Four years ago, Rob Mariano was working construction in his native Boston. Amber Brkich from tiny Beaver, Pa., was a recent college grad working as an administrative assistant.
Then came CBS’ reality series “Survivor,” then “Survivor: All-Stars” (where they met and fell in love and she won the $1 million prize) and later, “Amazing Race.”
So it’s probably no surprise that the couple’s wedding has become a two-hour reality special, “Rob and Amber Get Married” (9 tonight).
The couple married April 16 at Paradise Island in the Bahamas. “We make a good team” on and off TV, Mariano says, though he concedes that their “win-at-all-costs mentality” on “Race” – they finished second – rubbed some viewers the wrong way.
The decision to televise the wedding wasn’t hard, Brkich says. “If anybody came up to any girl and said, ‘We’ll give you not only the wedding of your dreams, but also give you the best wedding planner in the world (Colin Cowie) and the best backdrop in the world,’ that’s pretty hard to turn down.”
Brkich said the couple had “pretty much 100 percent say” in planning the wedding, including the location. The couple won’t discuss specifics but shared a few tidbits: For their bachelor and bachelorette parties, he went deep-sea fishing, and she swam with dolphins. There were about 250 guests. The newlyweds wrote their own vows.
So what’s next for Rob and Amber? “We have a couple of tricks up our sleeve that we can’t talk about,” Mariano says. For now, “I’m just looking forward to married life: sharing a house, learning to be together and doing house chores like mowing the grass and cooking,” Brkich says. The couple now lives on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
One thing they don’t want to do anytime soon is travel. They still haven’t taken the trips they won on “Amazing Race.”
Says Mariano: “We’ve traveled so much that a vacation now is three days at home.”
Cesar G. Soriano, USA TODAY
