Time of their life

Meetra Javed and Giles Pates’s wedding, spread across Karachi and New Hampshire, was not just a coming together of two creatives but also two cultures.

- PRAACHI RANIWALA

It was sweet serendipity that brought New York-based couple Meetra Javed and Giles Pates together. Even though the creatively-inclined duo started dating three years ago, they first met much earlier, at a party where they “ended up sitting next to each other, having a really wonderful and meaningful conversation,” says Javed, who is a writer, an executive producer at artist community Underhill Films and a producer for a mental health company. “But neither of us was in the mindset for a relationship back then,” she adds. Their paths crossed again at a mutual friend’s fourth of July party in 2019, where Javed saw Pates, an animator and painter, “dancing crazily on the roof,” though they only exchanged a few words that night. But a friendship began brewing soon after, and Pates finally mustered the courage to ask his now-wife on an actual date a few months down the line. She agreed, and they caught a photo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, walked around Prospect Park, grabbed a Middle-Eastern meal and found immense ease and stimulating conversation in each other’s company. “It was just the most simple and romantic day. Big gestures really scare me, so it was perfect,” admits Javed. On the morning of their dating anniversary last October, Pates proposed with his grandmother’s diamond and sapphire ring and she found herself saying an exuberant yes once again.