Hanging from the back of her bedroom door on Garnett Street, in ivory with a corseted back, is Rosie Hunter-Kilmer’s wedding dress. She’s only tried it on once since it arrived, and it’s still wrapped in plastic. “Sometimes I’ll lift it up and look at it,” she says. “I don’t want anyone else to see it.”
The Music senior bought it the day she found it, after the sales clerk offered her a 15 percent discount. “The sample wasn’t in the right color, and it wasn’t in the right size,” Hunter-Kilmer says. “But it fit the budget and it was the dress I wanted, pretty much.”
Under her futon are two boxes of 200 invitations, which she ordered with a coupon. Though she doesn’t have a job lined up after she graduates, her plans are set for the summer: Her fiancé, Andrew Hill, Weinberg and Music alumnus ’06, is in law school at the College of William and Mary; when they marry in June, she will join him in Williamsburg, Va. They will have been together more than six years, but at 21 and 23 years old and still in school, they are saving carefully.
To cut spending, the couple is making all their own arrangements. “I don’t want to pay a planner,” Hunter-Kilmer says. The wedding is set for June 28, at a church near Ryan Field, a week after Commencement, to reduce family travel. There will be no band at the reception; guests will dance to a playlist amplified by a “cheap” sound system. “We don’t want to spend money on something that we can’t actually keep,” Hunter-Kilmer says.
Planning a wedding while 1,000 miles apart isn’t easy, but Hunter-Kilmer says she and her groom are used to the distance. They started dating her sophomore year of high school when he was about to graduate and go away to Northwestern; later, he proposed beside the reflecting pool in Washington, D.C., the night before she left without him for her junior year. They have survived with frequent visits, calls, e-mails and “love letters,” which Hunter-Kilmer keeps in a manila envelope to one day show their kids. The future husband and wife talk on the phone every night at 9, because that’s when minutes are free on their cell phone plans. Tonight, for Valentine’s Day, they will probably do more of the same. “It kind of feels like all the money we have is both of ours,” Hunter-Kilmer says. “We’re both kind of anti-spending a lot of money on that stuff.”
So far, the bride-to-be has rather calmly balanced classes, job hunting and wedding planning. “I’m just at a point in my life where a lot of big changes are happening. So this is definitely one of the things that’s weighing on my mind, but it gets shoved out of my head a lot of the time,” she says. “I think if it gets to be May and I still don’t have a job, I might start to get a little stressed out about this.”
