Never say never
Reluctant bride lands dream wedding
Kim Garcia didn’t plan on getting married again. Why would she? The 42-year-old single mother of two grown children enjoyed being single and wasn’t really in a space to meet guys.
Then one night in July 2014, Seth Luague, 34, walked into a bar downtown and saw something he liked.
“I complimented her hair,” Seth recalls. Kim, skeptical of his intentions and age, barely batted an eyelash. “She basically called me out for being so random.”
Both had been invited on a happy-hour pub crawl by Duy Nguyen, a mutual friend who owns Soundbox Studios, where Kim’s younger daughter works and takes hip-hop dance classes. At Proof, a Midtown lounge and the group’s final stop, Seth asked Kim to pose for a photo with him on the roof
How strange, she thought.
“They have a big ‘I love you’ sign upstairs on the patio,” she explains. “Who wants to take a picture under an ‘I love you’ sign with a random girl?”
But Seth had an ulterior motive. “That was my way of getting her contact information,” he reveals. “I offered to text her the photo, but I really just wanted an excuse to get her phone number and ask her out.”
It was a smooth move, Kim acknowledges. A date was set for the following week — incidentally, on National Wing Day — at Cedar Creek in the Heights, one of Seth’s favorite spots for buffalo chicken wings.
“Even in that short time, we really just clicked,” he says. “We have an age gap, but she’s very outgoing, very well-spoken and very much an alpha female. She keeps me on my toes.”
Kim remembers things a little differently.
“He picked me up in a little red Honda Civic, and I thought, ‘He has a high school car. Has he even graduated yet?’ ” she says, laughing. “It was a little overwhelming for me because I’m such a person with walls up. Everything happened so fast.”
Whenever friends joked that he was her boyfriend, she denied it and said, “We’re just hanging out.”
After three months of dating, Seth’s roommate moved back home to New Jersey. Kim, a real estate agent for the WIRE Team, offered to help find him a new apartment; though yet again, her persistent younger beau had other plans.
While out shopping for a new television one day, she called him to ask what size screen she should buy. His response? Don’t bother.
“I’ll bring one when I move into your house,” he said.
So he moved in and they finally became an official couple. By the following August, Seth, a Verizon Enterprise client executive, knew Kim was the one.
“We were taking a trip to the Philippines, where Seth’s from, for his best friend’s wedding. I thought it was no big deal,” Kim says. She got sick at the end of the vacation and didn’t feel like dressing up for a fancy dinner that Seth had planned at Shangri- La’s Boracay Resort. He insisted.
Kim didn’t realize that Seth was proposing until he began fumbling around in his backpack for the ring.
“He cried, and I cried,” she says. “It was kind of surreal because I’ve always told him I would say ‘no’ if someone asked me again.”
Her answer — an emphatic “yes!” — surprised them both.
That was in December 2015. They booked the church, St. Vincent De Paul, and reception venue, Junior League of Houston; however, Kim was reluctant to confirm any more wedding plans.
“I’m not one of those brides who’s into the details — my husband is,” Kim says. As a grown woman, she and her family felt no need to rush. “It’s time-consuming and expensive. Do you know what we could do with $30,000 or $40,000?”
Her groom, whose immediately family lives in Atlanta, envisioned a traditional Catholic wedding.
“What I’ve learned from the Catholic ceremony is that the first, second and third readings really define what marriage entails,” Seth says. “If God is first in your life, and as long as you love Him, you will love each other.”
He also liked the concept that the church doesn’t marry a couple, it’s merely a witness to their vows.
So Kim and Seth compromised. A wedding planner was hired to lock in the details, and the couple decided to purchase a home with a closing date that fell during the week of their Jan. 28 nuptials.
According to Kim, everything. was arranged last minute.
After a disastrous wedding-dress-shopping attempt (“I hated everything. I didn’t like the styles or the prices”), she scored the perfect gown via Tradesy, a consignment app, over the Thanksgiving holiday. “I found a Casablanca dress listed by this woman who ended up getting pregnant and postponing her wedding. It was brand new with tags on it, but the fact that I only paid $275 made me love it even more.”
Four days before saying “I do,” she bought her wedding shoes from Dillard’s.
And on the big day, one of her 12 bridesmaids didn’t show up. But none of that mattered once Kim received Seth’s wedding gift, a short handwritten note, moments before the bridal party left for the church.
They were getting married.
“I wasn’t emotional, but I suddenly felt very appreciative of everyone who was there and so happy for us over something that I never thought would happen,” she says. “But it did.”
The congregation burst out laughing when Seth messed up his vows — that broke the ice. Between the ceremony and reception, the newlyweds drove straight to Whataburger for two burgers and a large order of fries.
“I never really had a dream wedding; I never had that fantasy,” Kim says. “But if I were to have my dream wedding, this would be it. I thought everything was perfect.”