I DO!: Jenna Colasante and Nick Benitez of Floral Park

They’ve known each other since prekindergarten and dated since 10th grade. On New Year’s Eve, nearly 15 years since they got together, Jenna Colasante and Nick Benitez married as they rang in 2025.

The two had classes together in pre-K, kindergarten and first grade, then met again while attending Floral Park Memorial High School. Colasante said a running joke in her family is that one day she came home from pre-K and told her family at dinner “ ‘There’s a boy in my class who speaks Spanish’ — and that boy was Nick!”

Colasante said the couple attended junior and senior prom together. “After graduation, we went to different schools but stayed together and came home a lot,” said Colasante, 30, of Floral Park, and a special education teacher in Queens with New York City’s District 75.

Benitez, 30, of Bellerose Terrace, said it was an unseasonably hot day in October 2023 when he proposed to Colasante at Old Westbury Gardens, where she was picnicking with friends. “I took the day off work and set up in the garden where they were walking, and she saw me when she came around the corner. I dropped to one knee and asked her, and she thankfully said yes,” said Benitez, an electrician with IBEW Local 3.

They chose New Year’s Eve to celebrate their nuptials. “Since my grandmother passed away, it was a nice reason to get everyone together again,” she said. Her grandmother, Ulina Colasante, of Woodhaven, Queens, died in 2022.

The couple hosted a Champagne-themed wedding at the Lannin in East Meadow on New Year’s Eve with 210 guests.

The night included a special send-off, with guests holding sparklers and the couple running through them. Old-fashioned party favors and a Champagne toast to the couple’s future and to 2025 welcomed the new year.

“We’re big party people,” she said. “We were having the time of our lives.”

Benitez agreed. “Everyone was on the dance floor,” he said. “Even my father was dancing. It was a time and a half.”

Nominate a couple who has gotten married in the past 12 months. Email your love story, in 250 words or less, to lilife@newsday.com, subject line I Do.