AvenueCalgary.com 41TARA ANAND COWLES
T
ara Anand Cowles married for the first
time at 25. Twenty years later, in the
summer of 2016, she returned to the
altar, not once, but twice, with new
husband Jay Cowles. “We joke that
I married Jay twice, so I must really want to be
with him,” she says.
In fact, the reason had to do with bureaucratic
clutter surrounding marriage laws in Italy, where
they wanted a destination wedding. “Getting
married in Florence, we discovered, was incred-
ibly difficult. You have to get your ceremony
notarized, have it translated — it was very
complicated,” says Anand Cowles. “And there’s
a possibility that they won’t let you know until
two or three days before your date whether they
approve the wedding or not.” Not wanting to
run the risk of being unmarried past their set
wedding date, the pair secretly tied the knot in
Kelowna a month earlier, making their Italian
wedding an encore performance.
Though getting remarried was never a priority
for Anand Cowles, donning a wedding gown
again did stir something inside her. “I didn’t think
marriage was super important to me, but it actu-
ally feels really special,” she says. “I like calling
him my husband. It feels good and it creates a
really nice closeness and a bond, being married.”
The Florence wedding was a more laidback af-
fair than Anand Cowles’s first, offering a chance to
vacation in a beautiful location that reflected who
she and Cowles were as a couple, without having
to worry about micromanaging small details. “We
made a conscious decision to make it an amazing
vacation for everyone, rather than being stressed
about the little things, which I think I was the first
time around,” she says. “When I first got married
I was so young, I didn’t really know myself. I think
I just did everything that was expected of me
rather than knowing what I really wanted. This
time, it was way more personal and true to who
we are as a couple.”
Another special part of the wedding was the
presence of not just Anand Cowles’ 22-year-old
son but also the bride and groom’s baby son,
Anson. “Having a baby together made getting
married important,” says Anand Cowles. “It was
about joining together and having the same fam-
ily name.
“It made it feel a little more sacred.”