A charitable couple who spent 12 weeks apart in the lead up to their wedding day tied the knot in a beautiful and intimate ceremony.

Dan Randall, 29, a charity youth director and a church senior leader in Burnley, married Marina Randall, 32, a charity training team member and a charity young adults leader from Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Dan grew up in Barrow and left the town at the age of 18 – setting him on the path that would eventually lead him to his wife.

Dan said: “We met through a charity that we both work for two years ago.

“We had met a little earlier than that when working for the charity, but that’s when I approached her and asked her out and it went from there.”

Despite a less than smooth start to the blossoming romance, it all worked out in the end.

He said: “We went to Starbucks for our first date – but it was actually the third Starbucks we’d visited, because the first two were shut!” Due to living apart, the couple would meet up in Bristol every three weeks.

Dan said: “In 2019 she went back to Brazil for the summer while she got her work visa renewed, and then I went out there and proposed at a waterfall in the countryside near Belo Horizonte, where she is from.

In the lead up to the wedding, the couple were apart for 12 weeks.

Dan said: “We didn’t see each other for 12 weeks and two days because we didn’t live together.

“The longest we had been apart before this was four weeks.”

The couple tied the knot on July 4 – the first day that weddings were allowed to take place after the initial coronavirus lockdown.

The ceremony took place at Life Church Lancashire.

Dan said: “We were due to get married on May 16 in the UK and then do something in Brazil in December, but it is unlikely that we are now able to do that.

“We were going to have 400 guests at the church but then the wedding got moved, so we did it on July 4 with 30 people.

“I was super nervous and she wasn’t, when it’s usually the other way around.

“It was great, and it was very personal and intimate and quite emotional.

“My dad had recently just been given the all clear from cancer, and my mum has been diagnosed with cancer this year.

“She had just had an operation to remove the cancer from her face just a week and a half before.

“We made it nice with family and friends – it was great. We couldn’t have a reception because at the time you could only have six people, so we decided to go and do our wedding photos and then we went home and had a Chinese takeaway.”