At this wedding in Udaipur, the bride wore a 10kg lehenga and had her own baraat

Chandini Jain and Ben Duffield flew into London from opposite sides of America for what they believed was their roka. Duffield took a red-eye from a conference in Washington, DC, and Jain came from San Francisco, where she had been fundraising. Their families gathered, a coconut was produced and the ceremony was completed. Jain’s parents later explained that this had only been the ceremony before the roka, then organised another in Agra.

The mix-up set the pattern for a wedding planned in three months from New York and London. Jain and Duffield run technology companies, live between both cities and had spent much of their relationship arranging flights to see one another. Their wedding in Udaipur would eventually require boats, several palaces and a schedule that reflected them, they admit, “with uncomfortable accuracy.”

There had been no proposal. “Who would propose to whom?” they say. Marriage came up during a conversation about bringing the people they loved from India, Britain and America into one place. They suspected that an invitation to come and party in India might receive several reasonable refusals. “A wedding was a much more effective summons.”

The pair had matched on a dating app in New York shortly before Christmas. Their first meeting fitted between Jain’s travel plans, leaving enough time for coffee near Columbus Circle and a walk through Central Park before she left for the airport. Duffield would be in London the following week, so they met again for what they now consider their first proper date.

Jain grew up in Jaipur, studied at IIT Kanpur and is the founder and CEO of Auquan, an AI company for financial services. Duffield grew up in Gloucestershire, studied at Oxford University and founded Lumaril, a physical AI company. Both divide their time between New York and London, so their early dates depended on work trips placing them on the same side of the Atlantic.

On one of those dates, Duffield claimed to have read an entire book as he waited for Jain, who was late. “It was a short book, but he remains very proud of the achievement,” she says. Another conversation became a lengthy debate about whether people could live on Mars. Jain liked his willingness to follow the discussion wherever it went. Duffield initially mistook her exhaustion for shyness, an assessment she soon corrected. He also discovered that she would tell him whenever he said something factually incorrect or stupid, which happened several times during their first few dates.

Soon, the pair were planning flights around one another. Duffield visited Jaipur for Diwali, abandoned any attempt to avoid seeming “too keen” and was taught to set off fireworks in the street without losing a finger. Their relationship became serious without a formal conversation about it. “I’ll see you if I happen to be in London” became “How do we make sure we’re on the same side of the Atlantic this month?”

Three months before their February 2026 celebrations, Jain and Duffield began planning, usually late at night after accounting for several time zones and two companies. Their save-the-date described the occasion as “the least efficient way to party with people we like,” though its recipients found the wording so cryptic that several failed to realise it was a wedding announcement.