Real Weddings, Advice, & Inspiration

Catalyst Wedding Company highlights weddings by and for game-changers. We seek to amplify and empower voices and viewpoints that are usually missing from the Wedding Industrial Complex. We're a community of badass wedding professionals who love all things funky, fresh, diverse, unique, and personality-driven; we convene twice yearly for (un)convention, a collaborative workshop, styled shoot, and dinner party. We're also the publishers of Catalyst Wedding Mag, a resource for couples looking for inspiration and affirmation that doing things differently in wedding-world is not only ok, it's wonderful!

Photos by The Girl Tyler & Zig Metzler Photography.

Three years ago the Catalyst team was orchestrating the third {un}convention conference and was lucky to be host to this amazing styled shoot at The Quirk Hotel. Erik & James are a real-life couple and they agreed to be the models for the shoot. It was such a fun day, both while celebrating in the hidden courtyard and while looking out over the Richmond skyline from the rooftop. Getting to meet these two was a pleasure. Erik had a few words to share with us about their relationship:

“After our first date, I immediately told my best friend that I was going to marry James. We met on a popular gay dating app but were completely blindsided by how easy it was to fall in love with each other. When we met, James was closeted and from a fairly conservative family, and I've been out since I was 17 in a fairly liberal family setting. We're also an interracial couple. On paper it didn't make sense, but over the last year and a half, our love has allowed us to grow together in so many ways that it is sometimes overwhelming.”

This article originally appeared in Volume Four of Catalyst Wedding Magazine.