B.I.O.: Katy Marshall, John Winstead

Katy, 29, is a meeting and event planner. John, 32, is a compliance specialist at the U.S. Department of Labor. They'll live in Arlington after the wedding.

First Kiss: "On his living room sofa, right after I trashed him playing Wii."

How He Proposed: After dinner, he proposed on the sidewalk by their car. "I was going to propose at the restaurant, but it was too crowded and loud. At one point Katy went to the restroom and I pulled out the ring box, but then stuck it back into my pocket, to the chagrin of the watching college kids at the next table."

Pet Names: He calls her "sweet pea" and she calls him "lovey bear."



Stupidest Fight: Over what time they should have left for a day trip.

Wedding engagement season is in full swing with flurry of holiday marriage proposals

Perhaps you still call this time of year Christmas. Or Hanukkah. Or, generically, “the holidays.”

If so, you haven’t been paying attention. Unconsciously, you’ve tuned out the insidious loop of diamond ads and ignored the pretty little boxes in every storefront window.

When to start planning your wedding

This, friend, is “engagement season.” And to those in the wedding industry, it’s only the eve of their most wonderful time of the year. For December rings, they know, bring January cha-chings.

January has become the month-long equivalent of Black Friday in the wedding world. After a rush of holiday proposals, wedding Web sites will see huge spikes in traffic, as bridal expos crank into gear across the country and glossy magazines with hundreds of ads and intimidating “to-do” lists fly off the shelves. With a quick flip of the calendar, the wedding-planning bonanza is underway.

According to WeddingWire, a Bethesda company that provides technology for the wedding industry, 33 percent of engagements happen between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. Families are together, sparkly lights abound and people are in the mood to unwrap things.

And if a guy’s gonna pop the question eventually, he might as well use the opportunity to avoid shopping for a holiday gift and kill two birds with — ahem — one stone. Plenty of Web sites offer ideas on executing the perfect holiday proposal: Play Santa! Hang it on an ornament! Spell it out in lights on your roof!

And, of course, the jewelers of America have done their part to reinforce the expectation of a diamond ring under the Christmas tree. In the past month, message boards lit up with postings by young women speculating on whether they’ll get engaged over the holidays. “My [significant other] told me on new years eve that I would be engaged this year,” one woman who goes by the user name kribbie wrote on PriceScope, an online diamond buying guide. “Well, since there are only a few days left til new years 2012, I’m hoping he keeps his promise.”

“Every year I despise the holidays more and more,” bemoans another who calls herself sweetpepsigirl. “The commercials make it hard, too. It’s like they KNOW I want a ring for Christmas.”

Never mind that she’s been in a relationship for only six months and “definitely knows there isn’t a ring in my immediate future. *sigh.*”

Still, she benevolently sprinkles digital fairy dust on the other would-be brides, typing “********dust*******” to bid them good luck with their proposal wishes. And when those diamond dreams come true, the newly engaged won’t bask in the ring’s glow for long before cranking up the nuptial machinery.

Naturally, the wedding industry will be at the ready. It didn’t become a $70 billion business because its purveyors spend a lot of time sitting on their heels, after all.

Bride Magazine’s January edition — which sold 250 ad pages this year, compared with the 40 or so ad pages most women’s magazines will have for the month — is always its best-selling issue. Big-name dress designers parade through bridal salons for trunk shows while retailers that offer wedding registries are already planning events for newly engaged couples to check out the goods.

‘You’re never gonna find two people who had such a nontraditional love affair’

(Barbara Kinney/ BARBARA KINNEY ) - Newlyweds Ian Alberg and Mary Morrison walk down the aisle after being married November 5, 2011 in a ceremony at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington D.C.

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After Mary Morrison and Ian Alberg were declared married, Bill Clinton was the first person to stand and applaud. It was, after all, his presidency that brought the couple together.

For much of the 1990s they were among the young staffers keeping the West Wing in motion. Alberg first did advance work for the campaign and later became a domestic policy adviser for Al Gore; Morrison rose from intern to deputy director of Oval Office operations.

Morrison, Alberg and other White House employees in their 20s worked incessantly, and when they did take time to relax, it was often with each other. “It was like a fraternity and sorority,” Morrison says. “We literally did everything together.”
No one else seemed to understand the world they were living in, and outsiders constantly asked about Monica Lewinsky. “The last thing you wanted to do was go out with someone else who’d be like, ‘Is it true? Is it true?’ ” Morrison says.
When the administration ended in 2001, the group splintered. Some staffers, including Morrison, moved to New York to work at Clinton’s new office in Harlem. Alberg and others stayed in Washington.
Morrison returned monthly to visit her family in Arlington. On each trip, she’d schedule time with Alberg, just to catch up over brunch or dinner. Alberg did the same when he went home to see his family in Long Island, taking the train into the city to go out with Morrison.
“It was just so easy to be with her,” Alberg says. “There wasn’t any stress. And we were best friends. I don’t think either of us were thinking about it [romantically].”
In 2004, Alberg’s mother had a stroke and his visits increased. For six months, it seemed she was on the mend. But after a second stroke, she passed away.
“I relied on Mary emotionally for just about everything. I honestly don’t think I could’ve gotten through that time if it hadn’t been for her,” Alberg says. “That’s when I started to realize, ‘Hey, this should be something more.’ ”
Alberg had put his career on hold to care for his mom, and he saw less of Morrison in 2005 as he focused on his job at a law firm and rebuilt his life in Washington. By 2006, they resumed their twice-monthly visits. Both continued to date other people, but by the next year Morrison realized she had feelings for Alberg. “I always wished he was around,” she says.
She worried about telling Alberg. “It was that stupid cliche,” she says. “We really didn’t want to ruin our friendship.”
But in 2008, she grabbed his hand. Soon they were holding hands everywhere they went and occasionally trading chaste kisses, although it rarely went any further. “Then we were like, ‘Okay, what are we doing?’ ” she says.
“So we started to have the talk,” continues Alberg, now 42. “I thought, well, this is either going to work or we’re never going to be friends again.”
They knew so much about each other and had shared so much history that casual dating was not an option. “We knew if we started dating, we’d probably end up getting married,” Morrison says. “And I think we both probably struggled with [that].”
At Obama’s inaugural ball that January, friends saw them holding hands and asked what was happening, but the two still hadn’t defined the relationship. “In my mind, I was like, ‘Well, this is great. I kinda like it the way it is — we’re friends, we have benefits,’ ” Alberg says. “But it wasn’t a hookup, either. We were best friends.”
Later that year, as they sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, they came to the conclusion that, practically speaking, they were already dating. It was just a matter of announcing it. They quickly did, and by the middle of 2009, their conversations turned to marriage.
Alberg says he never doubted the relationship but wasn’t sure he was ready for the next step. But by the next year, he decided it was time. “There isn’t anybody that I’ve ever felt this way about. There isn’t anybody I’m so comfortable with. There isn’t anybody else I can see spending the rest of my life with,” he says.
Morrison was expecting a proposal in Washington, so last Super Bowl weekend Alberg went to her home in New York. As she sat in sweatpants and glasses, he pulled out a ring. A week later, he took her to the Lincoln Memorial and proposed again, this time with her grandmother’s diamond.
“You’re never gonna find two people who had such a nontraditional love affair,” says Morrison, now 38, “but who really knew each other before they got married.”
On Nov. 5, the two wed at Sixth and I Synagogue in an interfaith ceremony conducted by an Episcopal priest and a rabbi. Morrison wiped tears from her eyes as they exchanged vows and read their ketubah, a Jewish marriage contract.
resource:http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/weddings/on-love-youre-never-gonna-find-two-people-who-had-such-a-nontraditional-love-affair/2011/11/23/gIQASWBFLO_story.html