John Cheese

A Plea for Help

I’m running on zero hours of sleep. I went to bed at 2am, and as I type this, it’s not quite 6am … which means I laid in bed for almost four hours, just tossing and turning and worrying until I thought I was going to throw up. My financée went to bed in tears. We both need a desperate break from the stress. Hopefully the majority of this audience is old enough to understand this because you can actually help. And right now, I’m swallowing some pride and asking for it.

See, last year, I wrote an article that was seen by over a million people, in which I proposed to my girlfriend: (http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-you-know-its-time-to-get-married/). She said “yes.” Since then, we’ve been able to save back a little money here and there to buy some of the basics for the wedding. For instance, I have my suit — she has her dress and veil. We have people set up for the cake. The actual place is booked. We have a large part of the whole thing covered.

However (that word is what’s causing me to not sleep before starting an 18 hour work day), there are some problems that we are just flat-out unable to solve. The wedding is taking place in her home town, which is about 12 hours from where we live. Getting us and my three children there (they are all in the wedding) is going to cost us right around a thousand dollars, counting hotel, food, rental car, and parade of live giraffes to announce our arrival (for those who don’t know me, that’s a joke — I joke a lot when I’m nervous). Then we’re talking an insane $1500 for catering, and that’s by far the cheapest we’ve found to feed our guests. And so I don’t drown you out in ridiculous numbers, they all add up to, “Where in the hell are we going to get the rest of this without resorting to armed robbery?” We don’t even have our wedding rings picked out yet because what we get depends entirely on how much money we have left after paying for what I’m now calling “ceremonial extortion.”

We’ve been cutting costs left and right with this thing — don’t think we’re one of those couples who enjoys the spectacle or is demanding limousines and a gold statue to commemorate the event. We just want a normal wedding. But before I go on, Google how much the average wedding costs. Though I can save you the trip: It’s $25,000. We don’t want ours to be anywhere near that figure, and it won’t be. However (sorry, there’s that word again), we’re now cutting so many things that when Emily brings up something normal that every other couple has at their wedding, I have to immediately shoot it down. So now, I look like (and feel like) the tightass bad guy who’d rather just go to the courthouse, sign some papers, and call it a day. She deserves more than that.

So the situation we’re in right now is that, yes, we’re probably going to have a large chunk of this taken care of on our own. But when we finish paying for just the basics, it’s going to be a stripped down, bare bones ceremony that leaves us with so little money, there’s a good chance we’re not going to have anything left over for rings. And even if we somehow miraculously squeak that out, it’s going to wipe us dry, leaving us with a whole new set of problems: mainly rent and bills for the next several months, followed by Christmas — yay.

I know as well as anyone that times are tight right now. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be in this situation, which is why I’m not expecting anyone to help. But just writing this out makes me feel a little better, and I guess that’s something, right? So what I’m asking is that if you happen to be ridiculously wealthy, or you just have a little extra that you were going to spend on beer anyway, or you grow money in a garden and have some extra that you need to get rid of before it spoils, we could use the help. At the very least, it may help us get the rings, which would be a huge relief for us. At the most optimistic, if enough people pitch in, it could help take care of the rest of the things we haven’t been able to pay for so far (we’ve already spent several thousand dollars that we couldn’t really afford in the first place).

To make it easy, I have a Paypal thing ([info removed] is where you tell it to send the donation). But I do want to stress that if this puts you out, DO NOT send us money. Neither Emily, nor I want to see people denying themselves things for our benefit.

IN RETURN: If we get enough money from this, I will hand my kids a video camera and have them film the behind the scenes stuff, as well as part of the ceremony itself, and I’ll cut together a (hopefully) funny and (possibly) touching video of the actual wedding. Hell, I may do that anyway.

We’re just extremely worried, and the more numbers we hear, the more we’re realizing we don’t have what it takes to make this work. We’re tired of losing sleep over this, and we’re tired of stress headaches.

If you can help, the Paypal info is: [info removed]