Ball State alumni compete for 'Ultimate Wedding'

After seven years of dating long distance, two Ball State alumni are hoping to make their wedding a spectacular one.

Theo Plothe and Amber Buck have four weeks to garner support through online voting in the $100,000 Ultimate Wedding contest by Crate & Barrel.

They met in 2004 as graduate students in the English department.

Five weeks after they started dating, Plothe went to Japan for two years to work on a graduate project in linguistics.

"It was trial by fire," Buck said. "If we could do that, we could do anything."

The couple will get married Sept. 10 in Fort Wayne. They're planning the wedding as if there was no such contest, but Plothe said it will only make the long-awaited ceremony that much better.

"Now we could have $100,000 to do what we were going to do, just bigger and better," he said.

The couple is hovering around No. 20 in the contest. If they make the top 15, they could earn a consolation prize of $1,500. The contest closes April 30.

The couple met at a conference hosted by the English department in which Plothe was the chairman and Buck was a presenter.

They had their first date a week later at a former Village restaurant called Roly Poly, bonding over vegan sandwiches.

"I thought, ‘Wow, who's that good-looking girl over there?'" Plothe said. "She didn't throw her drink at me, so I thought I was OK."

The couple's relationship had to move to the next level pretty quickly before he went overseas. They visited each other twice during the two years Plothe studied in Japan.

They made their relationship work by using Skype, iChat and lots of cellphone minutes, Plothe said.

Buck is a doctoral candidate in English and Writing Studies at the University of Illinois, and Plothe is studying communications at Northern Illinois. They live 175 miles apart, and it's the closest they've been in seven years — besides when they travel.

"Other people want stuff, and not that there's anything wrong with that, but that's not us," Plothe said. "I found in my life that when I travel overseas, I learn more about myself than I do about that country.

"I don't want to say it makes you a more interesting person, but it does. That's just what we value."

The couple got engaged in December 2009 outside the Taj Mahal. They had traveled to Agra, India, for a friend's wedding, and Plothe decided it was the perfect place to pop the question.

The couple has visited 25 countries. Their save-the-dates look like boarding passes, and the seating announcements will look like passports.

Buck said since they're still finishing their degrees, it might be a year or more before they can finally move in together.

"We know eventually we'll be together," she said. "One thing we decided is it has to be a big city with a nice airport."

Where to vote:

ultimateweddingcontest.com/entry/149250

Check them out online:

Email: tnagoglobal@gmail.com

Twitter: @tnagoglobal

YouTube: youtube.com/user/tnagoglobal

Facebook: facebook.com/TheoandAmber

Web: tnagoglobal.blogspot.com

The proposal video: