It is six degrees outside on a blustery winter day, and I've been standing for hours on the footbridge across the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass. I'm waiting for my fiancé, Rob, to propose - for the second time.

The first time he asked it was 95 degrees last June, and I was in Capri pants on this same bridge.

No, I hadn't rejected Rob's initial proposal. We are merely one of the latest reality TV couples to share - or in this case reenact - an intimate moment in front of several million Americans.

I wasn't on "The Bachelorette," nor was I one of Joe Millionaire's gal pals. And thankfully, Rob and I will not be getting "Married by America."

However, I got a small taste of how reality shows work when Rob and I agreed to be a part of ABC Family's "Will You Marry Me?"last month. It airs again this Sunday, March 30.

The show is hosted by Ali Landry (of Doritos commercial fame) and her boyfriend, Mario Lopez, better-known as A.C. Slater on "Saved by the Bell."

Rob and I were asked to be on the show because the producers heard of our story through a publicist for Classmates.com, a high school reunion website. We met in Ohio in the fifth grade and re-connected 14 years later in Boston on Classmates.com.

When we got the call to appear on the show, we were a bit skeptical at first.

Rob and I had watched in horror as Brooke of "The Bachelor" was whisked away in a limo sobbing her eyes out after Aaron rejected her. Even worse, we had seen the name-calling and catty comments made about other reality-show contestants in online chatrooms.

Did we want this kind of exposure? Would the show be accurate? Would they dig into our past and expose things we would not want aired on TV?

More important, could we get A.C. Slater to say our names on TV with the same enthusiasm he once reserved for Kelly Kapowski?

The show's premise was to spotlight five couples and the proposals. Then viewers could vote for the winning couple online. If we won, we would have our wedding and honeymoon paid for. All of this seemed as shallow as picking the homecoming court at a high-school prom. And we dreaded the idea of being married in front of several million people.

So we said, "No, thanks."

But the producers sweetened the deal. Forget the on-air wedding, they said. Just tell us your proposal story and we'll pay you $1,000, plus "other perks." With a real wedding to plan and both of us in graduate school, we thought, "Why not?"

So there I was, waiting for my fiancé to pop the question - again - in the freezing cold. We had met the film crew at 9 a.m. on a Saturday outside Anna's Taqueria - our favorite burrito place - in Cambridge, for the first day of shooting.

Rob's original proposal had been a scavenger hunt, with the "clues" scattered around our favorite Boston haunts. The second clue had been at Anna's Taqueria. (The first clue had been left at our gym, but the producers could not get permission to film there, so they cut it out.)

The first day's shoot took 12 hours: shots of Rob walking, me walking, Rob planting the clues, me finding the clues. And there was an unfortunate encounter with a hungry squirrel. On the Boston Common, the director spotted some squirrels running around the park and asked us to feed them.

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