I would fully understand if you read that headline and thought, “what could the positive impact of this possibly be?” Because honestly if you would have told me that I would be writing those words this time last year I would have asked the same question. Covid-19 drastically changed a lot about our world, our culture, our plans, and our weddings. While there is a lot of hurt and tears that comes with planning a pandemic wedding, I think it would be a miss to not look at the bright side of the way that wedding culture has shifted over the last year.
I got married on May 15th, 2020 and as you can guess, it was one of the hardest processes of my life. It was around this time last year that we were having to make some of the hardest concrete decisions regarding our wedding. After months of planning and putting together our dream wedding, we had to decide to scrap all of it and start from scratch. If you’re a Covid bride, I’m sure you know what I was feeling. It’s basically like trying to tell the little girl inside of you to give up her dreams and pick a new dream. You find yourself daily having to wrestle with the process of mourning the plans that you had made and trying to fight for joy and excitement over the new plans that you are developing. You know that you’re excited to be marrying your person, but it doesn’t take away the sting that comes with grieving months of hard work, and years of envisioning what your wedding day would look and feel like.
But after a year full of processing, emotional highs/lows, and pangs of retrospective sadness but also pangs of retrospective joys at how our day turned out I wanted to write about how Covid-19 impacted our wedding for the better! If you’re a bride who is currently in the season of life where you’re trying to navigate wedding planning in unprecedented circumstances, I want you to hear that there are truly positive things that come with planning your wedding in times like these! That some of the changes that were made were truly a gift, and that if I had to do it again, I don’t know if I would’ve done it too differently. Here are some of the positive impacts that Covid-19 has made on weddings.
It Introduced the Intimate Ceremony and Delayed Celebration
Sometimes in the midst of all of the cultural norms that surround weddings, we lose sight of the fact that our wedding day is truly about marrying the love of our lives. There is something truly beautiful about getting to have a ceremony that is intimate and is a shared moment between you and your future spouse and your immediate family or absolute closest friends. When the pressures of celebrating with hundreds of people fades away, you just get to focus on the one that you love and you get to bask in the support of your closest community. This is also a sweet opportunity to pick the gorgeous backdrop, get married at the beach instead of the church sanctuary, plan the destination wedding, pick a mountaintop to get married on! Basically, I’m saying, do the crazy thing! Maybe it’s your plan B dream, but it’s possible that the pandemic is opening up the possibility to make it the plan A! With so many people doing ceremonies and pushing back their celebration with extended family and friends, this is becoming a more viable option to still have the big party you were planning on, while still getting to enjoy the intimacy and flexibility of a more private ceremony!
You Can Refocus the Budget
As you can imagine, paying for 20ish people to eat dinner is a lot more affordable than paying for 200. So maybe you use this as an opportunity to do it big on cocktail hour appetizers, dinner, drinks, and dessert! We’ve seen some really beautiful spreads that have come out of covid weddings since you’re able to spend a little more money on your people! I would also highly recommend using the new budget to up your florals and finding decorations that you’re really excited about! Pictures from an intimate ceremony are incredibly beautiful and having flowers and decor that you love will only make those sweeter. Don’t be afraid to go big and make some new decisions that really excite you! For me, it was having our florist still make my dream bouquet and taking our families to one of our favorite restaurants in town after the ceremony. This is obviously something that we couldn’t have done with 200 people, but it was the perfect end to our wedding day!
It Grows Your Ability to be Flexible
Nothing pushed me out of my comfort zone like re-planning our wedding! You’re having to re-make a lot of the decisions you’ve already made and it feels a lot like rolling with the punches. With weddings, you have to plan months in advance. But the problem with covid is that you don’t know what the status of your state and their regulations are going to be months in advance. You learn to hold all of your plans with a loose grip knowing that they may need to be re-planned. While this didn’t feel like a good thing at the time, I look back now and have learned that it truly did grow my character. I learned what things are important to me and worth figuring out how to accomplish safely, and what things are okay to say goodbye to! At first, everything feels like something you can’t let go of, but over time you start to refine what truly matters on your wedding day. This translates well into the rest of life! There will always be things that you’ll have to decide whether or not to prioritize, and you’ll have to make quick decisions and changes. Planning a wedding in the era of covid was obviously incredibly challenging, but after seeing the ways that it grew my flexibility, I know that it will have a positive impact on my life.
You Learn What’s Truly Important
With my Pinterest-style dreams for our wedding stripped away, it allowed for me to focus on the most important part of my wedding – marrying my best friend. It’s so easy to get lost in all of the planning and dreams for how the day is going to look that you forget to include your groom in that dream. With most of that fading away, the one thing that will still be standing is your almost-husband. When you allow yourself to be excited about marrying your person first and foremost, you will reclaim a lot of the excitement that you’ve always had for your wedding! No one is going to take away your ability to get married one way or another, and that is something to be incredibly excited about! Allow yourself to mourn the plans that you have made, but also allow yourself to get excited about the plans that aren’t going anywhere, like who you’re about to marry!
I say all of this with the hope that it will be an encouragement to those of you who are in the thick of wedding planning, but also those of you who will be planning a wedding one day and want to have the correct frame of mind heading into it! I don’t want to understate how hard it is to plan a wedding at this time, but I hope that this puts a positive spin on some of the hard parts of it!
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