Cherraye & Robert are both from Groton, CT.  Cherraye tells their story: In the last semester of our senior year, Robert up and decides to join the Navy. I was a very successfull R.O.T.C cadet so I didn’t object to his decision but I was a bit concerned because I knew what it could do to our relationship. So, we decided to get married in August shortly after my 18th birthday (Robert was already 18). On August 23, 2003 we got married in my church. McDonald’s (where I worked) “paid” for the wedding. IT WAS TERRIBLE!!! I hadn’t really met his mother and sister until three months prior to the wedding and they were “interesting” people. His mother has been married four times and made me feel that that somehow deemed her worthy of telling me what was nice or what was tacky when it came down to planning my wedding. His sister (whom he put in my bridal party himself), was extremely picky about the bridesmaide dresses. It didn’t feel like the wedding was mine at all, but theirs. We didn’t even know where the wedding would be at until the week of the wedding when suddenly the men’s retreat at my church just so happened to get be cancelled. We didn’t get the marriage license until the day before the wedding about five minutes before the courthouse closed. The photographer was a friend of my mother’s who used a camera that she didn’t really know how to operate so EVERY SINGLE PICTURE OF THE WEDDING CAME BACK OUT OF FOCUS!!! So we have NO PICTURES. The wedding cake came from Wal-Mart which was too small to allow everyone to get a piece and there were only about 30 people there. I cried on the way down the isle!!! We droved down to Orlando for a day as our honeymoon and then two weeks later, Robert went off to boot camp. Our marriage has been rocky since the week of the wedding (the wedding planning, the 6 months apart after the wedding for basic training, two deployments and countless underways). Many people that we have met these past 4 years of marriage are all in the military and the time has now come to part. Many don’t know yet where they will be re-stationed to and others will be leaving the country. We’d always planned to have a second wedding (a real wedding) for our 5th anniversary which would be August 23, 2008, but by then everyone would be separated. Paying for a second wedding is still not insight yet and it really hurts that we have nothing to gaze back on in memory of our fisrt wedding. I don’t regret getting married, I just wish I didn’t have a wedding (at least not that wedding). Our families feuded a bit during the whole planning and we don’t really have a relationship which each other now. I haven’t been back to visit Tallahassee, FL (where we are from and where our family it located) in two years. We would LOVE to have this second chance to have this second wedding in honor of the time our marriage has survived and what it has survived and in honor of our new family and friends that we have.