Read more from The Big Day, The Boston Globe’s weddings column.
In October 2023, Iqra Khan rehearsed what she’d say to her then-boyfriend, Dimitar Grozdanov, as she rage-walked to and from the Harvard Square Starbucks.
"You don’t respect me ... you aren’t considerate of my time ..."
Without consulting her, Dimitar had committed them to dinner with one of his professors that night. It was, as she saw it, a violation of the mutual respect they’d built over the last two years.
Once back at her Harvard Law School residence, she shoved a pumpkin spice latte in his hands: “Here’s your thing,” she seethed. “And, by the way, I just think what you’re doing is so inconsiderate —”
“— and you’re so this and so that,” Iqra remembers saying. “And he was just laughing!”
The absurdity of the situation had gotten to Dimitar. The “dinner” was merely a fib to clear their schedules for the night.
“And I’m here defending it as if my life depends on it,” he remembers.
Iqra, an SJD (Doctor of Juridical Science) candidate at Harvard, was “still reeling” as they walked to the “dinner.” Approaching Hastings, the residence hall where she and Dimitar had met as students, she noticed candles with a small rug and flowers on the sidewalk. She pointed to the soggy but romantic set-up before he revealed: "This is our dinner.”
Dimitar asked her to marry him outside Hastings Hall. And Iqra said, “Yes.”
He’d chosen the location where “everything in our life basically began,” he explains. There, their first-ever interaction had not been quite as contentious, but, it was, as he recalls, “feisty.”
Dimitar, grew up in Levski, Bulgaria, and became a corporate lawyer there. He enrolled in Harvard’s Master of Laws program during the COVID-19 pandemic, and his first semester was held on Zoom. Iqra began the same semester from her home city of Lahore, Pakistan. That spring, Dimitar deferred, preferring to wait for a return to campus, while Iqra completed her master’s from Mexico City.
They met at the start of their first semester in Cambridge in August 2021, as Iqra continued her studies toward a doctorate.
“Welcome to Harrr-vard!” he greeted her at Hastings. His “thick Balkan accent” and energetic banter won her over.
“OK, how do I get this man to talk to me more?” Iqra remembers thinking. They soon ran into each other at social gatherings, and found excuses to connect.
Dimitar attempted to return a Mexican 5-peso coin (28 cents) he assumed to be hers; Iqra asked for his help moving a mini-fridge into her room. (“She is a very strong woman,” he says. “She was perfectly capable of handling that refrigerator.”)
He was already home in bed one night when Iqra called from a party, asking if he could spare a cigarette.
“It was obvious that it was not about the cigarettes,” he says.
When he arrived at the party, Iqra remembers Aerosmith’s “Dream On” was playing, and, “as soon as the chorus started, he just kissed me.”
Their first date was at Langone Park in the North End. Iqra was nervous, wondering if their chemistry and different cultures could translate into a deeper romance.
They sat and talked by the water from sunset until after midnight. She was impressed that Dimitar had read her 75-page master’s paper on Pakistani polygamy law.
“Obviously I read her thesis to impress her,” Dimitar says. “But her thesis is actually super fun. ... Reading somebody’s writing is also a way to see how they think ... I was really impressed.”
They built a life on intellectual debate, kayaking, horror films and Broadway, and trips to national parks. As students in a foreign country, they fell in love fast.
“You have everything in common,” explains Dimitar, ”in a new environment where you’re brought away from family, from friends, away from everything that makes you, essentially.” They got to know one another “with no baggage,” he says.
Arriving in Cambridge ”was such a huge culture shock,” says Iqra. ”I have no family here — I have my friends — but I then met this person who provided me with that sense. Something about him made me feel safe, comforted. He made me feel like I can be myself.”
They exchanged cultural traditions — Pakistani dishes and attire for Eid al-Fitr, bean soup and Bulgarian bread for Christmas — and embraced American ones, too.
“We also made some of our own,” Iqra says. “Like, Thanksgiving, when apparently I make shepherd’s pie now, every year.”
When Dimitar accepted a job at a New York law firm, they took to Amtrak. They began to discuss marriage in early 2023. Visits began to feel more like building a real home, outside of Harvard.
“I started realizing, ‘Wow, I’m happy,’” Dimitar remembers. “And that’s a weird thing to say because happiness is such an undefinable feeling to feel. But I felt like this is where I am supposed to be. I’m together with the person I love.”
While Dimitar had always pictured himself getting married, for Iqra, marriage was associated with certain expectations and inequities that had driven her to leave Pakistan.
“It was de-learning your cultural past experiences and realizing that sometimes building a home together and having a person who wants to have a life with you can be a moment of strength, not a moment of dependency,” she says.
When Dimitar supported her dream of bringing a romantasy-inspired day to life at a medieval-style castle, the experience began to feel joyful.
The wedding “became something that was empowering,” adds Iqra, “and not something that would take away my autonomy.”
Iqra, now 30, and Dimitar, 35, wed on October 5, at Hammond Castle in Gloucester.
The Sunday wedding featured nods to Harvard Law and fantasy novels, including their officiant who dressed in crimson — they called her the Red Priestess. Iqra created a new family crest with a red rose and an autumn leaf. Guests waved small flags with the crest after the couple said their vows.
The Friday before the wedding, they had a South Asian mehndi celebration at Stonehurst in Waltham. Guests were encouraged to dress in their home country’s traditional attire and revel in Bulgarian and Pakistani rituals and dances.
They estimate their guests represented more than 25 different countries. The end result was “something that’s very American,” Iqra says. “I don’t think you could do this in any other country.”
Read more from The Big Day, The Boston Globe’s weddings column.
Rachel Kim Raczka is a writer and editor in Boston. She can be reached at rachel.raczka@globe.com.