When Lavina Sabnani and Dr Amanda Friday began planning their wedding in Malta, Sabnani knew she did not want a small celebration. “Being a queer couple, I rarely see celebrations of our kind of love in this way,” she says. “It’s usually a smaller wedding or an elopement. I wanted people to know that love transcends everything and it deserves to be celebrated in a big way.” Across four days, the couple brought 180 guests to Malta for a wedding that placed Hindu rituals alongside celebrations of Friday’s Honduran-American heritage.
Sabnani was born in Hong Kong, where she works in marketing for a tech firm. Friday is Honduran-American, an actor and psychologist in gamified learning and development, who moved to Hong Kong with Sabnani three and a half years ago.
Sabnani had imagined marrying in Malta since childhood, after attending a family friend’s celebration at Saluting Battery, a historic gun-salute site in Valletta with an open deck overlooking the city and water. “I just knew that I wanted my future wedding to be in Malta,” she says. For Friday, whose family lives in the United States, the island also helped bring guests travelling from different continents closer to the couple’s home in Hong Kong.
Sabnani and Friday met in 2019 at a softball and baseball-themed bar in Washington, DC. Friday was wearing a panda onesie that night when she saw Sabnani across the patio. “I turned to my friend and said, ‘Wow, now that’s the kind of girl I’d want to marry but don’t think I ever could,’” she recalls. The two connected and exchanged contact information, though Sabnani was living in Boston at the time. Almost a year later, on New Year’s Eve, Sabnani messaged Friday to say she had moved to DC and did not know anyone in the city–this was not entirely true. Friday invited her to a party at the same bar where they had first met. As midnight neared, they had their first kiss.
Four years later, Dr Friday proposed in Inari, Finland, where Sabnani had long wanted to see the northern lights. At -32°C, a private reindeer sleigh ride became a group tour and the lights stayed hidden. Dr Friday finally proposed at the doorway of their cabin, where champagne was waiting. Minutes later, the sky filled with the Northern Lights.
After the proposal, Sabnani’s father surprised the couple with an engagement shoot in Bali, where they were photographed on the wing of a Boeing 737 that was converted into a cliffside villa. They saw the gift as his blessing, and later used the images on their wedding invitations and website.
Once planning began, the couple wanted the first evening in Malta to help guests settle into the island. At Villa Bighi, long tables overlooked the harbour of old Valletta as a string quartet played contemporary music and local performer Sean Kamati got guests onto the dance floor. By the end of the night, guests left with totes bearing the couple’s wedding logo, engraved hats that read “From Malta, with love,” hangover kits, custom wedding perfumes and mithai boxes. The logo carried peacocks, temple motifs and a D20 dice for Friday’s love of Dungeons and Dragons.
