Our Wedding

Let's not kid ourselves--these little histories are only written by the bride-to-be. Our intendeds are too distracted by our awesomeness to put their thoughts into words. So here's the whole of the story, from my ever-impartial perspective.

Cambridge, England

(where it all began)

It all began in 2006 on the eve of the 5th of November, which my extensive research taught me was a holiday of some importance in England. The night held a carnival atmosphere--like a July 4th celebration, but with burning effigies.

I was in England as a part of an MIT-Cambridge exchange program. Two friends on the exchange, Xing and Arjun, brought along some people they'd met at their college, Fitzwilliam.

You can see where this is going. But I have to take a moment to warn you of the tragic--scandalous?--truth. Stefan and I have a relationship built on a lie. Deception. Falsehood.

Let me explain.

After a few beers and with a while to wait before the fireworks, I wanted to take a spin on some of the carnival rides and asked if anyone was interested. Mona, another MIT student, was in, and so was one of the guys from Fitzwilliam. And boy was he cute!

Stefan Pabst does. Not. Like. Carnival rides. I've had to beg, cajole, and drag him onto anything that spins, turns, or coasts since. But on that magic night...

We chatted and flirted in line. Laughed as we whirled through the air. It turned out we had been in the same classes for a month now and never noticed each other. Dizzy, we made our way back to the others in time for the fireworks. How many people can say there were fireworks the night they met?

Stefan pulled out all the stops to sweep me off my feet. Two weeks after we'd met, and he surprised me with an amazing homemade layered birthday cake. I found out later via his housemates that he had nearly destroyed their kitchen trying to pulverize hazelnuts by hand. We went out for romantic dinners, took up salsa dancing, and bought season tickets for a chamber orchestra. We roadtripped all over Germany. In hindsight, he may have exhausted all his "gentlemanly behavior" in one blow, but it worked--I was head over heels!

My mom had warned me not to fall for a British boy while I was abroad, but I'd found my loophole in the end.

The long distance game

(the hard part)

After seven amazing months in Cambridge, reality returned and Stefan and I had to part ways, me for the US and him for Germany. Thus began the Dark Times. I've never been particularly good at the long distance game. I can't focus on phone calls, don't like to talk about my day if it wasn't particularly interesting, and have a hard time working around time zones.

Still, we tried the best we could. There were fights, and one afternoon in December when we broke up. Skype and willpower saw us through.

The hardest part about long distance is not knowing when it's going to end. When people ask me if long term relationships work, I feel a bit hypocritical but I always answer "No!" What made our relationship last wasn't figuring out how to be apart, it was surviving until we knew there'd be an end to the separation.

Brief reunions

(can't keep me awwaaay from you)

There's nothing like trying to plan an international trip on an undergraduate salary. (In my case, that would be negative $5000/yr.) We spent nine months apart--longer than we'd been together--before our first brief reunion. Stefan saved up and flew out to Boston to see me and have a little east coast vacation.

I can't say the trip was quite what he imagined, what with it being his first time in the US. There was no whirlwind tour of Niagra Falls and the Grand Canyon. We didn't roadtrip down Route 66. We did spend a few days in New York City before returning to Boston. And we flew to visit my family for Easter, which turned into a full tour of O'Hare airport when Stefan's connection was delayed for a day. But otherwise, it was mostly time spent together at MIT. Me scrambling to finish my requirements in time for graduation, him patiently dealing with my stress.

My first job as an MIT grad was working retail selling beads and jewelry findings. I wanted a physics-free summer before grad school, and this was a fun way to do it and save up for a trip to Deutschland. In August, I finally saw Stefan again. This was the visit that convinced us to make it work. Stefan set out to find a place in the US to go to grad school. I was already set to attend UIUC in the fall, so he concentrated his efforts on the Chicago area. He even took the GRE tests on his next US visit that October and started applying to grad schools.

We would find an end to our separation.

Chicago/Urbana, IL

(it's not the same zip code, but we'll take it!)

Stefan found a research position at Argonne National Lab, just outside Chicago. He began hunting for apartments before coming over. One day he tells me about the nice guy he met on Craigslist--he had a room in his house for rent, and he even offered to pick Stefan up from the airport and show him around Chicago.

Um.

I tried to explain how this was not a smart plan, how I didn't wait this long to be reunited only to have Stefan end up murdered by a Craigslist crazy person. But I couldn't pick Stefan up from the airport myself--I can't even remember why now--and Stefan was insistent.

Turns out Bob is a pretty cool guy. An architect who mostly lives in another city, but rents out his house in Oak Park, one of the nicer neighborhoods outside Chicago. Stefan rented a room and by spring, we at last found ourselves again on the same continent, though not in the same zip code. Every weekend became a special event, one of us traveling to the other. Always something fun on the agenda.

I look back on our time in Illinois with warm memories. Such busy weekends were exhausting, but for the first time in a long while, I was free to use my weekends how I wanted, unhurried by demanding schoolwork. Grad life required long hours and hard work as well, but there was now the flexibility to arrange my schedule how I wanted. And during the week, I was surrounded by awesome friends who made classes (taking and teaching them) as well as lab work far more entertaining.

Unfortunately, a national lab doesn't have nearly the same graduate student population as a university and beyond a few colleagues and housemates, Stefan's social life was limited to his weekends. We made the most of them, taking day trips, going to events in Chicago, and just getting in some much-needed face time.

In early 2010, we realized our days together were numbered. Stefan's advisor accepted a position in Hamburg, Germany, and was taking Stefan with him. Finding a new advisor in the US would have been very difficult for Stefan, since he was technically a student in Erlangen, Germany while working with a US research group. So I talked with my advisor about doing essentially what he'd been doing in the US--working with a Hamburg group while staying in her group at Urbana.

Fortunately, I have an understanding and flexible advisor. We made something work. Long story short, Stefan departed for Deutschland in July and by November, I was hot on his heels.

Hamburg, Germany

(adventures under one roof)

Moving to a new country is scary. You expect the big differences, but it's the million little things that make you homesick. (Why isn't anything open on Sunday? Where are the pumpkin spice lattes?) The language barrier doesn't help either. My first few months in Germany gave me a new appreciation for what Stefan had gone through moving to the US. I could finally understand his delight in finding a Polish bakery near Argonne that had 'real bread'. And his frustration about all the hidden costs of going out to eat. (Seriously, dining out is so much cheaper in Germany.) At least in Hamburg I had him by my side--he had essentially lived alone in Chicago.

We found a flat in a quiet immigrant neighborhood near work. I arrived in fall and had as my welcome one of Hamburg's most brutal winters in years. Still we managed to bike to work almost every day. I still don't know how we did it. Our first year was all about finding new patterns, learning to live together under the same roof. All the little things--striking a balance between open windows (brr) and cranking up the heater (wunderschön). And the big things--how do we split rent and living costs? What should we save money for and what is worth splashing out on? In hindsight the transition happened very smoothly. We share the same priorities.

It didn't take long to realize this relationship just might work. But with a good thing going, we weren't in any rush to make it official. After two years in the same flat, with Stefan set to graduate soon, we finally started talking the M-word. We decided to give ourselves plenty of time to prepare. (I only realized later there is no such thing as enough time..!) So in January 2013 we started looking at venues and forming a rough plan. Wedding bells were going to chime...

Wedding bells are gonna chime

(paperwork...lot's of paperwork)

Venue shopping in Germany turned into a fun tourist opportunity. We decided to rent a castle--yes, you can do that! It had been a running joke between us for years that I expected him to build me a castle. His home region is strewn with small 'burgs', defensive castles of stone pointing to an age where Thuringen stood at the shifting border between empires. We toured several beautiful castle grounds, eventually settled on Veste Wachsenburg. For the US venue, I had to rely on googling and email inquiries. But deciding on Schlafly's was a no-brainer in the end. Cute venue and delicious beer, what more could a bride ask?

We realized that getting legally married in 2013 rather than 2014 would mean huge savings on taxes, and allow me to get better and cheaper health insurance in Germany's public system. (USA, you have no idea what you're missing out on.) So we started the process of gathering documents. It turned out getting officially hitched in Germany would be simpler than in the US. For a visa to marry in the US, Stefan would have needed to undergo a physical. And I would have had to prove I could take care of him financially.

For all their claim to bureaucratic fame, a German marriage actually required fewer documents. I had to sign a affidavit claiming I wasn't married. (And that I had no STDs. What the heck, Deutschland?) It required a drive to Bremen's US embassy, but we got it done. And I mailed my birth certificate off to get an official apostille. There was momentary panic when Missouri sent me one for India somehow, but whatever, it slipped past the bureaucracy anyway.

The morning we went to turn in our documents, Stefan got up before me and I drowsily listened as he puttered around the house. All of a sudden, blasting into our bedroom,

"I'M GETTING MARRIED IN THE MORNING, DING DONG THE BELLS ARE GOING TO CHHHIIIMMME!"

As My Fair Lady rung out through the apartment, Stefan comes leaping back to our bed and I'm rattled into full alertness, silently vowing revenge.

The only really ridiculous part was the translator. Oh dear. In order to verify that I knew what the heck was happening, we needed to have a translator present when we processed our documents. And it couldn't be Stefan--just in case he was tricking me into tying the knot? Who knows? So we found an 'official' translator and told him to meet us at the town hall.

And what a clown we found.

This giant bald guy waltzes in an hour late, wearing the most ridiculous pin stripe suit we'd ever seen. He managed to be loud and pushy, and wrinkle up our documents in his oversized hands, but the one thing he really couldn't do was speak English. At least not 75 euros worth of English, which is what he charged for a half hour of his time. Stefan had to help him through explaining to me what I already understood. The whole episode was a farce. In the end, he told us he'd be totally available for our wedding too. Oh joy.

It turned out the soonest we'd be able to sign our marriage documents would be in October, effectively nullifying the health care benefit of marrying early. So we went to the nearby city of Schenefeld. A much less grandiose location, they had no trouble fitting us in whenever we liked. A small courthouse suited us fine--the real party was already in the works for next year. And as an added bonus, no translator needed!

We thought it would be just perfect to choose one of our wedding dates. By this point it was April and we wanted some time to prepare, so we picked June 28th, the day of our celebration in Germany. It perfectly fell on a Friday (the office isn't open on weekends). Our German celebration will also be our one year anniversary!

The night before the big day, Stefan's brother Christian came to town and the boys went out with Stefan's office mates to party it up. I relaxed with a friend in the spa, and felt guilty going to bed at 1 am. Meanwhile Mr. Party Animal, who normally is half asleep after one beer, comes rolling in at 4:30 am.

Morning arrived and I slipped quietly out of bed while an exhausted Stefan slept on. Now was my moment of glory. I brought one of the speakers into the bedroom and dug through our DVD collection.

"I'M GETTING MARRIED IN THE MORNING, DING DONG THE BELLS ARE GOING TO CHHHIIIMMME!"

My future husband was none too pleased, but I still can't seem to drum up any pity. I got dolled up in a cute white summer dress while a sleepy Stefan stumbled out of bed and into his suit. We met up with two good friends, along with Christian, to be our witnesses. The day was cold, grey, and rainy--quintessential Hamburg weather. Surely it must have meant good karma--getting the rain out of the way now means we'll have beautiful days in May and next June. Right? Only time will tell, but I have faith.

This wedding has been a long time coming and we just can't wait to be back in St. Louis to party with you. Thank you for reading our story and we'll see you soon!