Wedding Bells at Watermark: Steven and Gerald Wagner-Young

Wedding Bells at Watermark: Steven and Gerald Wagner-Young

Steven and Gerald Wagner-Young“My favorite thing about Steven is that he never ceases to amaze me in that he’s always willing to try new things every day,” Gerald says. “We do all kinds of things, and he has opened my eyes to a different way of life and a different way of thinking about life.”

Steven Wagner-Young, who is a waiter at Disney, and Gerald Wagner-Young, a wedding planner, met at Disney but didn’t know at the time they both worked at the theme park.

“He worked in one location and I worked in another, so we were at opposite ends,” Gerald says.

When they finally met up, they had lunch for an hour and talked, laughed and enjoyed the food. They agreed to meet up the next day at the Orlando Come Out With Pride parade, and they haven’t stopped seeing each other since.

“I wanted to be with him and hang out,” Steven says.

The two started spending a lot of time with each other and were practically inseparable.

“I guess after the first date, we hung out at another outing and then hung out again at another outing – it just grew into this whole thing,” Gerald says. “I wasn’t really looking for anything at the time, but it just happened the way it was supposed to. You want to say it was fate, I suppose.”

When Gerald’s lease was up, he was considering moving to Clermont, but Steven said that was too far and asked him to move in with him.

“I knew I wanted to be with him and spend the rest of my life with him,” Steven says.

For the couple, they didn’t really have a formal engagement. They were talking at Savoy in Orlando one night, having martinis, and they decided they should get married, and that night the wedding planning started.

Gerald’s favorite part of the wedding was putting it all together. He liked being able to make sure the wedding and ceremony had some components that represented him and some components that represented Steven.

“Seeing the two ideas join as one, that’s the beginning start of a marriage, right?” Gerald says.“You have people from different walks of life coming together as one.”

Their wedding planner actually bailed out on the couple five weeks prior to the wedding, so the couple had to take over the reins of the planning process. Gerald’s desire to do wedding planning was planted then, which grew into his business Over The Rainbow Weddings & Events that he now owns.

“After the wedding, we came up with this cute idea of having 52 weekends of honeymoons,” Gerald says. “We picked out a day, or the entire weekend, where we would go do something special, just him and I, whether it was go downtown or go to a museum or to boat rides in Winter Park.”

Steven says that their first year of marriage has been fun and busy with a lot of stuff going on. One of the biggest things on both of their priority lists is renovating their home to allow it to be a place to raise a family. They are in the process of preparing for a family. They will be having the home study done soon, and they hope within a year to have a little one.

“My favorite thing is his smile,” Steven says about Gerald.“Also, whatever idea I come up with, he never looks at me like I’m crazy, he’s just like ‘let’s try it, let’s do it!’”

YEARS TOGETHER: 3 years

WEDDING DATE: April 4, 2015

WEDDING VENUE: The Veranda in Thornton Park

WEDDING PLANNER: Over The Rainbow Weddings & Events owned by Gerald

WEDDING CATERER: Foodie Catering

WEDDING COLORS: Purple and cream

FIRST SONG: “Halo” by Beyoncé

INTERESTING FACT: They just finished classes to adopt a child and are about to start the home study part of the adoption process.

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