Bride Goes Through with Lavish Wedding, Admits It Was 'Strictly a Ploy' to Set Up Her Maid of Honor (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• Erin Kulaga shared a TikTok joking that her wedding was meant to set up her maid of honor and best man

• Hannah Jacobson and David Wackrow began talking every day after meeting

• The couple dated long-distance before Wackrow moved to Denver

Most weddings are about celebrating one love story — but for Erin Kulaga, hers quietly sparked a second.

“It worked perfectly,” Kulaga says, reflecting on her master plan to set up her maid of honor with her husband's best man. After meeting at the wedding, she says the pair never stopped talking.

The moment first caught attention in a short TikTok , where Kulaga joked that the entire event had been part of a bigger plan. "My wedding was strictly a ploy to get my maid of honor and my best man together. I spent $50 billion so that they would fall in love — and they did," she said in the video. But behind the humor was something real: a connection she had hoped for long before the two ever met.

“I obviously got married for real,” she tells PEOPLE, adding that while the wedding wasn’t actually just a setup, the idea had crossed her mind early on.

Before the introduction, Kulaga had already started planting the idea, telling David Wackrow, “I have this friend. I think you’d really like her,” though he didn’t take it seriously at first.

That changed when he finally met Hannah Jacobson, Kulaga’s best friend, and the dynamic was immediately clear. “And then they met and I was like, look at this,” Kulaga recalls.

Their first conversation didn’t exactly go smoothly — at least not in the way people might expect. “I was a big yapper. I wouldn’t shut up because I was just nervous,” Wackrow admits to PEOPLE.

Jacobson remembers it the same way, laughing at how little she got to say. “He talked the entire time. I don’t think I said words,” she says, though she adds it was still a good conversation.

In the days leading up to the wedding, they found themselves talking more and more. Planning a joint bachelor-bachelorette trip gave them a reason to stay in touch, and the conversations quickly became a daily habit.

“We just haven’t stopped talking,” Jacobson tells PEOPLE, noting that they’ve stayed in contact every day since that trip.

Within a few months, their connection turned into something more serious. They started dating about three months after meeting, even though they were living in different cities at the time.

“[It was] three months until we started dating, but talking every day before that,” Wackrow says.

For Jacobson, those early days were defined by long, easy conversations that quickly became part of her routine. “I would come home from work, make dinner and immediately go FaceTime David,” she says.

Wackrow says the connection felt natural from the start. “It felt very authentic talking to her. There was no real lulls in conversation,” he says.

After a year of long distance, the relationship reached a turning point. Wackrow moved to Colorado to be closer to Jacobson, ending the distance that had defined their first year together.

For Kulaga, watching it all play out has been both exciting and a little nerve-wracking. “I felt so responsible,” she says, admitting she worried about what would happen if it didn’t work out.

Now, she’s happy with the outcome — and her matchmaking track record. “I’m really one for one,” she adds.

The response to the TikTok only reinforced how much the story resonated. “Everyone’s like, ‘Set me up next,’ ” Jacobson says, noting how many people related to the idea.

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For Wackrow, part of the appeal is how the relationship started. “It was more of an organic kind of thing,” he says.

Looking back, Kulaga says her instinct came down to knowing both of them well. “There’s no way they can’t at least get along,” she says of her thought process before setting them up.

Nearly two years later, the couple is still together — and for Kulaga, it’s proof that sometimes a wedding can do more than celebrate a love story — it can start one, too.

Read the original article on People