British-Nigerian author Bolu Babalola, known for the romcom-crowned works Love in Colour, Honey & Spice, and Sweet Heat, has turned her own wedding into the kind of story she’s spent her career writing for others. In a first-person essay for Vogue, Babalola walked readers through her marriage to her husband, T, alongside a photo gallery spanning both a London church wedding and a traditional Yoruba-Ijaw ceremony in Lagos.

The story of how they met has the texture of one of her own plots. On a January evening in Lagos during “Detty December,” a stranger at a rooftop bar asked if she’d like to join him for a drink. Babalola wrote that meeting him didn’t unsettle the ease she was already feeling that night, it simply added to it, and that she was drawn in fast, first to his voice, then to his face. What followed was a first date over sushi rather than a text-back-and-forth, and, according to family lore she’s since been told, a very late-night visit to her cousins’ rooms to announce she’d found her husband, something she says she has no memory of doing. His name carries the meaning of freedom in Ijaw, his native language, and starts with the letter a friend once reminded her she’d dreamed about years earlier.

Their relationship stretched across both London and Lagos, and that geography would eventually shape the wedding itself. Babalola described discovering, early in their courtship, that their paths had crossed for years without them properly meeting, overlapping at the same parties long before the timing lined up. The proposal arrived on their second anniversary, staged by T as a last-minute “food tasting” at his sister’s not-yet-opened restaurant, complete with a red carpet, a floral arch, and their song playing as she walked in, before she turned to find him already down on one knee.

The wedding itself kept its two cultural threads distinct. The traditional Yoruba-Ijaw ceremony took place in Lagos, with four outfit changes and traditional drummers, while the church and legal wedding was held in London, the city where their relationship took root, at All Souls in Langham Place, a church tied to Babalola’s family since her childhood, with the reception held just across the street at the Langham. Her gown came together in Istanbul, designed with her mother in the city’s Fatih district, a mermaid silhouette in delicate lace with an off-the-shoulder sweetheart neckline, later paired with a detachable overskirt her mother suggested for the ceremony. The day was built around a single theme, “When Bolu Met T: Love in Bloom,” a nod to her lifelong devotion to romantic comedy and to what she describes as her belief that love reaches outward into community, not just between two people.

The photos from both ceremonies are below, courtesy of photographer Deji Lawal via Vogue.