Sophie Simmons is a married woman. The 30-year-old singer, TV personality, and daughter of Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed-Simmons, wed her longtime love, James Henderson, on Feb. 22. Five days after the couple obtained a wedding license at a Los Angeles courthouse, the two exchanged vows in front of fifty friends and family members in the backyard of her mother’s Malibu home. In the photos obtained by PEOPLE, Sophie looks radiant in her sparkling blush dress by Galia Lahav. James wore a Tom Ford suit.
After guests arrived for light bites and drinks, the couple began their ceremony, with Sophie walking down the aisle in her dress and Maria Elena Bridal headpiece. “No One’s Gonna Love You” by Band Of Horses played, a nod to Sophie and James’ romance. “When my fiancé and I first started dating nine years ago, he took me to a Band of Horses concert,” Sophie told PEOPLE. “I was so tired from filming our reality show Shannon & Sophie back then, I fell asleep on his shoulder. We were way too early in the dating phase for me to do that. Luckily, he thought it was cute, and he woke me up for that one song.”
After exchanging their vows, James and Sophie took their first steps as a couple to Bright Eyes‘ “First Day of My Life,” as that is James’s favorite band.
“We couldn’t be prouder of our daughter,” Gene and Shannon told PEOPLE in a statement. “James is a solid young man, and Sophie can do anything she puts her mind to. We wish them a lifetime of love and happiness. If they are even half as happy as we are, they will last long.”
The couple began dating in 2014 after Sophie grabbed a coffee at the café where James was waitressing. She was smitten by her “hot” waiter and gave him her number. They went on a date later that day and had been together ever since.
James proposed to Sophie in July 2022 during a family trip to Switzerland. Sophie shared the news of the engagement on her Instagram, along with a black-and-white photo of her ring. “This is the time,” she captioned the shot. Sophie told PEOPLE that the COVID-19 pandemic made them realize how important it was for them to be married — if one was admitted to the hospital, the other couldn’t see them legally unless they were husband and wife. After James proposed, Gene advised that they get married by the end of that year. The logistics for that date didn’t work out, so they made it happen with this February wedding.
On Thursday (Feb. 23), the couple will host 250 of their family and friends for a reception in Los Angeles. “The reception party is the big moment,” Simmons said. “We’re going to party until the sun comes up.”
Sophie and James picked the backyard of her mother’s “she-shed” home for the wedding because “the view truly can’t be beat.” The couple also chose this ceremony to accommodate their families’ religious beliefs, opting for a judge to marry them in a courtroom and to make exchanging vows more about their love than anything. They also ” “took out all the language in the vows about the wife obeying and things like that,” said Sophie. “We wanted it to be super equal, because our partnership is really equal.”