WEDDING: Happy ever after for Ryan and his princess Katie
Pre-wedding nerves are familiar to anyone who has taken a walk down the aisle. But for Ryan Earle, who was marrying Katie Lowe, they hit extremely hard.
‘My best man and I went for a fry-up before the wedding,’ explains Ryan, 24. ‘But they had forgotten my bacon.’
‘I told how it was my wedding day and I needed my bacon, but when they brought it out, I was so nervous that I couldn’t eat it anyway!’
His wife Katie, 24, shared in Ryan’s nerves but ‘was also really excited’ for their big day on September 2, 2016.
The couple, from Havant, first met soon after leaving secondary school through mutual friends. Immediately hitting it off, they would enjoy sharing walks along the seafront, trips to the cinema and seeing Irish pop band The Script in concert.
‘He just made me laugh and we got on really well straight away,’ Katie recalls.
‘I loved her personality,’ adds Ryan. ‘She was just a happy, chirpy person, which is what I like in a woman.’
Four years later and Katie fell pregnant with their first child, Harrison. It was then, while planning a weekend in Paris, that Ryan found the opportune moment to take their relationship to the highest level... literally.
‘I didn’t know that I was going to be proposing in Paris right away,’ says Ryan, who is a dentist. ‘We had already booked the trip to France, and I had been ring shopping with my mother-in-law, so I thought ‘‘where better?’’
Ryan’s original plan was to get down on one knee while he and Katie were up the Eiffel Tower, but Katie’s fear of heights led to him proposing underneath the tower instead.
‘I was pretty shocked, I didn’t have a clue at all,’ says support worker Katie. ‘I thought we were having a quiet weekend away before the baby came!’
Fast forward another three years to Ryan and Katie’s wedding at St James’ Church in Milton, where Ryan found new meaning to the word ‘nervewracking’.
‘I loved exchanging the vows and seeing Katie walk down the aisle,’ he says. ‘But for me personally, my best moment was seeing the kids dressed up and walking down the aisle with her.’
It was really important for me to have the same name as my children,’ Katie explains.
‘He treats me like a princess,’ says Katie of her husband and ‘absolutely brilliant’ dad to Harrison and daughter Ava, two.
‘Even now we have the kids in our lives, he will always put me before anything else.’