The Dahlgren Chapel at Georgetown University, where the ceremony will be held.

As anyone who has planned a wedding can tell you, you can’t plan much until you choose a venue. The mantra of real-estate agents certainly applies to wedding planning: It’s all about location, location, location. Randy and I are not Washington natives, but we’ve both lived here several years and consider it our home. We wanted to have our wedding close to home, both for convenience and because it felt right to get married where we met and fell in love.

We began our search for a wedding venue shortly after our engagement last summer. Aided by the recommendations of local bridal magazines and Web sites, Randy and I began visiting reception venue after reception venue in search of our perfect location.

We quickly found, however, that without a sky-high budget, there’s no such thing as perfection. We toured ornate ballrooms that would’ve made for a beautiful evening (and a lot of debt), venues with fabulous views but not enough space for our guests, a charming Colonial estate that unfortunately served Colonial-era food (rabbit? really?), and lovely gardens that would’ve left us out of luck—or in need of a tent—if it rained. 

In the vast galaxy of cyberspace, there’s a tiny, very chatty planet called TheKnot.com. Heralded as “the Internet’s most-trafficked one-stop wedding-planning solution,” it was the first wedding Web site I browsed when I got engaged. Initially, I visited it to get a sense of the reception venues available in Washington. From there, I stumbled on the Knot message boards and was quickly sucked into a world that teeters precariously between helpful forum and venue for high drama.

Note: Please welcome Erin, our latest Bridal Party blogger. She’ll be posting every Tuesday.

In life and especially in relationships, there’s a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time. I was always confident that I’d meet my future spouse in college. That was the way it had worked for a lot of people I knew in the Midwestern town where I grew up, and it seemed perfect: have a shared alma mater, a few fun years together post-graduation, and a beautiful wedding at age 26 or 27.

The timing wasn’t right for me, though. I never really clicked with anyone in college, and my twenties were full of fun, short, and mostly disappointing relationships. I finally met my fiancé through a mutual friend at age 29. Turns out, he had gone to college with me, but even though we had some friends in common, we’d never met. Our paths crossed for the first time at a happy hour on Capitol Hill in the summer of 2007. It was a warm August night, and I had very little on my mind beyond beer and Buffalo wings. I definitely had no idea that the man I was going to marry was the big guy with the scruffy beard who had just sat down next to me.