E10 OnLove NUPTIALS L H LINDBERG PHOTOGRAPHY
Jess McCann & Erik Ballagh
Jess McCann, 33, is a dating coach and the author of “You Lost Him at Hello: A Saleswoman’s Secrets to Closing the Deal With Any Guy You Want.” Erik Ballagh, 30, is an engineer. They live in Falls Church.
Wedding date: Sept. 11
Location: Kingsmill Resort, Williamsburg Guests: 180
How they met: After penning a dating book that advocates using sales techniques to land a man, Jess found herself fielding questions about her own relationship status (single). She resolved to start taking her own advice. In September 2008, she and a pal went to Arlington’s Liberty Tavern for happy hour. At the next table: Erik and his friends. Jess told her friend to spark a conversation by asking for a menu.
The proposal: Last December, the couple were in the car about to leave home for a holiday party when Erik went back inside to get his wallet. He took so long that Jess went in after him — and found flowers, candles and Erik on one knee. The holiday party? It was actually an engagement party.
The wedding: Jess wanted a destination wedding. Erik didn’t. So they compromised with Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, where they married outdoors, by the James River. The romantic reception’s look focused on layers of white and lots of texture, from Jess’s flowing organza gown to fluffy peonies and white umbrellas for the guests.
The honeymoon: The newlyweds split 10 days in Hawaii between the islands of Maui and the more secluded Lanai. — Amanda McGrath
KLMNO
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KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST MAKING EVERY MOMENT COUNT: Candice Fisher and Gordon Dexter both have cystic fibrosis, an incurable disease that causes lung and digestive problems. The next year, she acquiesced to her
by Ellen McCarthy and Emily Yahr
Candice Fisher didn’t want to be in
Texas for her freshman year of college. Fiercely independent, she had been un- der close supervision for most of her young life; by 18, she’d had enough. It was time, she felt, to strike out for a dif- ferent coast. But she’d made a bargain with her
grandmother: one year at the University of Texas at San Antonio and, after that, “all bets are off.” It wasn’t that she didn’t understand
her grandmother’s worry — her vigi- lance had kept Fisher alive. Fisher and her two siblings moved in with their grandparents once it became clear that their mother, who struggled with drug and alcohol problems, couldn’t properly care for them.
When Fisher caught pneumonia at
age 6, her grandmother, a nurse, began to think there was something more seri- ous going on. She pushed for tests that revealed Fisher had cystic fibrosis, an incurable genetic disease that causes se- vere lung and digestive problems. In junior high, Fisher was put on a list for a lung transplant. By age 15, she was missing as much school as she was at- tending; by 17, her hospital visits stretched to months at a time. But in March of her junior year, when
RMN PHOTOGRAPHY
Ria Serapio & Jonathan Namata
Ria Serapio, 26, is a finance manager. Jonathan Namata, 27, is a network systems engineer. They live in Alexandria.
Wedding date: Sept. 18
Location: St. Raymond of Penafort Roman Catholic Church, Springfield; Holiday Inn, Alexandria
Guests: 215
How they met: In 1999, Jonathan was a junior and Ria a sophomore at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria. They struck up a friendship on the debate team. Four years later, their friendship turned romantic after a date to the circus, where they shared a funnel cake.
The proposal: On Columbus Day of last year, Jonathan invited Ria to join him for a hike in the Bull Run Mountains Conservancy. Then Jonathan, a geocaching aficionado, input coordinates into his hand-held GPS to direct them to a scenic overlook on the Ridge Trail, where he proposed.
The wedding: The couple drew inspiration from their favorite movie, “The Princess Bride,” to create a fairy-tale vibe for their church ceremony. They followed it with an “Old Hollywood” reception that featured a red carpet, a popcorn-and-snack bar, and “showcase performances” from friends and family, including a string quartet, a ballroom tango danced by an aunt and uncle, and a song-and-dance medley performed by the “Namata Glee Club” (otherwise known as Jonathan’s cousins).
The honeymoon: Relaxing at the Bucuti Beach Resort in Aruba.
—Amanda McGrath MARRIAGE In a down economy, more prenups and ‘divorce insurance’ by Ellen McCarthy
Money can’t buy love, but our worries about having enough in the bank might be affecting the way we approach it. More couples tying the knot are taking precautions to protect themselves finan- cially. A September survey by the Amer- ican Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that 73 percent of divorce lawyers reported seeing an increase in demand for prenuptial agreements over the past five years. “I have to believe that the recession has had an effect in that people’s finances have been diminished,” says Marlene Eskind Moses, president of the associa- tion and a Nashville lawyer who’s been practicing family law for 30 years. “What they have takes on greater importance.” Moses says she’s seen a big rise in re- quests for prenups among middle-class couples, not just those with substantial assets. Some people want to shield them- selves from taking on a spouse’s debt; oth- ers want to ensure that a pension plan re- mains in their name only. Prenups may be growing more popular,
but Moses says the conversations sur- rounding them are as touchy as ever. “It feels like you’re trying to take away some- thing from somebody, or you think the marriage is already gonna fall apart,” she says, adding that she encourages her cli- ents to think of it as “an estate planning opportunity.” John Logan thinks people should do
even more to limit the financial havoc that can be wreaked by a marriage failure. Logan, a 54-year-old entrepreneur from North Carolina, is the creator of WedLock Divorce Insurance. In 2001 Logan went through what he describes as a “world-class nasty divorce.” “My friends called it ‘The War of the Lo- gans,’ ” he adds. Adding up his lawyer fees and looking over his bank statements, Logan began to wonder: “Why can’t you protect yourself from this?” Divorce insurance makes sense from a consumer standpoint, he says, because you’re more likely to go through a marital breakup than experi- ence, say, a massive house fire. Logan teamed up with Prime Insurance
Co. to begin selling divorce insurance last month. So far, he says, they’ve signed up
“a handful” of policy owners. It works like life insurance in that customers choose how large a policy they want and pay ev- ery month based on that amount. (A cal- culator on the WedLock Web site can come up with a personalized estimate on the cost of a potential divorce, including expenses like moving, child care, counsel- ing and furnishing a new household. The policies purchased so far, he says, range from $99 to $1,073 per month.) Customers must be policyholders for at least 36 months before submitting a claim (evidence of divorce) to ensure that peo- ple don’t enroll with WedLock knowing they’re on the fast track to splitsville. Logan says his company is “not promot- ing divorce.” He hopes eventually to offer a benefit payout to those couples who make it to their 25th anniversary. “We would much rather pay out the claim to people who have a successful marriage,” he says. Logan, incidentally, is engaged to be re- married. Though he believes this one will last, he did become a WedLock customer. Logan says he and his fiancee bought pol- icies for each other. Divorce isn’t a big concern, however, for
the growing number of Americans put- ting off marriage altogether. In 2000, 34.5 percent of 25-to-34-year-olds had never married; by 2009, that number jumped to 46.3 percent, according to a recent Census report.
Sociologists and marriage advocates point out that married people fare better economically than their single counter- parts; however, that message may not be convincing to couples facing the steep costs of elaborate weddings in a time of economic turmoil. Although marriage rates have dropped, more people are choosing to live together. Census takers found that the number of unmarried couples who shared a home rose 13 percent in the past year alone. And that, Moses says, explains the emergence and growing popularity of what she calls a “cohabitation agreement.” These legally binding documents can cover everything from real estate agreements to “who takes out the garbage to the frequency of sex or not gaining weight.” And that seems perfect for a timewhen “for richer or poorer” seems too much to promise.
mccarthye@washpost.com
doctors announced they’d found a set of lungs for her, Fisher told them she didn’t want them. “I was more or less in denial,” she says. “When you have CF you feel so crappy all the time. . . . You just kinda get to the point where it’s nor- mal, so you don’t really see this as a pro- gression down the road.” Her grandmother persuaded her to
have the surgery and stayed with her in Dallas during the six-month recovery. Just before the operation, Fisher lost some of her hearing due to a complica- tion with medication; a seizure after the surgery left her in a coma for a week. But her body soon accepted the healthy new lungs.
grandmother’s request that she stay nearby a little while longer. But Fisher wasn’t happy at UT and spent much of her time researching East Coast schools and blogging about day-to-day life after the transplant. In January 2005, after linking her page to a network of sites maintained by people with cystic fibro- sis, Fisher began trading messages with another blogger, Gordon Dexter. Dexter was a freshman computer sci- ence major at Philadelphia’s Drexel Uni- versity. His cystic fibrosis had been diag-
fit” — took a side trip to Dexter’s home town outside Harrisburg. Walking up to the front door of his family home, she had a moment of pan- ic. “I was like, ‘What the hell am I do- ing?’ ” she recalls. “ ‘This is so stupid.’ ” But Dexter looked just as he had in photos he’d sent her and, after a long chat with his dad and stepmother, they went off for a walk on their own. “Basically, when we met in real life it was almost exactly like meeting online, in terms of how it went between us,” Dexter says. “It was a fun conversation. I
“I can’t imagine anything better than this”
Candice Fisher & Gordon Dexter
nosed when he was a 2-year-old and he lost his mother to breast cancer when he was 10. He and Fisher began instant messaging every day, usually about their classes and what they were watching on TV, but sometimes about life with CF. For Valentine’s Day he sent her a “ner- dy romantic T-shirt” featuring a com- puter-coding pun. Though it often seemed surreal to Fisher that she was becoming involved with someone through the Internet, the intimacy of their exchanges made it clear that they were more than friends. As a history major, she’d focused much of her college search on Pennsyl- vania, entranced by the thought of studying close to Gettysburg. That June, Fisher traveled to the state to visit sever- al campuses and without telling her grandparents — who would’ve “had a
would say something jokingly to annoy her and she would poke me. Online it would have been a virtual poke and in person it was actually poking.” Three days and one first kiss later, she
left Pennsylvania but was optimistic that they’d be back together by the end of the summer.
Fisher was accepted to Drexel and
that August, her grandmother reluc- tantly packed her things into a pickup truck and drove East. She and Dexter both worried the rela- tionship wouldn’t survive the transi- tion. “It’s a little bit different to talk to somebody for an hour or two online than to go stay with them for an hour or two,” she says. “But after a few weeks, things settled out and it really just worked.”
By spring semester of their senior
year, they’d adopted a cat and began to talk about the future. “I knew at that point I had feelings for him — very deep feelings,” says Fisher, now 24. “I found it hard not to see the long term.” At the time of her transplant, doctors told Fisher that she could expect to get about five years out of her new lungs. It’s been seven, and she’s still in good health. Dexter has yet to undergo a transplant, though he knows it’s likely to happen eventually. In some ways, he says, being with Fisher makes that thought — and life as it is today — a little easier. “She’s definitely very understanding and helpful. If I need to stop walking and cough, it doesn’t bother her,” says Dexter, 25. “And she’s very good at guilt- ing me into doing my treatment regi- men.” Just before Valentine’s Day 2009, he proposed. They moved to Columbia that June when Dexter landed a job as a cy- bersecurity engineer with a government contractor. The next month they quietly married on a New Jersey beach so that Fisher would be covered under Dexter’s health insurance, and they began to plan a wedding ceremony. On Oct. 10 — a date chosen, he says, because “10-10-10 is a binary and I’m a huge nerd” — they exchanged vows be- fore 50 guests at Woodlawn Manor in Sandy Spring. Under a cloudless sky, each promised the other “to laugh with you when times are good and suffer with you when they are bad.” Occasionally Fisher says she will hear about a couple getting married in their mid-20s, and think, “Oh my God. They’re so young. What the hell are they doing?” Then she remembers that she and Dexter are that age. “But we’ve both been through so much, and you never really know. I just don’t want to lose the time I have with him by saying, ‘Well, there could be so much more out there.’ I’m perfectly happy with him,” she says. “I can’t imagine anything better than this.”
mccarthye@washpost.com yahre@washpost.com
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