Lidia & Ben

Lidia Simoes Thomas and her now husband Ben Thomas always kind of knew they wanted to get married. The pair of theatre buffs met at Acadia almost five years ago—she was the stage manager and he was the lead actor—but their romantic plot twist didn’t take place until after closing night. “He said I love you after two weeks and I make fun of him for it to this day,” she says about their hard, fast fall to coupledom. After years of dating, Ben popped the question at a playground near Lake Banook—“his voice was shaking and I cried,” she says—a nod to a swing set at Wolfville School where he both asked Lidia to be his girlfriend and later surprised her with a promise ring.

The planning process was speedy; with her family hailing from Portugal and his from Ontario, they plotted the wedding around visitors, settling on a date just eight months later. “One of my big things was really making guests comfortable, I wanted it to be a casual affair,” says Lidia, of the majorly DIY’d summer soiree, which took place—coincidentally—on her birthday on the lawn at Pugwash’s national historic site, Thinkers Lodge. Guests drank ciders and snacked in the sun after the ceremony, ate dinner at the nearby Lobster Factory and danced the night away in the character-filled venue. It was family-filled, bursting with love and—despite the stress of doing it all themselves—seemingly seamless. “This relationship is kind of the one that makes you think, ‘Oh there is a God,’” says Lidia. “We’re best friends as well as married. It works and it’s always worked.”