Thanks to my matchmaking cousin and a mutual friend, I met my fiancée during the summer of 1996, knowing little to nothing about him. What I did know wasn't very impressive. He had recently left the Marines (Strike one: military boys held zero appeal), had bought a new truck (Strike two: a truck?!) and his best friend knew my cousin (fast becoming strike three). Miraculously, though, something clicked, and within two months we were living together.

At that time I had nothing. I mean, literally, nothing. I had no car, so I walked to my nanny job, where I worked for a man and a woman who had both figured out, after marriage and a baby, that they were both gay. I existed on Oodles of Noodles and, on a good week, Tombstone pizza. To top it all off, I was living in a summer sublet with a bunch of frat boys (I promise it was nothing like you might imagine).

With nothing of my own to cling to, I didn't hesitate to move in with R. It definitely was impulsive and perhaps premature; neither of us had even met the other's parents. I inadvertently broke it to my Italian, Catholic mother and Puerto Rican father via the outgoing answering machine recording. Hearing "Hi, WE can't answer the phone now," prompted the inevitable question, "What is this WE crap?" from my parents. I have no idea how R told his white, Southern Baptist parents, whose approval of me was in question. They were still trying to figure out a) if I was Cuban and b) if my parents were citizens.

Slowly, we began accumulating things and created a life together. We got a dog and quickly brought in two cats. We moved from a condemnable apartment to a house full of R's friends. When that proved too much for the relationship to stand, R bought a house. At 23 and 24, respectively, R and I were way too young to know any better. We thought we had it made.

I soon found myself with another dog, living in a new home in a VERY rural Virginia county (Gum Spring, baby). I'm talking 20 minutes from the nearest decent grocery store and a half hour from the nearest Wal-Mart.

But it was worth it; I was in love. Naïvely, I thought an engagement ring, the big wedding and babies would shortly follow. Yet another cat (count them: 5 pets!) later, I was still ring-less. In the meantime, my younger sister had met and married the man of her dreams. Finally, in March of 2002, R proposed with a gorgeous 1+ carat emerald cut platinum ring. My dream ring would soon be followed by a dream wedding, right? Wrong.

That was only the beginning of the saga that would become the wedding.

Add one more dog (Six!) plus another year of stagnancy and the planning finally began… sort of. The wedding party is set, the dress coveted, the location visited, the calendar consulted, and then reality hits. All of this costs money, the families don't mesh well and, worst of all, R has become mentally incapacitated. He, not we, decided that we should pay for all of this ourselves. When he told me this I could actually hear my dreams come screeching to a halt.

So, here I am, trying to get through the wedding chaos unscathed. WE moved the location to Florida to combine it with a honeymoon, cut the wedding party severely from 100+ to 20, and now the real planning (and saving) begins. I have a funny feeling the drama has only just begun.