How Big Love Can Be!
Orlando and Mirko at their wedding luncheon, 2 November 2025
December 10, 2025
Everyone knows that weddings are celebrations of love. Yet what I realized at the wedding I recently attended is that the love shared by the marrying couple ignites love in each of us who bears witness.
I met Eugene Orlando Hughes when he was a participant on a wilderness program I was co-guiding in the Sahara Desert of southern Algeria. Since then the two of us have led our own programs in North Carolina, London, and the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Orlando is creative, an introvert, intuitive. His partner, Mirko Sulic, is a physician who fled Croatia during the war in the early 1990s and resettled in London. He then had to become proficient enough in English to get his medical license to practice there.
Orlando and Mirko had been together for 23 years when they decided to make their union official.
The big event unfolded over two days, with about forty guests, including friends and members of their community. On Saturday night, there was a dinner at Orlando and Mirko’s beautiful thatched-roof home in Gloucester. We all got dressed up, ate fantastic food, and thrilled to the music of a Diana Ross impersonator who got everyone dancing wildly in a small room.
On Sunday, the couple hosted a formal lunch at the historic village hall. There was a string trio, and the various courses of the meal were interspersed with readings by friends on friendship, community, and love, and surprise recitations by each of the two grooms to each other. It was those expressions of love that that really melted the heart.
To Mirko Orlando spoke the lyrics of a song, inviting the rest of us to join in with the words of the chorus. When it was his turn, Mirko spoke by memory a poem about love by e.e. cummings. As the two men made these very moving testaments of love, I found myself exchanging glances with several people around me. Our expressions conveyed the depth of our feelings —sweet, strong, and ineffable, but possibly conveying something like: These two love each other so much! And I, too, know something enormous about love, and at this moment I am suffused with it.
For some, I’m sure, the love bloomed out toward their own beloved, sitting right there at the table. For others, perhaps, there was regret that a promising love had never come to fulfilment. For a fourteen-year-old girl, there may have been hope for love to enter her life one day. As for me, I was remembering the beautiful wedding my husband Andy and I had, even as my heart ached because he died five years ago and I still miss him so much.
Several years ago, when I was writing a book about desire and attraction, my friend and mentor Meredith Little Foster said to me, “Isn’t it amazing how biglove can be!” I believe all of us who were part of Orlando and Mirko’s wedding celebration would have declared the same thing.,
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