On September 17th, I married my girlfriend of 2.5 years in front of 250 of our friends and family. The wedding was a culmination of 13 months of planning, saving, arguing, stressing, cheering, and hand-wringing. In the end, like many weddings, we had a great time in spite of everything that didn’t go according to plan, and basked in the amazement of the sheer scale of what we planned.
In a lot of ways, things turned out like a very stereotypical romantic comedy, where most of the crises were averted, old rivals got along, and everyone had a great time. Marrying my wife was significant because we come from different cultures but we are able to meet each other in the middle. We’re very different people, and what that has done is really forced us to compromise with each other and also learn a lot about the other person’s beliefs/culture.
My wife had wanted to have a traditional Mexican wedding. I wanted a geeky ‘theme’ wedding. We compromised and had a Mexican ‘theme’ wedding (really a Mexican wedding but at that point I didn’t mind 
). I knew the wedding would be unlike anything my family had ever been to- our weddings tend to have very short ceremonies, dinner, speeches, an hour or so of dancing with a DJ, and done. My wife’s family is Catholic, and the ceremony is drawn out (particularly so for ours because it was bilingual). There was a Mariachi band playing during the ceremony, and also during dinner at the reception. We hired a live band who happened to know popular English AND Spanish songs, which was great because it got both families on the dance floor. We danced for the better part of six hours- far more festivities than my family were used to and many of them got pooped out early.
Overall the whole thing was wonderful. I really enjoyed following on the traditions of my wife’s family, including a lucrative money dance, getting tossed into the air repeatedly by her cousins. We got TONS of presents, relatives that we hadn’t seen for years came out to visit, and had tons of support and help.
