Bachelor in Paradise stars Joe Amabile and Serena Pitt are sharing more details about their intimate courthouse wedding.
One week after the newlyweds were spotted by PEOPLE at City Hall in New York City, Amabile and Pitt appeared on the Click Bait with Bachelor Nation podcast to open up about saying "I do".
The couple said they had talked about the idea of eloping ever since their engagement party in August, and it took just three weeks to go from Googling "how to get married" to actually exchanging vows.
Amabile, 36, and Pitt, 25, explained they originally hoped to get married in a Zoom ceremony on their couch — similar to how it was done at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — but after learning it was no longer being offered as an option, they decided on a courthouse wedding.
"It has taken a lot of pressure off of the wedding itself," Amabile said. "I already feel like the pressure is gone."
Heading into the ceremony, Pitt said they "didn't know what to expect at all," but she was soon moved to tears.
"I just figured you sit down, you sign some papers, and they're like, 'You're married!'" she recalled. "But you go into this room and it's the two of us, and [our witness] Natasha [Parker], and this woman. And she's like, 'Face each other, look into each other's eyes, hold hands,' and I got so emotional. It made it really real, [but] not in a bad way."
"She was crying," Amabile chimed in, as Pitt admitted, "Yeah, I was crying the whole time."
Once the "I do's" had been exchanged, Pitt said the couple left the courthouse feeling "super excited."
At that point, only a handful of people knew about the wedding, including Parker (the couple's witness and fellow BiP star) and their families. On their way home, Pitt said they planned to "call our close friends... but that was gonna be where we kinda drew the line."
However, all that changed when Pitt received a text message from her manager, indicating that they had been spotted by PEOPLE leaving the courthouse together.
"Serena got a text from her manager that basically asked, 'Are you married? Because this publication either got tipped off or they had somebody that was near there that saw you guys walking out of the marriage ceremony,'" Amabile recalled. "So realistically, we don't even know if that would've got out, but technically, that is public knowledge."
Pitt added that it was surprising they got caught because "we were so dressed down, we were wearing masks ... we were like, 'There's no way anyone's gonna see us.'"
In fact, they were so convinced that they'd get away with the secret nuptials that the couple even brushed off Pitt's mom when she asked about the possibility of getting caught.
"Serena's mom had asked us before, 'What are you gonna do if somebody notices you?'" Amabile recounted. "I'm like, 'We'll just say we're going there for a speeding ticket.' I didn't realize the marriage section is large — and separate."
"Yeah, you get spotted in there, nobody's questioning what you're doing," Pitt noted.
Ultimately, though, the pair decided to share the news publicly.
"Once we got the text, and my manager's like, 'Look, it's totally your call what you wanna do here,' we were just like, 'You know what? Screw it. Let's share this with everyone, we have the video, let's share the video,'" Pitt said. "If it's gonna get out, we might as well have it released in our way."
"Getting spotted was just the push over the edge to do it," she added. "But had I known the video was gonna go everywhere, I would've dressed a little differently!"
Following their courthouse nuptials last week, the couple told PEOPLE exclusively that they still plan to "have a big wedding next fall," but were happy to have a "private moment just the two of us [that] felt so special and intimate."
"We can't wait to celebrate with all of our family and friends next year at our wedding," they added, "because who doesn't want to marry the love of their life twice?"
The couple got engaged on season 7 of Bachelor in Paradise. After the show wrapped, Amabile and Pitt maintained a long-distance relationship for months before moving in together in New York City in March 2022.
In August 2022, they celebrated another relationship milestone: their engagement party in Pitt's hometown of Toronto.
