And they lived happily ever after!
In June, Yalonda and Kayla Solseng captured their own storybook romance in a princess-themed engagement shoot at Romantic Moon Events Center in Glyndon, Minnesota.
Kayla dressed up as Belle from “Beauty and the Beast,” wearing a voluminous yellow ball gown, while Yalonda dressed up as Cinderella and sported a blue dress.
The couple, who got married on Sept. 3, have bonded over their obsession with the TV show “Once Upon A Time” since they started dating two-and-half years ago.
“That show rewrites fairytales and this was our modern-day fairytale,” Kayla told The Huffington Post.
The couple first connected on the dating site Plenty Of Fish and then met in person at a night club in March 2014. It really was love at first sight.
“Our connection was like none other,” Kayla said. “We then hung out every single day from that day on for the next three weeks. We couldn’t get enough of each other!”
After dating for nine months, Yalonda proposed to Kayla while studying abroad in England. Kayla came to visit around the holidays and the pair planned a trip to Switzerland. After a day on the slopes, they came back to their hotel where Yalonda surprised Kayla with a fairytale book she had written and illustrated based on the couple’s own love story.
“At the end I asked Kayla, ’Will you be my happily ever after?’” Yalonda told HuffPost. “Of course she said ‘yes’ and cried.”
Earlier this month, Kayla and Yalonda made it all official when they tied the knot at Romantic Moon Events Center ― the same venue where they had taken their engagement photos.
The LGBT Facebook page Have A Gay Day shared a number of pictures from the princess shoot; the post has racked up more than 17,000 likes and 8,000 shares since it was posted over the summer. The brides told HuffPost they hope their story inspires other LGBT couples to write their own fairytales too.
“Gay marriage has been legalized in the U.S. for over a year and we hardly have gay or lesbian characters in children’s movies ― let alone them being main characters,” Yalonda said. “Kids want to be the characters they grow up with but when none of the characters represent you, then you feel alone. I want our photos to be shown to kids and families as a way of saying it’s okay to be who you are. It’s okay to be with the person you love.”