Appreciating the transient life of an Army brat, working through commitment during college, and teaching racial resilience to one’s children.
Camille + Mike // Annapolis, Maryland
A couple’s wedding is one of the rare times they can gather as many or as few people as they like, and while deciding which family members to invite usually entails bobbing between genuine desire and strained obligation—there’s always at least one distant relative whose invitation straddles both—deciding which friends to invite is invariably a more spirited choice, and one which reveals the periods of life most meaningful to the couple.
I thought about this after Camille and Mike’s wedding, at a particularly loud moment when the air hung heavily with the smell of Miller Light and spilled tequila. Their ceremony had been quite small and so, in lieu of the larger reception they had planned pre-pandemic, Camille and Mike had rented an AirBnB to host an afterparty for an even smaller group of friends and family trusted to take a COVID-19 test and quarantine beforehand.
“THIS IS AN AMAZING GROUP OF PEOPLE,” Rob, one of Mike’s oldest friends from childhood, began shouting. Sensing a toast, a few people raised their red solo cups or shot glasses, as others hurriedly poured themselves refills. Someone more familiar with everyone’s sober personalities commented to me, “He often starts shouting like this when he’s a few drinks deep.”
Rob continued. “WHERE ELSE CAN YOU FIND THIS KIND OF DIVERSITY? WE’VE GOT BLACK PEOPLE. WE’VE GOT ASIAN PEOPLE. WE’VE GOT WHITE PEOPLE. WE’VE GOT AN EGYPTIAN.” I glanced at the friend in question, who appeared to celebrate at his mention. “AND NOW CAMILLE AND MIKE ARE MARRIEDDD!!”
The group cheered, and gulped their drinks. A few people snacked on IHOP leftovers from breakfast that morning; others sipped spiked seltzers or hastily mixed drinks while talking to each other in quieter corners of the house, away from the deep booms of EDM and Cardi B coming from a set of subwoofers in the living room; still more went over to a side-room with a ping-pong table, alternating between its stated purpose and beer pong.
Camille and Mike’s wedding afterparty had a very college-like feel, appropriate given almost everyone in attendance, including Camille and Mike, had met in college, first at Penn State-Altoona, and then Penn State’s main campus at University Park when they all transferred in their Junior years.
Mike's attending Penn State had been no surprise. “My dad went to Penn State, my sister went to Penn State; it only made sense that I also went to Penn State,” he told me. Mike is the youngest of three kids. His mother, an immigrant from Taiwan who moved to the US in her early 20’s, met his father through mutual friends in California. The family moved to rural Pennsylvania when Mike was four years old.
“There weren’t very many neighbors,” Mike said, “and I enjoyed it a lot because I was always outside. My parents were very hands off, and very lenient about life.” Camille joked that Mike was definitely a mama’s boy, a claim he didn’t refute, adding, “I never bickered with my mom or dad, and even though I was sometimes threatened with the wooden spoon, I wasn’t ever hit with it.”
He described his childhood as being rather normal and uneventful, and remembers frugality being instilled from a young age. “My mom didn’t work,” he said “so we were a family of five living on one person’s salary.” Vacations were uncommon. “I remember a single family vacation we took to California when I was in sixth grade.”
Mike took an early liking to science—his father is a manager at an environmental engineering firm—ran cross-country, and was placed into a college-prep program. “My formative years in rural Pennsylvania were me mostly running around outside finding ways to entertain myself,” he told me. “It was a pretty smooth upbringing; a safe, no frills life.” The choice to go to Penn State had been a predictable one.
Camille’s choice, on the other hand, was more capricious. “My school decisions were between Texas and Pennsylvania, and I chose Penn State because Craig”—Camille refers to her father and mother by their first names, Craig and Tammy—“was from there, and I didn't want to go back to Texas, where I used to live. I went to the Altoona branch literally just because I love tuna.” Her choice tracked well with the unpredictable trajectory of her life thus far. “I’m an Army brat,” Camille told me, self-ascribing the label to outline the wide set of experiences she had growing up with her father being active-duty in the US Army.
Camille lived all over the world; she was born in North Carolina, then moved to Texas when she was two years old, Kuwait when she was nine, and Germany when she was 14. Family was constant, but her environment, schools, friends, and routines changed regularly. “Everything in my life has always been very temporary,” she told me, “and it sounds bad, but honestly it wasn’t. For example, I’m able to make new friends super easily.” She noted, too, that she lived in places for years at a time, as opposed to other military brats she knew who moved around every few months; compared to them, life was enormously stable.
Her father was often on deployments, away from the family for extended periods of time; Camille remembers early memories of confusion at his infrequent presence. “Craig would pick me up from daycare, and I used to look at him and think, like, ‘Who is this man? This can't be my father, right?’” When he was present, Camille’s father would be strict, highly protective, and adamant about his children doing well in school. “I think the strict thing came from the Army,” she told me, “and he’d always say ‘listen to what I say, and you’ll be fine.’ I used to be so scared, and I never acted out in front of him.”
I asked more about her time in the Middle East, and what life there was like. “Kuwait is a very rich country,” Camille replied, “and I was kind of thrust into the culture there.” One evening over dinner, a few days before the wedding, her parents shared about some of their experiences. “We never went to the parties,” her mother, Tammy, began, “but some of our friends would have them out in the desert, where it’d seem like you were in a club somewhere, only even more lavish. There’d be sleeping tents, bathroom tents, dining tents, club tents.” Small cities were built and torn in days, for a party.
Many of Camille’s own classmates came from incredibly wealthy families. “I had a friend who was so rich that her dad gave her a waterpark for her birthday,” she told me, adding that she was quickly swept up in the same mindset. “We lived in a nice flat where we had the entire floor, and even though it was the military paying for it, I didn’t really get that as a kid; I just thought we were also wealthy.”
Looking back, she said she was honestly a “bratty teenager” who argued a lot more with her parents than she’s proud of. “It took me until the end of college to wake up and realize, holy crap, I gave my parents such a hard time growing up. Especially my mom, who did so much for me, and yet I still treated her like that.”
She reflected upon her personality back then. “I was a very strong kid,” she said. “I didn’t take anything from anybody, and I think that came from my dad. If someone didn’t like me, I was just like, ‘Cool, I don’t like you either then.’”
“When I lived in Kuwait,” she continued, “everyone also kind of looked like me; everyone was some shade of brown, so I definitely think that played a role, since you can’t really make fun of someone when you kind of look the same. I got called dark a lot, since I was a completely different shade in the sun, but I was dark, so that wasn’t really ever a problem.”
Camille’s move to Germany a few years later, at the beginning of high school, was similarly straightforward. “I really enjoyed being the new kid,” she told me. “I lived and went to school on a military base. It was very American, and I had so many friends who were all just living the same life there. It didn’t feel like there were many differences between us, because we were just American kids enjoying the fact that we were living in Europe.”
Camille expressed gratitude towards her upbringing, as well as a certain nostalgia towards the time when she wasn’t as conscious of her own racial identity. “I got to do a lot of traveling, and I think it just shaped my personality, being thrown into a different world and culture since I was in fifth grade. Also, it wasn’t on my mind at all back then—ignorance is such bliss—but I had a lot of friends who looked like me, which was really good.”
Camille had always planned to return to the United States for college, but, ironically, her first year at Penn State was more of a culture shock than the many international moves she’d made before. The feelings of camaraderie she had with friends during her upbringing, which never had to do with her identity or race, suddenly felt naive.
“I wasn't used to the kinds of cliques that form in college,” she said, “and it just wasn’t fun.” She acknowledged how difficult it was to precisely describe those emotions. “Altoona was very white, and I was constantly being stared at, so I found camaraderie with the Black kids there because it seemed everyone else was white and from Pennsylvania, like, an hour away.”
She and Mike went to school on the same campus, and had many mutual friends, but surprisingly never met there. “I only have one crazy memory of Camille when we were at Altoona,” Mike recalled, “and I don't know why it’s burned into my memory, but I was walking back to my apartment, and this Cadillac drove past me, playing loud music and stuff. I later found out that that was Camille’s car.”
Camille grimaced, but then smiled at the reminder of the memory, explaining, “My parents wouldn’t buy me a car when I went to college, which I’d thought was my God-given right”—remnants, perhaps, of her perception of wealth in Kuwait—“so I was super upset at them. I had the GI Bill for the first two years of college, and that paid for school and also gave me a stipend. So I saved the stipend, and paid the down payment of the car on the emergency credit card my dad gave me, because I knew it didn’t have a limit.”
She and Mike laughed as she told the story; they both live very financially responsible lives today, and find the entire incident to be absurd. “It was literally totaled, like, two months later, because some stupid woman crashed into it, and I think that was God’s way of telling me that one, I shouldn’t have put it on that credit card, and two, that was a really impractical car to have as an 18 year old.”
The two only began talking after they both transferred to Penn State’s main campus at University Park. “Mike worked at the campus gym back in Altoona,” Camille shared, “and I’d told one of our mutual friends to keep an eye out on him since I thought he was super cute. So, one night at a party, after we’d all transferred to University Park, she sent me a snapchat of Mike saying hi to me. We just kinda started texting and talking after that.”
I asked when they started dating; Camille rolled her eyes. “We were talking since 2013 but didn’t start dating until September 2014,” she said. Mike followed. “It was up to me to make it official,” he said, “and I kinda dragged my feet. I wasn't really a person who was used to relationships, and I’d only had one other girlfriend before Camille. Plus, I wasn't really into commitment at that point.” He shrugged. “It was college.”
Camille’s perspective hadn’t been the same. “I was definitely in it for the long haul,” she said. “Earlier in college, I’d done whatever I wanted, but with Mike, I knew I wanted it to be different.”
Mike didn’t budge for a few months, and Camille broke off talking to him over, among other things, his lacking disposition towards commitment. As Camille described it, “We weren’t dating, but we were something, and Mike could’ve communicated that to me better but didn’t. So we officially ended things in February 2014, and I swore not to have anything to do with him anymore.”
When the two happened to attend the same party in April 2014, Mike tried apologizing and asking if they could talk again. This time, it was Camille who didn’t budge. “I let him sweat for the entire summer,” she said. “Deservingly,” Mike added, smiling. I imagine it’d been emotionally draining at the time but, six years on, the distress had faded into comedy.
Camille eventually gave Mike another chance; they officially decided to date in September 2014. Many of their early arguments resulted from poor communication. “He’s not a communicator, and it’s hard for him to talk at all,” Camille noted, looking at Mike, who didn’t disagree. “So figuring that out between both of us, and learning how to communicate was tough. Because for me, mentally, emotionally, it was tough, thinking, well, it was so easy for him to avoid commitment the first time, so he could definitely do it again.”
But Mike soon reached the same long-term mindset as Camille. “I realized it was kind of for the long haul after she took me back that second time,” he said, “but then another part that sticks out to me significantly was after I graduated. A company called me and offered me a job in New York City; Camille was still in school at the time, and when I thought about my relationship with her, I decided to turn down the job. That was kind of a turning point for me, thinking, Okay, I'm prioritizing my life down here with Camille over moving to New York getting this other job.”
Camille did the same for Mike, deciding to turn down work that might be closer to her own family; each prioritized their relationship over other opportunities, and the two moved in together soon after Camille’s graduation.
Couples first learning about Portrait of a Young Couple sometimes ask why I want to be hosted in their own home the week before their wedding, rather than just rent an AirBnB or hotel. Some, I’m sure, are turned off by the idea of having to host a stranger in their home.
The purpose, I tell them, is to more naturally understand each others’ personalities, lifestyles, and other intangible traits that are best observed rather than talked about. A couple’s home is where they’re most comfortable, and thus where they’re most likely to be truly themselves. For example, a dinner conversation at home, with no set start or end time, is very, very different from a dinner conversation at a restaurant with both; moments of silence are reflective in the former, and just awkward in the latter.
A few weeks before Camille and Mike’s wedding, I realized that I had a somewhat longer break between my previous wedding and theirs. I asked whether it’d be ok to arrive at their apartment in Maryland a few days earlier than the seven days outlined in our contract. They happily agreed, saying I was welcome anytime, as long as I didn’t think things would be too boring.
Camille and Mike’s home is full of cozy, if perhaps “millennial”, adornments and furnishings: their small outdoor balcony includes a garden that blooms with arugula and catnip; they own two cats, Tux and Mac, the former a jittery stray who’s not fond of strangers and the latter a friendly fur ball who likes to sit on open shoulders and laps; their pantry is well-stocked with tea, including a few CBD varieties; they both own Apple watches; they’ve started trying to brew their own kombucha.
Both have been able to work from home during the pandemic. Mike works as an engineering technician with the Anne Arundel Soil Conservation District, designing agricultural best management practices to help improve farming systems and reduce pollution. Camille works as a program analyst at the Department of Homeland Security; the details of her work are, understandably, private.
During the day, we’d each work on our respective projects. Camille stood at a makeshift standing desk in the apartment’s office space, making calls or typing away into Microsoft Teams. Mike sat in the pillow-lined corner of their dining area, sometimes drafting schematics and sometimes, when things were slow, researching market trends for his newly-acquired hobby of day-trading. I curled up into one of their couches, writing for this project and planning logistics.
Both are conscious about fitness; Mike ran track and field during college while Camille did cheer. They’d regularly take yoga or weightlifting breaks, and every few days, with Annapolis Bay as our backdrop, we’d go on a bike ride or do a field workout together. I don’t often have time or space when traveling for this project to properly exercise, so our week of fitness was an extremely welcome change of pace.
For fun, Camille and Mike had me take a quiz they’d made for their wedding, composed of 10 questions about the two of them. I was pleasantly surprised when I got all but two right; most, I realized, could be answered by just watching them interact at home. “Who has a green thumb?” (Mike, whom I’d observed talking more about the garden than Camille, and seeming to check on it more frequently, too.) “Who has read more than 50 books this year? (Camille, who I remembered told me once about an Instagram book club she runs with friends.)
We’d play lots of board or card games in the evenings, usually at Mike’s suggestion. I appreciated it when he suggested we play Mahjong; most people in the US only know about the mobile matching game that happens to use the same tiles but is otherwise different in every way.
Mike relished the chance to learn a new card game when I offered to teach one; normally relaxed about most things in life (“I’m very non-confrontational,” he’d told me before) Mike suddenly became very competitive. “This is why I hate playing games with Mike,” Camille said in exasperation, as Mike gleefully won round after round.
In Camille, I noticed the strong will she had told me about before. She and Mike are both open about what they believe, and don’t shy away from topics others might find too political or controversial. “If I meet someone new, it eventually comes out,” Camille told me. “We start talking about activism or politics, and it’s a huge part of my life. These days, it’s no longer just about, like, taxes; it’s literally about human life.”
Camille said she hated using Facebook—she’d often be livid after reading a comment or post—but also that she couldn’t help but get sucked into online debates. “I have to first put my reply into a Word document,” she told me one day, saying it prevented her immediate, visceral emotions from taking over. She thought of a post she’d seen a few days prior that “wasn’t too divisive, but was making a lot of sly, underhanded comments about BLM, so I got up at, like, five in the morning, and wrote this huge, long paragraph.”
“I've found that being nice, saying hi, in the comment really helps, so that's what I did. And it was great. I mean, we had a good conversation. But she was asking a lot of stupid questions back to my comments, and eventually I was just like, I’m not going to do the teaching anymore. I’ve given you what you need; take it and learn more.”
“It’s not your job”—you referring to someone trying to educate others about an issue, and how the onus often falls on the marginalized person to explain and justify their marginalization—“but it feels like it becomes a job; getting sources, editing, writing.”
But Camille also allowed for the importance of her, and other individuals, at least trying. “In all honesty, that's the way people are gonna learn: from people that they know and trust. So it is on us, in a way.” She let out a small sigh. “But, I wholeheartedly understand people being like, I just can’t put in more of this energy. I will try to educate others as much as possible. But if they end up being like one of Mike’s friends, where they’re just like, ‘well, Ben Carson,’”—implying that the existence of individual Black success negated issues faced by others in the community—“then I’m like, OK, no, we’re done."
She told me about how her own racial self-awareness in college coincided with a national self-awareness and reckoning around race. “Mike Brown was the first one,” she said, “and over time, as we got more ‘ideal’ victims, people started to see it, over and over.” (Their wedding happened in the months after George Floyd’s murder, and days after Jacob Blake’s.)
Mike, too, has been influenced by his own identity, but acknowledged that much of his current activist mindset and strength of beliefs arose from conversations with Camille. “I was sometimes bullied in middle school for being Asian,” he told me, “but I brushed it off so easily that I never really got to being retrospective about it. It never felt, like, personal.”
“My social awareness and activism; she’s been the one to bring me into all of this,” he noted, looking towards Camille. I asked if their identities affected the way they talked about their future. “I always tell him, ‘You’re gonna have a brown kid,” Camille replied, “and you’re not going to be able to hide that they're brown at all. So you need to be able to prepare yourself for the looks, the questions, just the subtle racism that comes with being in brown skin.”
Camille and Mike's slow start to their relationship foreshadowed their slow crawl towards engagement. After five years of dating, Mike, who’d at first shied away from a relationship, now shied away from a ring, though not because of commitment issues. “I wanted us to be set, financially,” he said, “where everything was perfect before I proposed.” Camille wholly disagreed. “I was just like, no way, life isn’t like that; you can’t plan perfection. You’ll never be happy if you’re, like, 40 and saying ‘Oh, I’m ready now, things are good!’”
The two had a long discussion about the topic, and eventually agreed that they were just delaying the inevitable. Both knew that they wanted to be with each other, after all; maybe they shouldn’t wait so long anymore.
They decided, over an anniversary dinner, to go look at rings. “Oh my God, we shouldn’t have done that,” Camille laughed. “That definitely tainted everything, because afterwards, I was expecting it.” Mike is many things, but quick to act on a big decision, he is not. “I kept thinking he was going to do it,” Camille said, “and there were a few good times he could’ve, but he never did.”
During Christmas of 2018, the two visited Germany, and made a stop in Heidelberg, where Camille lived in high school. (“It would’ve been so picture perfect,” she told me, showing a picture of the two of them.) When he didn’t propose, Camille, being a Harry Potter nerd, expected it to happen during a trip to Disney. (“Yeah, it didn’t.”) Then she expected it at a family dinner when her sister flew in from Germany for her birthday. (“He’s not gonna not do it while my sister’s here right? Yeah, didn’t do it.”)
“All my emotions kind of translate into anger, so I was so angry at him,” Camille said, rolling her eyes and smiling. In his defense, Mike seemed more nervous and analytical than anything else. “I was thinking through whether to do it in front of people, or to do it private. I'm not very good with words… talking… yeah.” He seemed to both intentionally and unintentionally prove his point in that moment.
He did, of course, eventually propose. “I set it up for July 4th, 2019. We were going to go to my sister's house in West Virginia to celebrate and I asked Camille, why don't we invite your parents over, too? So I was thinking maybe some ‘flags’ could be raised for Camille. It was July 3rd, and we got dinner, just the two of us, from her favorite restaurant called Afghani Grill. I popped the question after we were done eating and it completely caught her off guard, since she was expecting it to be the next day.”
“It worked out very well,” Mike said, clearly proud of himself. “It was very good,” Camille allowed, smiling. The next day, they celebrated with both of their families at an outdoor barbecue.
“We were going to take you to that restaurant,” she said, “but it unfortunately closed due to COVID.”
Mike turned out to be the one who wanted to plan a large wedding, in contrast to Camille, who “wanted to just do, like, legal papers.” They’d originally planned a large celebration of about 200 people, and held hope through the beginning of the pandemic that, come Fall 2020, things would be under control. “One of our friends gut checked us though, and told us no, this is not safe to do,” Camille said. “So we asked the venue what other people were doing, and they said everyone’s cut their list significantly and stripped everything down."
The two decided to postpone their larger celebration with their original venue until 2021, but wanted to keep the ceremony on their original date in 2020; it was exactly six years after they started dating in 2014. They booked a much smaller venue after downsizing the guest list to around 30 people.
Photos from Camille and MIke’s wedding ceremony
Their ceremony, held outdoors on a bright, sunny day, with a light breeze to cool everyone down, lasted about 20 minutes. Camille’s brother held a smartphone in the front to live-stream the event for those watching online. “Honestly, the weather being so perfect felt like a blessing after the rainy day beforehand,” Camille shared with me afterwards. “I just felt like it was a sign that after all the uncertainty, it was still a good decision to have our wedding.”
We took a few family photos after the ceremony, as well as some individual portraits.
Photos from Camille and Mike’s portrait session
Camille’s father made a short toast at dinner after the ceremony.
“Past, present and future,” he outlined. “The past is your foundation. It's where you met. It's how you met. Your first kiss, your first disagreement. It's meeting the parents. It's meeting the friends. It's meeting the siblings. Your past is the solid foundation that will be the support that you need to get over the rough spots.”
“The present; in the thick of it; the roughest part of the journey. Work, kids, parents, friends, money, education, all vying for your time. Remember to put time aside for the two of you and for yourselves by yourselves. You do you and then, you know, do each other.”
I wasn’t sure if he’d meant to make the joke or if it was a slip of the tongue, but either way, Camille and Mike scrunched their faces and turned their heads away in embarrassment as the rest of the room hooted and laughed.
“Make sure to kiss each morning before you leave the house. Make sure to say good morning to each other when you first open your eyes, even if you're mad at each other. Keep other people's drama out of your home.”
"The future; all the actions that you took, or failed to take, to get you where you are. There's one thread that flows from the past to the future: friendship. You must be best friends… always.”
He paused for about 20 seconds. His voiced cracked intermittently as he continued.
“Best friends hold a bond of mutual affection, not based on sexual or family relations. There are certain expectations of the husband and a wife in a marriage. But a best friend is someone with whom you can be yourself every day and never fear their judgement. Treat each other as a best friend, each and every day.”
Camille and Mike’s future feels rather present. The two hope to have kids as soon as possible (“He literally just wants to wait until after the wedding,” Camille said, somewhat frustrated, though this seemed like a pattern she was by now used to) and hope to raise them to have a combination of their family’s traits. “Mike’s family is just super calm, and we definitely want that for our kids, while mine has a communication style that is very loud and abrasive. I don’t want exactly that, but I do want to teach my kids to be able to stick up for themselves and to be very strong-willed and strong-minded, like how I was raised.”
The two hope to eventually move somewhere more similar to Mike’s upbringing: in Pennsylvania, and with a bit of land. For now, they’re at ease with being closer to a big city, where they can make more money and save for the future. “I do not want to be a stay-at-home mom,” Camille affirmed, “and so we’re both going to have to make enough money to afford childcare.” She used to work with the Youth Service Bureau alongside local community organizations like churches, businesses, and volunteer groups, outreaching to young people against using drugs, and hopes to find a way back to that type of work. “I want to be able to say that I’m helping the future, because youth are the future. But for now, we are excited to start a family and to start our life as an old married couple.”
I rarely get to see a couple again in the hours or days after their wedding; usually, they’re immediately off for the honeymoon, and even if they’re just headed home, I generally insist on not imposing on their wedding night. Camille and Mike, though, had encouraged me to stay another night and day with them and their friends in the AirBnB. As thanks, I decided to edit and show some of the wedding photos that same evening.
I cast the photos onto the TV in the living room for everyone to see; Mike, who soon began wiping away tears, tried hiding behind a large pillar before a few of his friends called out to him.
Mike, Camille, and their friends reacting to some of the wedding photo previews
Some of the previews I showed Mike, Camille, and their friends and family after their wedding
I thought of how funny it was to have seen Mike and Camille at home all week, working, exercising, cooking dinner, vacuuming their apartment, in very homely, domestic life, and then to see them here, shouting and dancing and laughing, being their best, most outgoing selves in front of their best friends.
I also thought of how rarely I get to see a couple’s reactions to my photos; what combination of happiness or nostalgia they experience, what memories they’re reminded of. And so it was moving to see Mike so overflowing with emotion, and Camille curled onto the couch, smiling, tears welling in her own eyes, their friends surrounding and hugging them, fawning over how genuinely radiant they looked in the photos.
“That was the first time that I saw Mike cry, you know,” Alyssa, one of Mike and Camille’s closest friends, told me later. “I feel like the two of them are responsible for most of my best memories. They’re the planners of our group.
“Mike in particular is always just trying to make sure everyone’s having fun. His friendships are for the long-haul, and even though Camille has said before that she knows a lot of friendships are temporary, I feel like she’s starting to know that many of us are going to be friends forever now.”