is always very organized and ‘logical’”, says Sarah, who works as a nanny in Kent. “But all rules have now been thrown overboard. There was immediately a click between us, a connection that could not be denied. Paul is already feeling like my best friend,” says the woman, who is determined to make the marriage a success. “We know we will face challenges and we do not view our marriage through pink glasses. We have the will to get out together if there are problems.”

“We both tried to do things the traditional way and that did not work for us. It felt so good between us that we immediately wondered why we would not marry: I am no longer interested in dates to see what I do not like about a certain person. I am committed to letting our marriage succeed – as it used to be, when partners sometimes met only a few times before they got married.”

Openness and communication

Her partner Paul, who works in the TV world, thinks the same thing about it. “It is very strange. If you had told me ten days ago that I would meet someone with whom I would go to Las Vegas immediately to marry, I would have declared you insane. And yet it went like this…”

“Our conversations immediately went into the depths: we were talking about life, about marriage and what we wanted in the future. We have both been married once and did not want our previous experiences to determine our future. With every previous relationship I always lacked openness and communication. Now, with Sarah, that is not the case. I also think: what do I really have to lose? If this turns out to be a hasty marriage and we split up in six months or next week: what have I lost in the grander scheme of life? Nothing right?”

Yet the man is determined to do his best to make his second marriage a success. “When you look back at the period around the Second World War, people also married without having seen each other very often or very well: they worked hard to make their marriage a success. With our marriage we show each other that we are prepared to invest everything in our relationship and in each other. We both really believe in marriage and what it means.”