First step - picking a date

After I calmed down from my epic engagement freak out, Billy started saying how he wanted a long engagement - like, a year and a half or two years. I was totally fine with that. It made sense: we were planning on moving half way across the country, start our careers, etc. It would give us plenty of time to figure life out, as well as things like where the hell we should get married (Ohio vs. Michigan vs. our new home in New York).

That idea didn't last long.

I waited about 15 hours between getting engaged and looking up wedding blogs and websites.

It was a sickness.

I forget when exactly I started looking at the calendar on my computer, but I know it was less than a week before I realized that in 2009, our anniversary was going to fall on a Saturday. Which would mean an engagement of just over a year. But it would be one less important date to remember!

See, I have a thing about choosing easy-to-remember days for important points in Billy's and my relationship. For awhile, Billy tried to argue that we started going out on February 20th, as we hadn't actually slept yet, thus we were operating like it was (really really) late on Friday when we were out.

But February 21st is exactly one week after Valentine's Day. It's much easier to remember the date that way.

Our six month anniversary, August 21st, was also special as well, because it was an easy date to remember...but those details can't be published on a public blog. I think Billy would kill me (which would totally put a damper on the whole "wedding" thing).

And then, of course, Billy proposed on New Year's Eve. No forgetting that date!

So it totally made sense to me to get married on what will be our fifth anniversary. Billy was hesitant at first - but I convinced him!

I think our parents thought we were a little crazy at first, especially since nowhere we were considering getting married at is exactly the nicest place in the middle of February. Which meant for a very brief time we (read: I) considered a destination wedding...but I'm too much of a control freak for that!

So, to re-assure everyone, I also had some non-sentimental reasons for 1) shortening the engagement and 2) making it the middle of February.

1) It was very important to both Billy and I that our friends from the forensics team be able to attend the wedding, something that may have been difficult if we waited for more than a year as all of our friends are or were near graduation and making plans to move away. This way we could catch them before they left, or at least before we lost contact with them.
2) It's the middle of winter. Who gets married in the middle of winter? Especially on a non-holiday weekend. I was positive we'd catch at least some deals on prices that way.

Eventually everyone saw my logic :-)

How did you choose your date?