The average American woman spends about 1.5 years planning her wedding… assuming that she starts planning after she’s engaged.* I know some women start early, like when they are 9 years old or something. Call me boring, but I was out getting scrapes on my knees and beating up the boys I liked when I was 9 instead of planning my dream wedding. I guess that partially explains why with only four and a half months left I have yet to get into the full responsible-planning mode. (Still clumsy and beating up the boy I like.)

All that aside, I have a simplified outlook on this mess and, sadly, it revolves around one key factor: Money. The green, the cash, el dinero, der… geez, I forgot all the German I learned in two semesters-worth. Das Geld. There we go. In the melodious words of Wyclef: I’ma tell you, like Wu told me, cash rules everything around me. (Dollah dollah bill, y’all.)

Seriously though, we know the most important part about getting married is that we have a solid foundation for marriage. Christian and I love each other and we share similar views on faith, career, children and life in general. We’ve had that for years now. What we have yet to get is the means by which we can embark on our life together. Moving in together and leaving the marriage detail for later is not an option.

All we can do is just bide our time and try to plan around the financial aspect. One of the things that has taken shape quickly is the guest list. Our first guestimate was 60 to 70 guests. Then it went up to 80. Currently, it’s pushing 100 and that’s also going to push our budget. The cap has been set at 100 though, for better or for worse.

When we first sat down and just threw out names of who we would like to invite, we wondered, “Can we really think of 60 people who we really want to show up?” The funny thing is that when you start writing the names down and account for their +1’s that also know you, the list gets long in a matter of minutes. Most of the list is made up of friends, so at least in our case there are no worries about imposing mothers who want to invite all the relatives she can think of AND her canasta friends. Luckily our moms don’t play canasta so no worries there. Instead we thought about the people who throughout the past 6 years of our relationship have been more than acquaintances. Then that narrows down to people who we can call friends in the sense that, let’s say we’re stuck in La Guardia airport because of a horrible mid-March snow storm, these people would drive out there from Ithaca, pick us up and take us to a warm house to wait out the storm for a couple of days. (This is just an example, not to be applied to all the people we know.) But yes, the process for the guest list has been given serious thought only because, if we could, we’d invite 90% of the people we’ve met upon entering Cornell. I’d end up with something like 100 guests made up by class of 2008 ChemEs, other Cornellians, interns I met at Kraft and friends from back home. Christian would contribute something like 1,000 guests from all his info sci friends, facebook buddies, coworkers, internship pals and people he met at conferences in between. This isn’t to say that all these people would want to show up, but assuminig that 80% of the guest list actually attends, we’d need to reserve all 38 acres at the Fruit and Spice Garden to comfortable party with these peeps. All I can think of is this man I met at one of my internships who told me about when he got married. He said that back in those days (and where he’s from) you had to practically invite the whole town because your wedding was announced in the paper and that usually meant everyone would find out the when and where and take it as a general invitation. I can’t remember how many people attended his wedding but it was several hundred— the number 750 rings a bell, but I could be making that up. Anyway, he said they went cheap with the reception by doing a pig roast and some other money-saving ideas and the total came out to be less than $10,000. Everyone enjoyed themselves, everyone ate and drank and I was left wondering why the dollar no longer buys as much as back in those good old days.

Anyway, musings aside, the guest list: it’s tough, it’s laborious. It’s almost like America’s Next Top Model or American Idol with so many hopefuls and so few winning spots. And who wouldn’t want to compete for the chance to see Christian and me tie the knot?? Come on.**

*I made up this statistic, but doesn’t it sound so credible? Part of my job as a plant designer in my senior ChemE course.

**Totally kidding. If anything, it would be more like Project Runway or Top Chef because we’d be more interested in inviting people who could make me a wedding dress and/or provide ideas for catering.