The world had shut down and we had two choices…
Wed in Istanbul or… here.
The girl I was marrying stood at a large bay window looking out at the water cascading down a hillside street in Budva, Montenegro.
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"Why even bother?" she muttered, already in her dress and waiting for the hair and makeup pro, sure her hairstyle wouldn't survive that rain-soaked cliff.
“You know, back in America, rain on your wedding day is a good sign,” I told her. “Good luck and all that.”
I wondered at the time if I was lying. Maybe it’s a different day when rain brings good luck.
“We’re not in America,” she shot back in a tone I’d come to know as very Russian.
It’s part sarcastic, part we-grew-up-with-Communism-where-everything-goes-to-s***.
Hard to explain, really.
Suffice to say that my soon-to-be wife, Yulia, a history PhD from Crimea, wanted nothing to do with my sunny attempts at finding a ray of light in what she saw as her disastrously wet wedding day.
I was just surprised to be in this moment.
That was Dec 7, 2020, and I never expected to be married again.
Growing old and dying alone seemed my path through the future.
From Jobless and Alone to a Dream Job in Europe
Divorce had settled upon my life in south Louisiana five years earlier after a nearly 25 year marriage. And I’d lost a high-paying job I loved at the same time.
Jobless and alone, I assure you, is a very bad, no good, rotten way to move into your 50s.
But apparently that was the necessary prologue because life surprises you when you open yourself to all the new adventures that are possible—particularly when those adventures are overseas.
My grandmother had a trivet in the kitchen when I was a kid: When life hands you lemons, squeeze the hell out of ‘em until you’re happy again.
So, I squeezed…
And ended up with a dream job in Europe, writing for International Living, a publication that for more than 45 years has been showing readers how to take the leap into a new life abroad. Turns out, I was taking that leap myself.
What a leap it turned out to be because it literally changed my life when I met Yulia in 2019.
I was in Prague, she was in Sevastopol, a Russian navy town on the southern coast of Crimea. I visited her. She visited me. We met in random places—Istanbul; Heraklion, Greece; Riga, Latvia; St. Petersburg; Moscow...
Then COVID impolitely locked down the world.
Two Countries Left to Marry In
Meeting up amid a pandemic was a massive hassle.
But marriage?
Well, that seemed a perfectly logical way to circumvent a global shutdown.
On a trip to Istanbul, I proposed on a rooftop restaurant deck.
She said yes, and I put my grandmother’s wedding ring on her finger.
But how to get married in the Year of the Pandemic?
Given the number of countries that were closed off to us, we had two choices: Turkey or Montenegro.
And, so, we come to our rainy morning in Budva, a small and truly ancient town along Montenegro’s southeastern shore. Yulia had found a restaurant with a pergola on a cliff where, apparently, lots of locals marry.
We said “I do” under splotchy clouds and lots of sun.
Yulia was ecstatic.
I wasn’t going to die alone. Big win.
I’ve long believed that the universe is life’s real architect.
And going back into my youth, I’d always wanted to live in Europe.
Oddly, I’d always wanted to meet a Russian woman, to the degree that (goofy as it sounds) I took Russian language classes at Louisiana State University.
And there I was, on a cliff in a former communist country, marrying a woman who was born in the Soviet Union, became Ukrainian when the USSR broke apart, and then turned Russian when Putin invaded her homeland of Crimea.
Back on the Cliff, Four Years Later
Four years later, I was back on that same cliff, for a story I was writing for IL on Montenegro—surprised by the new roads, the new hotels, the whole new towns rising up in a country I labeled “the new Croatia—only, not many people have realized that just yet."
Sitting there for a moment and thinking back on my wedding, I realized I was also surprised at the strange and unexpected ways the universe fulfills your wish list.
I look back over the last 10 or 12 years of my life and I can see the journey, though it’s not one I could have ever plotted for myself. Which goes back to my point earlier: Open yourself up to the unexpected opportunities the world plates up for you.
Take that trip you’ve always dreamed about. Move to another country, even if only for a year. Say yes to the circumstances that scare you a bit… or a lot.
That’s where life hides all the good stuff.
Maybe you won’t get married on a seaside cliff in southeastern Europe. But you will find excitement all along the way.
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