A Rare Personal Post: Our Wedding Day, Postponed
94 days.
We have 94 days until our third wedding date. This past Saturday, April 25, 2020, was our original wedding date. The date we planned everything for. The date that was early enough because why wait, but late enough to have time to plan. The date that was in spring. The date where rain would have been my biggest concern. The date where I should have married my J.
He done good, right? Vintage 1920s engagement ring with Asscher cut diamond. Be still my heart.
On March 16, 2020, only about 6 weeks before our wedding date, we decided to move the wedding to June 6, given the shelter in place orders for the Bay Area. We immediately coordinated with all of our vendors, choosing our new date of June 6. We sent a personal email to every single person on the guest list to let them know our plans had changed. We had hopes that 6/6/20 was far enough out. Nope.
On April 3, with a new shelter in place order through at least May 3, we again decided we had to change the date. We started the conversations with our vendors yet again, coordinating a date with very few to choose from. So many couples in our position are doing the same, so our choices were limited. We chose August 1, sent an email to the guests yet again, and again, had high hopes for this date.
On April 25, only 4 days ago, we honored the day that should have been ours. We broke SIP orders and took a drive out of the county. We picnicked at a deserted park for about 20 minutes and then headed home. We arrived at home to a surprise on the front porch - friends put together a celebration corner! We got a flower delivery: a bouquet and boutonniere! We did a toast with our guests over Zoom! We got a fancy dinner delivery! We read Advice & Wishes our friends and families had sent over, cried, cried some more, talked, smiled, cried some more, never had the dance party we intended to have, and fell asleep promptly at 10pm as two 40-somethings usually do. This day was as great as it could be, not hugging family & friends, not seeing everyone’s faces IRL, but it was not the day we imagined. I promise, we would have danced until 11pm and then continued after if it had been the day we planned. Oh and I would have been more dressed up.
Our friends and families are amazing. Supportive, helpful, thoughtful, considerate, good listeners, incredible people. We are so grateful for everyone.
Yesterday, April 28, 2020, our Governor outlined the stages to reopening. Not once in these briefings has weddings come up, and to our surprise, there it was: Stage 3. As a state, we’re in Stage 1. One. Uno. “Weeks to Stage 2” according to the state government. Stage 3 is limited reopening of things like schools, churches and gatherings like weddings and funerals, with caps on number of people. According to the subtle comment during the briefing, this stage is months away.
94 days is also months away.
What does this mean? How do you plan anything in life when you can only look 7-14 days into the future? How do you reshuffle vendors, reprint invitations, print signs, notify guests, deal with new seasons & weather, and basically replan all the things when every single decision has to be made in total uncertainty?
We have now done this twice. We have postponed our entire wedding TWO TIMES. For those who have had their wedding day, do you remember how much planning it is? Not just booking vendors and signing new contracts, but coordinating people and logistics and timelines? I went from a massive spreadsheet to a massive spreadsheet + 1” binder to a massive spreadsheet + 3” binder. You guys, I had to go to Office Depot twice to get more dividers. Leslie-Knope-Amy-Santiago-style.
More importantly, and the piece that we are struggling with the most, do you remember the emotions? The huge emotions: the pure excitement, the nerves, the joy, the love, the heart-be-still-moments? All of that has been taken from us. We now live in the unknown.
I decided yesterday that I am done being apologetic about wanting our wedding day. If we wanted to elope, we would have. We do not want a Zoom wedding. We do not want to live stream our wedding on Facebook. We do not want to print everyone’s faces and tape them to chairs. We want our loved ones there to witness our nuptials and there is nothing wrong with wanting that.
Postponing a Wedding
Now to the maybe helpful part. If nothing else, maybe another COVID-19 bride will find a helpful hint in here or just someone to vent with. Here are some of the wedding planning tasks that have to be redone or replanned or answered or re-mulled-over:
Straight up worry, stress, disappointment and frustration. I’ve struggled a ton with allowing myself to be sad. In the beginning of this, I still had hope and I think that kept me from just wallowing. It’s ok to feel the feels. It’s ok to be disappointed and sad that your day, as you planned it, can’t happen. The investment we make into this day is huge. Money, emotions, time, logistics - it’s huge. It’s a lot to accept that it has to be redone. It’s hard to get going on things you literally just finished and do them again. I’m sad all the time.
Our wedding is actually pretty simple. Even with more simple details, all the things still exist - we all need to eat, we all want a cocktail, we need somewhere to do that, and we want it captured for posterity. We need a marriage license. We needed a sound permit. We needed wedding insurance, we needed clothes. The basics are pretty much the same because we want a traditional wedding (I’ll admit, I do more than J, but he’s amazing and is open to it all.)
Picking another new date: this ain’t our first rodeo. As great as all of our vendors have been, we are most likely out of dates to choose from in 2020. For a few extremely important personal reasons, we do not want to wait to get married and we cannot wait to get married (also we can’t wait in the good sense too.) That’s why our engagement was just over 5 months.
If your vendors haven’t reached out (and they should have in my opinion) it’s time to reach out to them and figure out how everyone is feeling and what they are thinking. Does your venue have other dates? If so, get a list of them and put a soft hold on all of them until you have a chance to talk to the other vendors.
We did this for all vendors. We asked each one to hold multiple days, first right of refusal, so we could get through talking to everyone.
Pick the new date. Resign all the contracts. Notify all guests as early as you possibly can.
New marriage license. Our current marriage license is only good from 4/25-6/11. We now have to go back to the Solano County Clerk’s office and figure out how to do this. Do we have to pay $100 again? Are they even open? Napa County is not even issuing marriage licenses right now. UPDATE, 4/29: The Solano County Clerk’s office just replied. If we don’t get married before the 6/11 deadline, we will have to pay again. Even though we’re not allowed to gather. They suggested that we get married now and then have a wedding later. This is unacceptable. And this is not over.
Update wedding insurance policy with the new date. Again. Oh and not that this should be a shock to anyone, but wedding insurance policies don’t cover epidemics and pandemics. They know what they’re doing and it’s not cool.
Limits on gatherings. What does this mean? How do you continue to plan a wedding when you have no clue how many people are allowed to gather? 10-person limits won’t cut it. Our immediate families total 34 people.
My dress is in quarantine. The alterations shop downtown is obviously not open. No work has been done on it. Even if we wanted to do a small ceremony (which we don’t #notsorry), I don’t even know if I could get it.
His suit is in limbo. We have no clue if they ever started working on it, if they did then closed up shop, if it’s done sitting somewhere we can’t get to. We have no idea what’s happening and no one has communicated with us once about it.
Our wedding bands are also in various states of who knows what. Another vendor that didn’t get back to us proactively. J finally reached out to the jeweler and my ring is supposedly done and in the city. We can arrange for curbside pickup even though we’re not supposed to drive anywhere. His ring is in a closed shop in PA. No one has touched it since mid-March. This is probably one of the most important things to me and we can’t even get his.
Accommodations. We booked multiple vacation rentals for the night before the wedding for us and various family members. Airbnb has allowed cancellations without penalties, but how long will that last? If our state reopens some things, even in limited capacities, is that when Airbnb will decide that all bookings go back to abiding by the owner’s terms, aka mostly no refunds? We will be out a considerable amount of money if that happens.
We are paid in full to almost every single vendor. Two reasons we did that: 1. We were only 6 weeks out from our wedding day when the SIP orders hit. 2. We were racking up credit card reward points for our honeymoon flights. What happens now? How are our contracts going to be handled by each vendor? Talk about being in limbo. We can’t walk away from that much money and just shrug at it as a loss. Not an option, especially now that my client work has all but dried up. What are we supposed to do? Yes, we will dig into all of this with each vendor, but the question is legit. Unfortunately, no one can answer it for us which I wish for more than anything in a way.
Reprinting our invitations. Again. Like I said, our vendors have been great so far. Minted only charged us 25% of the original cost of the invitations for a date change and reprint. We decided to hold off on reprinting this third time until later in May just in case we couldn’t move forward with 8/1. To add to the stress with tiny little details that are haunting us: they discontinued our design. I’ve been going back and forth with them for a 5 straight days to find out what that means and what happens when we haven’t yet reprinted and they don’t “carry” the design any longer. Still not sure. That said, talk to your vendor and see how they can help.
Bachelor/ette parties and honeymoon travel plans are toast. Is it really a bachelor/ette party if we don’t get to go out and dance? In all seriousness, I’m sad that these have been taken away from us. These once in a lifetime experiences. These celebrations with our friends are canceled. Not to mention the headache of cancelling all reservations, trying to get refunds (no joke, I spent a total of 7.5 hours on hold with Expedia trying to get my flight refunded. Tip: if Expedia or a travel site gives you the runaround, call the airline directly, ask for the refund code, then call Expedia back, give them the code and tell them to call the airline while you are on the phone. It’s your legal right.) Again, this is time that we will never get back. I guess it’s good we have nowhere to go. #sarcasm.
Stress about our guests. We know that our loved ones understand. They’re sad for us and have been super supportive. That doesn’t erase the stress and worry about all those who made travel arrangements, paid for things, took time off of work, etc etc etc. Going back to them for a 3rd date change has hints of embarrassment for me. I feel so bad for doing this to people when all we want to do is have them come to Vallejo, California, to celebrate our day with us.
Ignore the ridiculous newsletters from The Knot and the like. In the beginning of this, wedding sites started sending emails trying to guide all of us lost couples. I was thankful for the help, the feeling of not being alone, but then I read them. One actually said that if we had to change seasons, be sure to change floral arrangements and color palettes to match the season, and even to think about choosing a different dress. Are you kidding me? I planned for a navy & copper wedding and that’s what we’re having. I bought my dress in November. I also can’t imagine trying to start over on that, not even mentioning the cost of doing so. Talk about out of touch.
Speaking of the tiny little details: our guest book has a date printed on the cover: April 25, 2020. Shutterfly was great and sent us a free reprint of the book with the new date, June 6, 2020. We got it the same day we decided to change it to August 1. We now have two identical books with the wrong date. The sheer number of details to attend to, ones I already did, is overwhelming, especially when the joy of working on it all has dwindled.
Some tiny little luck-outs: We didn’t have J’s wedding band engraved with the date and that’s only because it didn’t fit inside. Lucky. We didn’t have J’s suit embroidered with the date because they “can’t embroider numbers.” I won’t even get into the ridiculousness of that, but again, lucky. I didn’t order the signs because I couldn’t decide on a design. Lucky.
All the things that were so much fun between October 11 and mid-February have now lost a little meaning. Getting our marriage license at the County Clerk’s Office was a thrill and should have been a one-time thing. All of the anticipation and excitement of imagining this day and then actually having it are shrouded in sadness and frustration. The time spent attending to every detail (and we’re going fairly simple!) has been redone twice, and now have to be revisited for a third time. That’s so.much.time.
Most of all, I want to walk down the aisle to J, watch his face, give him my vows, hear his, and hold his hands. I want to hug my parents. I want to dance the night away with smiling faces. Some folks probably think I’m being superficial or inconsiderate. I’m not apologizing for wanting my wedding day anymore, remember? I’m tired of feeling guilty for wanting it. So I’m not. I want our day. I love him so much and I want this for us.
Message me if you want tips on how we postponed all the details or if you just want someone to listen. I’m here for ya.
~Megan
