✦ The Modern Heiress

I never planned for vows or veils. But life, love, and God had their own itinerary.

For most of my life, marriage was not in the picture. I had it all mapped out: a passport full of stamps, a job in the corporate world, solo brunches, independence wrapped in ambition. I wasn’t running from love. I just never saw it as something that would root me. I imagined myself working late in skyscrapers, walking through foreign cities with heels and headphones, maybe calling home when I remembered. Marriage was optional, distant, someone else’s path.

Then came 2021. A year that felt like an unfinished sentence until I met him again. Or rather, re-met him. We knew each other 8–9 years ago. He once dated my ex-best friend, and I was his enemy. Or at least that’s what it looked like from the outside. But funny enough, even back then, he never hated me. We clashed like two storms in denial of the sky we shared. Time passed. People changed. And suddenly, the tension between us softened into something neither of us expected: love.

We got engaged, and everything should’ve been beautiful. But it wasn’t. Not at first. For almost two years, he was barely there emotionally. I was carrying the weight of promises, expectations, and silence. I broke down. I questioned everything. I almost left. But then something changed. About 3–4 months before the wedding, the man I hoped for began to show up. Not just in presence, but in heart. And today, he is my husband. My partner. My comfort. He may not have started strong, but he chose to arrive and stay. And that changed everything.

Marrying him was never part of my original plan, and neither was surrendering to God. But somehow, both happened at once. In learning to receive love, I also learned how to kneel, how to ask, how to pray, how to trust something bigger than timelines and control. I didn’t lose myself in marriage. I discovered new parts of myself I didn’t know existed: softness, patience, faith, and the quiet kind of joy that doesn’t beg to be seen, but holds you when no one is watching.

Navigating adulthood as a married woman was never in my cards, but maybe it was always in my story. I am not the girl I thought I would become. I am something more complex, more surrendered, more loved. I still carry my ambitions. I still dream in capital letters. But now, I do it with someone by my side, not to complete me, but to witness me. To walk with me. To believe with me. And somehow, that makes the dream even bigger.

Love you Z.

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Your favorite ‘yes’ of all time,
Madam Alias Solis
Writer, The Modern Heiress