Shanel grew up in the water. When she and her sister Melis were little, they went to bed in their swimwear so they wouldn’t lose a minute in the morning. Whatever else happened, the sea was always part of it.

Xavier doesn’t need much. A slow Sunday, Nova (their husky), a board game Shanel is about to lose. Shanel is the one with the lists: a third degree, solo trips through Central Asia, the next thing and then the one after. Ten years in, she says he taught her to stop and notice what she already has. He says she makes him want to be better at everything. Asked separately to describe each other, they both picked the word childish :)

They met at Essex University. She was nineteen. He was twenty and coming out of the “library” when he saw a head of curly hair and decided he had to say hello. He tried Greek. She was Turkish Cypriot. It went fine anyway.

At some point she told him that love, to her, looked like the lantern scene in Tangled. He held on to that. When he finally proposed, it was on a river in Hoi An during the lantern festival. Before that came a day of rain, a cooking class that flooded, and a boatman who gave up on them after five minutes. The second boatman didn’t. The lanterns went onto the water and they both cried.

So when they came back to Cyprus to get married, it was always going to be by the sea.