These Best Friends Fell in Love and Celebrated With a Golden Hour Reception Overlooking Kelowna

Maskeen and Akash met at a party after high school and became friends first. Everyone around them seemed to notice the chemistry before they were willing to admit it.

“Our story is your typical friends-to-lovers,” they say. “The friendship always had a bit of a spark in it, but we denied it despite everyone pointing it out until it was too hard to ignore.”

By the time they finally crossed that line, they already knew each other well enough to have seen the less polished versions too. “Having seen each other at our best and worst as just friends yet still having that build-up of attraction is what gave us such a solid foundation,” they share.

“Falling in love with someone after having seen it all is something really special.”

It probably helped that they’re remarkably similar. “We’re both the life of the party,” Maskeen says. “The male and female equivalent of one another in that department.” She loves Akash’s ability to charm practically anyone, while Akash loves how quickly Maskeen can make a room laugh. “She’s always dropping these one-liners,” he says. “Sometimes we go on these long bits, and I’m always the one to stop them because she’ll keep going, and I can’t keep up.”

By the time Akash proposed, Maskeen knew an engagement was somewhere on the horizon. They had already talked about marriage and even booked the gurdwara. Knowing it was coming did very little to prepare her for the actual moment.

On May 20, 2023, Maskeen thought she was joining her cousin for a wedding pre-shoot. She arrived at a Vancouver loft with her sister and cousin, walked upstairs, and found a room filled with candles and glass vases. Then a video of Akash started playing.

“I was so unbelievably overwhelmed and uncomfortable,” she admits. “Nothing, not even knowing, can prepare you for the feeling of being proposed to.”

The video itself became a blur. “I blacked out and couldn’t remember anything,” Maskeen says. “I just remember that after the video stopped, he was behind me kneeling with my ring in his hand.”

Akash had one more surprise waiting. He told her they were heading to dinner, then brought her into a room filled with 50 of their closest friends and family. “Pure shock x2,” she says. “He really hit the hammer on the proposal.”

They had actually started planning the wedding before the proposal and gave themselves two years to put everything together. Maskeen credits their photo and video teams, along with her makeup artists, with making the week feel easier once it finally arrived. “I think it’s so important to pick those two vendors carefully because they’re with you for the entire week, and you want to feel comfortable with them.”

One of the best moments of that week wasn’t planned until the night before.

Maskeen and Akash had talked about crashing each other’s events, but their schedules made it seem unlikely. Then Maskeen’s family decided at the last minute that they were going to crash Akash’s Bakara party.

He genuinely had no idea.

“His energy, it felt like a movie moment,” Maskeen says. “Everyone saw and felt it. We talked about that moment all week long.”

She chose one of their favourite Punjabi songs for the entrance, a track they once had to get emailed directly from a DJ because they couldn’t find the original version online. They rented a party bus at the last minute, showed up, and stayed dancing well into the night.

The reception required considerably more planning.

Maskeen and Akash chose Hillcrest Farm in Kelowna, an outdoor venue on a hill overlooking the landscape. The venue provided the tent and lighting, but nearly everything else had to be brought in separately.

“We had to essentially create it from scratch,” they say. “This was the bulk of our planning. Planning the rest of the week was a piece of cake in comparison.”

Their parents were initially nervous about the idea. Weather, bugs and all the things that could go wrong with an outdoor reception made the decision feel risky. Then Akash’s parents snuck in for a preview earlier that day and called the couple excited about how everything had come together.

Reception Details

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By golden hour, the reason they had chosen Hillcrest was obvious.

“The guests were in awe, not a single person on the dance floor or at their seat, everyone scattered taking pictures with the view as the sun was setting,” they share. “This will forever be engrained in our memories.”

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With just over 200 guests, the reception also felt small enough that Maskeen and Akash could relax around the people closest to them. “We were playfully unserious throughout the night because we truly felt at home, just delirious with love and happiness.”

Maskeen approached her wedding looks with the same instinct she brought to the rest of the week. She wanted every event to feel different and spent a month shopping in India, although, somewhat unexpectedly, she found her three main outfits within the first two days. Her wedding lehenga was maroon and blush pink, while her favourite of the entire week was her Jago look, with red, orange and sage tones and vintage-style detailing.

“It has a vintage look to it, like you took parts of someone’s grandma’s rug and stitched it together,” she says. “It’s my absolute favorite look to date.”

The Looks

After two years of planning, the biggest thing Maskeen and Akash learned was how easily a wedding can start consuming the relationship itself.

“You eat, breathe, and sleep wedding for the last six months, and it can cause some tension at times,” Maskeen says.

Her advice is to deliberately make room for everything else. Go on a date. Talk about something unrelated to the guest list. Remember how you spent time together before every conversation became about the wedding.

For two people who started as friends, that part comes naturally.

Long after the proposal surprise, the Bakara crash and the golden-hour reception, they still have the thing that came first: they genuinely like being around each other.