Yulia and Tetiana had spent a while deliberating over a date for their wedding before they decided it had to be March 1 — exactly a year to the day they fled the war in Ukraine.
“That date should be a sad anniversary, the anniversary of us leaving our old life behind, but we decided to rewrite this story and made it our special anniversary,” 42-year-old Tetiana said. “We lost a lot and there is a lot of evil in this world, but we’ve turned that evil into something good.”
Yulia, 44, added: “We decided to exchange a bad memory for a better one.”
Photo: REUTERS
They married at the town hall in Ripley, a town of 20,000 people in central England, in the presence of their closest friends, describing it as “something very special.”
On the day they wore matching T-shirts featuring the slogan: “Love you to the moon and back.”
“I know it’s a very common phrase, but for me it was always about our feelings and our relationship,” Tetiana said.
The couple have been together for 10 years and have long wanted to get married.
However, same-sex marriages and civil partnerships are not recognized in Ukraine, despite hope for the introduction of LGBT rights laws after the ousting of the country’s pro-Russian president in 2014.
The circumstances of their nuptials are bittersweet for the couple, who always knew they would have to go abroad to get married, but never expected to be doing so in the context of the invasion of their home country.
“It really was very strange that our dream came true, but in such a weird way. It has been difficult,” Tetiana said.
“It’s not the price we expected to pay for getting married,” said Yulia, who is originally from Russia.
The couple, who worked as translators in Ukraine, said Russia’s full-scale invasion highlighted their fragility as a couple when they could not legally declare their relationship.
Their decision to get married was, in part, “a pragmatic one,” Yulia said.
“Officially we were just friends. We made our wills to be in favor of each other, but that is the only official link between us in Ukraine,” Tetiana said. “Love and romance is wonderful, but we are so fragile and ephemeral. Official marriage is something very legal and solid, and when there is war, it is so important for people to be protected.”
Since moving to Britain, Tetiana and Yulia have lived in Belper, where they initially moved in with their sponsors, Sarah and Helen Barley-McMullen, who had set up a group specifically to help LGBT Ukrainians reach the UK.
They have since moved into their own rented flat nearby. Both are self-employed as translators, and Yulia now also works part-time in a college, while Tetiana is also looking for work to help her fully integrate into British life.
“I knew we had fully settled when we got a letter from the council about our council tax. I was so glad. To me, this letter was a result of our efforts to settle and get our own place. I was like: ‘Look at me, I’m a real British taxpayer,’” Tetiana said. “But more important than that is the friends we have made. We have friends we are going to watch the coronation [of King Charles III] with, we have friends that we have Easter lunch with. And that is the most important thing: the people.”
Although they hope to return to Ukraine after the war, the couple said they were thriving in their new life in the UK, particularly living among people so accepting of their relationship.
“It is still unbelievably wonderful to have so much acceptance here,” Tetiana said. “We are not rejected. When we told people we were going to get married, absolutely no one said: ‘But you’re two women.’ Everyone just said congratulations. It was and it still is so wonderful.”
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