I guess weddings invariably involve a lot of excitement about what to wear, especially for women. I currently have two potential dresses. Both are beautiful. I’m leaning toward one at the moment because the other looks slightly maternity-like, and with a shotgun wedding like ours, we don’t need any more rumors swirling. Popular opinion (read: my friends and my mom) is split down the middle, which means on Friday, October 2, I’ll probably be spending the evening pouting into a mirror while they hash it out.

John and Sophie discover that the St. Regis Hotel has a terrace that's ideal for weddings.

With our date confirmed and family notified, the next fundamentally important thing to do was find a venue. I’ve heard horror stories about Washington wedding venues being booked years in advance, so we approached this task with some trepidation. Luckily, we were planning a morning wedding, so I hoped it wouldn’t be quite so bad. I had in my mind a small country church, quaint and ancient, with a charming priest, which would naturally be located in downtown DC close to all the restaurants we were considering for a wedding brunch. Turns out there’s no such thing. Who knew?

John and I, who might kindly be described as “secular,” have no local church that we attend and are both lapsed Catholics. In England, you can get married in a church or a registry office, and that’s it (most people opt for churches, and therefore priests are generally more forgiving to sinners like us). In the United States—where you can get married anywhere from a Waffle House to the underpass by South Capitol Street—the options are slightly more complicated.

Sophie (with a friend) tries on a $4,000 gown at a Bride & Groom shoot earlier this year.

Planning a wedding in ten weeks is no joke, particularly when half the people you want to invite live in England. John and I have been taking the whole thing in stages so as not to completely flip out. The first thing we needed to do was pick a day—that way, everyone we expected to fly to DC at a moment’s notice could start booking their tickets. It sounds simple, but throwing an almighty wrench into the works was the fact that we also needed a venue, and somehow the two would have to coordinate. Yikes.

Luckily, we’re not wedding-y people. I’ve been to plenty of weddings—my godmother’s, my friend Sara’s, both my parents—and while they’re very charming (and you get to drink a lot), I always suspected I lacked the wedding gene. I never, ever dreamed of getting married until I met John. My idea of long-term happiness was retiring to Miami with a bunch of girlfriends and becoming The Golden Girls. I even tried on a $4,000 wedding dress at a Washingtonian Bride & Groom shoot this year, hoping to stimulate some nascent bridal urge, but all it did was make me feel like a sequinned cloud. Weddings? Bah humbug.

That said, I had three things I absolutely wanted for ours:

Sophie, our bride-to-be, and her fiance in San Francisco.

Today we introduce you to Sophie, a Washingtonian assistant editor who’s getting married—five weeks from now. Read on in the following weeks for her take on planning a small wedding with guests from all over the world, dealing with legal issues such as getting a green card (Sophie’s from England), and finding, in her words, “a minister who isn’t a former televangelist.”

As Austin Powers, my fellow Brit, might say, allow myself to introduce myself. I’m Sophie, I recently started my new job as an assistant editor at The Washingtonian, and I got engaged at the end of July to John, a really wonderful man whom I met in graduate school. Two years ago, I moved to New York City from London to get my master’s degree in journalism at New York University. Having been held up by visa issues, I arrived two days later than everyone else, jet-lagged, homesick, and completely unused to the 90-degree heat (i.e., miserably sweaty). So I grabbed a seat at the back of the room for my first class in media ethics and tried my best to look invisible while we waited for the class to start. After about two minutes of furtive glances, the guy sitting opposite me (John) stood up and gruffly introduced himself, an act that I later found out took extraordinary effort because he’s rather shy—which also accounted for his gruffness. I was pathetically grateful. My first American friend!