Real Weddings: Matthew and Sam

Samuel Butcher, a 34-year-old creative director at a marketing agency, first met Matthew D’Silva, a 29-year-old director of business development at a construction company, on Tinder in 2017. The couple bonded over their shared love of campy movies and their close-knit families. Sam moved in with Matthew’s family during Covid, and the couple grew closer after Matthew lost his mom to cancer in 2022. Sam proposed to Matthew in 2023, followed by a second proposal from Matthew to Sam in March of 2025. They were married later that September in an elegant black-tie affair at Graydon Hall Manor. Here’s how it happened.

Matthew: When I downloaded Tinder in 2017, I wasn’t looking for the love of my life. I was 21 and didn’t have any gay friends. I was just looking to meet more people in the community. After I matched with Sam, we started chatting about our favourite movies and songs, and it felt like we had all the same interests.

Sam: He told me his favourite movie was Hocus Pocus, and it was mine too. I’d only been on one date via the apps before matching with Matthew. But I was excited to meet him. We were really vibing and had a good connection.

Matthew: We chatted for a few weeks before our first date, which was in early July. I was living in Mississauga with my parents at the time and working in Toronto as part of a co-op term for my engineering degree at the University of Waterloo. Sam and I planned to meet after work at El Catrin in the Distillery District.

Sam: I was kind of nervous about the date. I was living with three of my best friends and my sister at the time in an apartment in Little Italy. They encouraged me to go. Our date conversation was pretty lighthearted. We talked a lot about pop culture and our families over chips, guac and sangria.

Matthew: In the Uber home, I texted Sam to let him know how much fun I’d had and asked if he wanted to meet up again. We set up our next date two days later. We saw each other three times that first week.

Sam: Our conversation got a lot deeper on our subsequent dates. I could tell that we were aligned in the sense that we both value kindness and our families are very important to us. I grew up in Peterborough and have one sister. Matthew grew up in Mississauga with two sisters. On our early dates, we went on a lot of walks around different neighbourhoods of Toronto, like Kensington and Fort York. We’d go for a stroll, sit in the park and then get food together.

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Matthew: They say that opposites attract, but Sam and I are exactly the same. That’s why we became best friends so quickly. We both keep our circles tight. We believe in quality over quantity when it comes to friends and appreciate experiences over things.

Sam: Just before my birthday, which is August 12, Matthew and I made our relationship official after dating for two months.

Matthew: I was still in school at that point, so Sam and I did long-distance for a while. I’d visit him in Toronto every other weekend, and he’d come to Waterloo in between. I graduated in 2019.

Sam: Then Covid hit. I bubbled up with Matthew’s family since I was living with a bunch of roommates in Toronto at the time. I moved out of my parents’ house when I was 18, so it was kind of weird going back into a house with parents in my late 20s. But I loved his parents and they loved me. We ended up doing a lot of fun things together: themed dinner parties, board games and drinking way too much.

Matthew: One of the silver linings of the pandemic was how close Sam became to my family.

Sam: Early in our relationship, Matthew and I had talked about wanting to have kids one day. Then, naturally, marriage came up. I first thought of proposing to Matthew in 2021. I started working with a jeweller that Matthew’s mom recommended. But I didn’t want it to feel rushed, so I held off.

Matthew: We never felt any pressure to get engaged. We knew at some point that we’d get married. Then, in 2022, I lost my mom to cancer. When that happened, it felt like we both lost a mom. The three of us shared a special bond.

Sam: After we lost Matthew’s mom, I felt like life was way too short. I thought, Why am I waiting? We’d already been together for five and a half years. So I decided I would propose to Matthew on our six-year anniversary weekend. It happened on July 1, 2023. I took things up again with the jeweller and finished designing the ring. It had a round black diamond on yellow gold and an interior ruby on the band. We usually do something for our anniversary weekend, so I booked an Airbnb glamping treehouse in the forest in Minden Hills.

Matthew: We’d gone camping on our anniversary before, so it didn’t seem out of the ordinary. We love spending time outdoors, and we visit Algonquin Park at least once a year. One afternoon, Sam suggested that we go on a hike a 10-minute drive away from the Airbnb.

Sam: The owner of the Airbnb was actually a photographer, so I hired her to hide out in the forest and capture the proposal. I tried to curate our outfits a little so that we would be in our nicer gear. But Matthew ended up wearing a random shirt that said “Not Interested” on it, which was kind of funny.

Matthew: When we got to the middle of the forest loop, I saw someone hiding in the woods. At that point, I was kind of concerned for our safety.

Sam: I tried to distract Matthew and told him we should just walk ahead. The photographer had a huge telephoto lens, so luckily she was still able to capture everything. I got down on one knee and ended up putting the ring on Matthew’s right hand since I was so flustered.

Matthew: When Sam proposed, the first emotion I felt was shock. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I was flooded with happiness. Then I started bawling after realizing I had hit a milestone without my mom here to see it. There were a lot of ups and downs in a short amount of time. Sam understood all of it.

Sam: After he said yes, I confessed that the person in the woods was actually a photographer I’d hired to take photos of us. We went back to the treehouse and called both our families on FaceTime to share the news. Then the photographer did our engagement shoot a few hours later. Matthew and I were in the middle of house-hunting at the time, so four days after the proposal we bought a house in Port Credit, where Matthew grew up.

Matthew: We already had a few ideas for the wedding early on. My older sister had gotten married in 2021, and my mom had worked closely with the wedding planner. I knew I wanted to go with the same planner because of that connection. We also had a venue in mind—Graydon Hall Manor. We had seen it on an episode of Schitt’s Creek and thought it was such a beautiful setting.

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Sam: Graydon Hall was already booked for 2024, so we chose a date in 2025—Saturday, September 20. We envisioned it as an intimate black-tie event that would be elegant and moody. We’d have about 140 guests.

Matthew: Warmth was definitely in our vision for the wedding. Sam and I are both very visual, creative people, and we love interior design. Instead of using a lot of white and cool tones that weddings tend to have, we wanted to incorporate earthy colours like brown, moss green and dusty rose.

Sam: We had brown table linens, for example, which isn’t the first thing you think of for a wedding. We designed the look and feel with our wedding planner, much like how we’d decorate our home.

Matthew: We got our tuxedos custom-made at King and Bay, a place recommended to us by our wedding planner. Even though we’re similar in a lot of ways, we didn’t want to be wearing the exact same outfit, so they helped us personalize our looks: ivory-coloured tux jackets with black trousers. I naturally gravitated toward a more traditional look—a classic structured single-breasted jacket. But Sam takes more fashion risks than me.

Sam: I ended up going with a double-breasted tux jacket. We went through the swatch books to pick the right fabric to make sure it looked good on both of our skin tones.

Matthew: Sam and I had never talked about who would propose first. I felt like we both wanted to give that moment to each other—the feeling of proposing and of being proposed to. So, in March of 2025, I planned a second proposal for Sam.

Sam: I knew something was up. Matthew planned a day doing the things we loved in the Waterloo region, like antique shopping and eating at our favourite vegan restaurant, Cafe Pyrus. At the end of the day, Matthew drove us to the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory. They were closed but said we could still go in, which I later realized was all part of Matthew’s plan. We wandered around the space, then as we got to the pond, next to the waterfall, Matthew got down on one knee to propose.

Matthew: I told Sam how I had dreamed of giving him a proposal of his own and how excited I was to get married and spend our lives together.

Sam: I was on cloud nine. There were butterflies flying all around us and landing on us. It was a beautiful and perfect proposal.

Matthew: I hired a photographer to take photos at the butterfly conservatory and booked us a stay for the rest of the weekend at Langdon Hall to celebrate, including a spa day.

Sam: Matthew knows how much I love jewellery, so we had already designed my ring together before Matthew’s proposal. It has a radiant-cut diamond with a platinum prong and an interior ruby to match Matthew’s ring.

Matthew: Sam and I couldn’t imagine not waking up and spending the morning together on our wedding day. That evening, we stayed at our house, and Sam gave me a card and a gift—a little brooch that had my mom’s photo on it for me to wear inside my jacket, by my heart, on our wedding day.

Sam: The morning of our wedding, we did our usual routine. We woke up, worked out, drank our smoothies, did chores and then did our skin care routines.

Matthew: We arrived at the venue at 12 p.m. to review everything with the planner, then our sisters arrived for lunch. After that, Sam and I split up to put on our outfits in separate wedding suites. We took our first look photos at the entrance to Graydon Hall.

Sam: Our ceremony happened outside in the gardens.

Matthew: I walked down the aisle, and Sam was waiting for me at the altar. It was a way more emotional experience than I was expecting. I was holding back tears the whole time. When I got to the front, I was full-on crying. We read vows to each other, but since we weren’t hooked up to mics, it felt more intimate. Only the first two rows could hear us.

Sam: We had our sisters by our sides and our families in the front row. But I didn’t really look at the crowd—all my attention was focused on Matthew. After the ceremony, we escaped upstairs to the wedding suite for a quick bite and some champagne, and we watched our guests mingle outside on the terrace during the cocktail hour. It was magical. The forecast kept changing that week, and it was cloudy that morning, but it cleared up by noon and turned out to be the most gorgeous day.

Matthew: Sam is vegan and gluten-free, and I was pescatarian at the time, so we wanted to make sure our dinner could accommodate all our guests’ dietary restrictions.

Sam: Our meal options were braised short ribs, miso black cod and a veggie Thai green curry. People were raving about the food.

Matthew: After dinner, we did our first dance outside to “Slow Dancing” by Aly & AJ. Our guests were standing around us holding sparklers. Then everyone was ushered inside the hall. Sam danced with his mom, and I danced with my younger sister. Then my older sister and my dad joined in. We played “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" by ABBA to open up the dance floor.

Sam: We didn’t leave the dance floor the entire evening. People told us that they had never danced that much in their lives. The vibe and energy was high, and everyone was having a good time. Afterward, our friends told us they were recovering for days from both the drinking and the dancing.

Matthew: There was a decent bit of disco, ’70s and ’80s throwbacks for our parents, Sean Paul for my millennial cousins, and Charli XCX for the Gen Zers. The party ended at 2 a.m., but we lingered until 2:30. There were about 30 people left at that point. The venue staff started cleaning up around us.

Sam: Matthew and I went back to our home in Port Credit that night. We stayed up for about an hour, just talking and reminiscing. We both felt like the day was perfect. We wouldn’t have changed anything.

Matthew: We felt great and looked the best we ever had. Our custom-fitted tuxes made our bodies look snatched. We felt like celebrities. People were calling us James Bond.

Sam: We went on our honeymoon to Thailand two months later, in November. We did Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai and Phuket for three weeks. The highlight was staying in an elephant sanctuary in Chiang Rai.

Matthew: In a way, being married feels the same as before because we’ve been together for so long. But, at the same time, there are elements that are different. When you know you’re going to be with someone for the rest of your life, the way you move through decisions feels stronger. If we’re disagreeing about something, we’re almost quicker to resolve it now because it feels like we have something important to protect.

Sam: It feels like we have a refreshed outlook that has us excited for the future. We’re looking into what we want to do in terms of having children, which is the next step. Being married just substantiates our love and affection for each other and our ultimate goal to continue building our family and our lives together.

Cheat Sheet

Date: Saturday, September 20, 2025 Venue: Graydon Hall Manor Planner: Ellie Eccleton, Muse Event Co. Florals: Blush and Bloom Stationery: Paper and Poste Photography: Kaela Leone Videography: Ric and Vic, Outside In Content creator: Jess, Hype Gal Media Cake: Bunner’s Bakeshop Officiant: Jeremy Citron, All You Need Is Love Furniture: Detailz Chairs, linens and tabletop rentals: Simply Beautiful Decor Wine and coupe glasses: Splendid Settings Tent draping: Eventure Designs Tent: Premiere Event Tent Rentals DJ: Kyle Reid (DJ Kyrei), Sole Power Productions String quartet: Wellington Music Photo booth: Magnetic Staffing Tuxedos and shoes: King and Bay Rings: Samuel Kleinberg Jewellery