J SQUARED WEDDING COUNTDOWN • FOUR WEEKS OUT

So… we’re Jonathan and Jeffrey—Jon and Jeff for short—although somewhere along the way, most of the people in our lives started calling us J Squared.

We’re both bisexual men, we both use he/him pronouns, and on October 10, 2026, we’re getting married at the Millennium Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We live in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and we’ve been together for almost six years.

We met online in October 2020. One conversation turned into hours of talking, listening to music and getting to know each other. I ordered pizza, Jeff stayed the night, and from there we became pretty much inseparable.

Our relationship has always been built around friendship first.

We talk about everything. We laugh a lot. We travel together. We support each other’s ridiculous ideas. And over the years, we have learned that the life we want does not always have to look like the life someone else expects us to have.

That mindset has shaped our wedding from the beginning.

Backyard karaoke proposal and rooftop engagement photos in Goldsboro, North Carolina

A Wedding That Feels Like Us

Our wedding is a black-tie, Gotham-inspired masquerade, but for us the theme is only the surface.

Our ceremony is called The Ascension of the Court. It is divided into eight Acts, our wedding party becomes The Court, our guests arrive masked, and the ceremony includes music, characters, rehearsals and audience participation.

We wanted to create something people could feel.

We did not want our guests to simply sit down, watch us exchange vows and leave saying, “That was nice.”

We wanted them to feel like they had stepped into a world that could only belong to Jon and Jeff.

But creating that world has required a lot more than imagination.

Planning It Ourselves

We planned this wedding ourselves.

There is an old wedding tradition that says the bride’s family pays for the wedding.

Well… there is no bride over here.

And we did not have the luxury of someone simply handing us a wedding budget and saying, “Go plan what you want.”

We had to figure it out ourselves.

We had to decide what we could afford, what mattered most, what we were willing to spend more on, what we could cut, and how to turn a very big vision into something financially possible.

That has been hard.

We have argued.

We have disagreed.

There have been stressful conversations about money, vendors, details and decisions where one of us felt strongly about something the other one did not completely understand.

But something unexpected happened through all of that.

It brought us closer.

During the moments when I felt overwhelmed, Jeff understood why.

When he was frustrated, I understood what was behind it.

Even when we disagreed, we were still working toward the same thing.

We were building this together.

And somewhere between the budgets, contracts, vendor emails and late-night planning conversations, we learned even more about how to be partners.

Two Grooms, Our Own Rules

Planning as two men has also forced us to look at wedding traditions differently.

So much wedding language still assumes there will be a bride and a groom, each with a predetermined role.

When that is not your relationship, you start asking different questions.

Who walks first?

Who gets escorted?

Which traditions actually mean something to us?

Which ones are we keeping because we love them?

And which ones are we only considering because someone told us that is what a wedding is supposed to look like?

Eventually, we stopped asking, “What are we supposed to do?”

We started asking, “What feels like us?”

That question changed everything.

There is freedom in realizing that you can honor tradition without being controlled by it.

You can keep what matters.

You can change what does not.

And you can create something new when the old answer was never really written for you in the first place.

Why Representation Matters to Us

That matters to us beyond our own wedding.

Part of the reason we wanted to share this journey is because we believe people like us deserve to be seen.

We love our LGBTQ+ community, and we do not think our relationships, our families, our celebrations or our love stories should feel like the exception.

We deserve the same space.

The same joy.

The same beautiful photographs.

The same extravagant weddings.

The same quiet weddings.

The same messy planning stories.

The same chance to see people who look and love like us simply being happy.

Representation does not always have to be about struggle.

Sometimes representation is two men planning a wedding, arguing over flowers, worrying about the budget, laughing at each other, bringing two families together and being ridiculously excited to become husbands.

That is the story we want to share.

The Final Countdown

And now, after more than a year of planning, October 10 is no longer this distant date sitting on contracts and calendars.

It is here.

Our Court is rehearsing. Packages are arriving. Final decisions are becoming final-final decisions. Our house is filling with wedding things, and the vision we have talked about for more than a year is slowly becoming real.

Over these final weeks, we want to bring you into that part of the journey too.

The good parts.

The difficult parts.

The things we get right.

The things we would probably do differently.

And everything we learn while trying to pull off the biggest celebration we have ever created.

Because underneath the masks, the music, the theatrics and all of the details, this has always been about something much simpler.

Two best friends.

Two families.

One life we chose to build together.

And somehow, we’re almost there.

Photographer: Kivus and Camera