My husband and I got engaged on November 19th, 2019, and excitedly planned our wedding for May 16th, 2020. I spent hours upon hours creating lists, making Pinterest boards, calling venues, getting quotes from caterers, and planning everything out to try and make our wedding day as perfect as possible. Then in February COVID-19 started heavily impacting the US, College classes were put online, my job became virtual, and my Fiance was out of work. Everything we were planning on started to crumble and so did I. I didn't know if we would press forward with the wedding or move it. After much discussion and tears, we decided to change our large wedding ceremony into something more intimate. Here are the 5 things I learned about planning my wedding during a pandemic.
1. It's okay to mourn what is lost but keep pressing forward
I spent countless nights crying because of all I felt we had lost due to having to move our wedding. Lots of our friends and family wouldn't be able to come. We lost the deposit on our wedding venue, and my husband lost his job so our initial budget was cut down to nothing. Everything seemed to be turning out the opposite of what we planned.
I kept kicking myself for being so upset about something I had no control over, but I realize now after the fact that it's okay to grieve what is lost.
Allowing myself a few weeks to be sad allowed me to go through the stages of grief, allowing myself to accept everything that was happening and allowed me to be happier with the end result:
1. denial. - I didn't want to think the wedding wouldn't happen the way we originally planned it to be. I didn't want to think we'd lose our deposit or a lot of our income.
2. anger. - I was mad at the world that everything seemed to be happening at what was an important part of my life.
3. bargaining. - I tried to convince myself that by may everything would be over, or we could still do it even though we no longer had the money to do what we originally wanted to do.
4. depression. - I cried nightly every time I thought about the wedding, I wasn't able to start planning something different.
5. acceptance. - I realized that I had no control over what was happening and only had control over myself and how I handled everything and how I pushed forward.
2. Let your Fiance be a point of calm and not frustration.
My Fiance and I fought more planning our wedding than we did at any other point in our marriage. We had conflicting ideas about what we wanted our wedding to look like and who and what we wanted there. I started to get frustrated with him because I felt like I was planning our whole wedding and he wasn't helping as much as I'd like him too and he got frustrated because he felt like he couldn't express his wishes to me because I'd get mad at him for not thinking realistically. It went back and forth like this for months, but once the pandemic hit I realized just how much I appreciated him and his cool head and ability to see things differently than I could.
It's important that while you're planning your wedding to remember why you love your significant other and make sure you keep that love and communication alive even when you're in stressful situations (whether that be planning your wedding or going through a global pandemic). It's important to remember that your significant other is just as invested in your special day as you are, even if their investment and care shows in a different way than yours does. Keep the love alive, and keep the communication open.
3. Don't try to please everyone, it's your day.
A big issue I ran into was changing my wedding to be more intimate with just my and my husband's direct family really riled up and offended many of our friends and extended family. It really hurt me to offend these people and tell them they couldn't be a part of my day and it hurt that they got so offended due to a situation I had little to no control over. Every time one of these situations would flare up my Fiance always made sure to tell me that he loved me and I needed to remember that the day was for us, and not for them.
Remember that your wedding is a day to celebrate you and your significant other and it's okay if it offends some of your relatives how you want to do it because, in the end, your wedding is for you and you SO and nobody else.
4. Just because it's different doesn't mean it's worse.
I'm a big planner and I get anxious when things are unplanned or deviate from what I had originally planned. So when everything about my wedding seemed to deviate from my original plan it really threw me for a loop. I felt like I was lost and had no way to press forward.
After a month of flopping like a fish out of water and hoping everything would just go back to normal, I realized I needed to understand that just because my initial dream wedding wasn't going to happen exactly how I had initially planned it, didn't mean that it was going to be lesser or worse.
5. Remember what's most important.
While I stood in front of my now-husband in the middle of a park with our closest loved ones as we agreed to love each other forever I realized that everything I ever needed at a wedding was there around me. While planning your wedding it's easy to get lost in the fancy lace table cloths and roses of every color, but in the end, it's important to realize what is actually the most important part of getting married, and that's being able to be legally (and for some spiritually) tied to the person who means the most to you in the entire world. I had gotten so lost in my plans and expectations that in a way I'm glad this pandemic ruined what we originally planned because it helped me see what was really important.
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