Wedding Bell Blues
Altering getting to the altar amidst COVID-19
Two months before our wedding day, before shelter-in-place took over our day-to-day, when the news had a range of stories, and before social distancing was taken seriously, Matt and I found ourselves at the bakery of our local grocery store asking about wedding cakes.
“You picked . . . an interesting time to come,” the baker said, smiling tightly at us.
Matt and I piped up about our guilt given the circumstances, residual comments of a conversation we had right before entering the shop coming out of our mouths in full force.
It was early March and headlines about New York started to resonate, and around the U.S., grocery stores started seeing an influx of people as aisles of dried goods and paper products were cleaned out.
And amidst it all, there was still a mingled uncertainty when I spoke to strangers and friends about it all. How long was this going to go on? What exactly would this change? Are you doing anything differently? Should I?
Matt and I somehow pumped one another up into coming into the grocery store that day. With two months to go, we figured we’d stay on track with the recommended Wedding To-Do List, albeit with a brave face plastered on each other’s faces, worry simmering below.
Two months ago, we didn’t even have masks on. The baker stood nearby as we flipped through photos of cake with our naked hands and told her what we were looking for. We talked about tiers and frostings as if everything were normal, though every once in a while one of us would mention “if . . . ” and “when”. Like if we weren’t in lockdown by that point or when things cleared up. A fellow customer dropped by and even asked how to freeze bread loaves properly, and I gave advice.
Matt and I walked home, feeling accomplished though uncertain. We talked more about frosting and the virus, what we’d have to reschedule, and how our friends were feeling.
The next day, I picked up three personalized mini cakes for our tasting, and our city went into quarantine.
To Have and To Hold
I feel awful saying this but I never wanted a wedding. I was never a little girl to really imagine my wedding, and if I’m honest the idea of a wedding and coordinating my disparate friends and family to come together made me curl up in the fetal position.
It was an emotional and financial expense I figured was out of my reach. Saddled with student loan debt, having witnessed two of my father’s affairs, and still learning the parameters about my trauma-response people pleasing tendencies at therapy, I was at odds with how to undertake a wedding.
I’ve also seen my friends and even my sister go through the emotional and financial stress and worry of having a big day. I’ve been a maid of honor— granted a little terrible at it—and part of bridal parties. The circumstances weren’t for me, I reasoned. Even if a tiny part of me wondered what I would do given the option.
Enter my partner Matt. He saw weddings for what they inherently are: a time for family and friends to come together as we start our lives together. A place for us as a couple to express ourselves creatively as we host said loved ones through a well-worn ceremony that joins branches of families together and starts one afresh.
Which sounds lovely, but I still needed convincing.
I once asked a friend after her own wedding if it was all worth it, and I remember how soft her eyes went with the memory and how loving she sounded when she said she felt amazing walking down the aisle and seeing the familiar faces of people she loved over the years being there to support her and her partner. And I knew upon hearing that, that my unsounding Grinch heart, two-sizes too small, wasn’t emotionally stable enough to have that clear and unwavering of a perspective.
You Jump, I Jump
I have trouble with relationships, though not the one with my partner. I tie myself in knots trying to people please. I’m terrible at dealing with anger so I have breakdowns when friends or family get upset at me, and believe the relationship is over by default. I accomodate to a wild extent so I spread myself thin on the whims of others.
Needless to say, the idea of debating who should and shouldn’t be on a guest list or saying “no” when someone had a suggestion sounded awful to me. So when Matt posed the idea of a wedding, I refused.
I said yes to the proposal, of course. Our wedding discussion happened weeks later, where Matt laid it all out. A wedding was important to him. He always imagined one and would I consider it?
No, yes, no. I couldn’t make up my mind off the bat. I hemmed and hawed at the prospect of being a bride. A lot of me didn’t identify with the bridal role: I hate dressing up for a big deal, I hate being the center of attention, I hate expectations. And I had my own baggage I was becoming more aware of.
Matt and I couldn’t see eye-to-eye on this. We finally agreed to each create lists of what our “day” would look like before exchanging them and seeing if we could find common ground. Matt sat on the couch in our tiny New York apartment to do his. I went for a walk and ended up at a bar to do mine.
When we exchanged them they were the same. I wanted a backyard barbecue at my sister’s with a few close family and friends and yard games. Matt wanted something casual where we’d be able to make it our own. “I want you to be able to be creative with it,” he said, “I’ll take care of all of the hard stuff.”
So I agreed.
The I Do’s
I commiserate and understand how bridezillas are created. I’m not sure if I was one — though my freak outs were more meltdowns — but I now have all the empathy in the world for brides who earned that unjustified moniker.
Wedding planning is a lot. Financially and emotionally. And to Matt’s credit he did take on the hard stuff, but even as we did our best to divide and conquer, a wedding soon became a wedding.
Weddings do interesting things to people. Families are involved, friends are involved, strangers you meet are involved. You get a lot of advice or opinions from others, which can be golden or really unnecessary and you smile and nod to all of it. Though if you’re like me, you smile and nod, had one idea of things, then someone mentions another thing and you wonder if you’re doing the wedding thing right.
What if your guests hate you because there isn’t enough food? What if the chairs you picked hurt people’s butts? Or what if they can’t see because the time you picked is that weird hour when the sun accelerates its descent and hits you right in the cornea?
These and more nonsensical worries would pop up as I continued to field questions great and small from vendors, and slowly I entered a weird fugue state of things.
“I didn’t even want a wedding,” was a familiar refrain I spoke early on, said with a joking pride that brought a weird comfort as friends or vendors began to pick my brain.
What napkins did I want? What was my vision for flowers? What sort of theme was I thinking?
“Your theme is wedding,” my sister stoutly reminded me, after I complained to her about that particular question coming up several times in conversation. “It’s you getting married.”
Which I accepted wholeheartedly, but more often than not, when a wedding conversation popped up, I’d be confronted with other aspects of a wedding I never thought about:
Where’s the after party? What’s your giveaway?
Smiling and saying no was certainly an option, but after I left the questioner and was in the safety of my own home, I was free to freak out.
I didn’t have an after party. I didn’t have a giveaway. Was it ok that I didn’t have any of these answers just yet? Was I already behind?
After the worry came the denial that anything had to be done or decided upon. I figured I could be effortlessly blasé about the whole thing, like an off duty Kate Moss.
The problem was I left Matt out to dry with the planning. A wedding was still important to him, as was showing me how great a wedding could be.
“I’m drowning here,” he admitted one day after calling a few prospective vendors in a row. He was doing his best to keep a can-do attitude up and outwardly I was being an ungrateful chit. “I don’t think you even want it.”
“I said I wanted it,” I said confidently. “Remember when I compared starting wedding planning like the scene from Inception?”
He remained unmoved.
“The only way out is to go deeper,” I said, paraphrasing Leonardo DiCaprio’s character. “I know that. It’s just hard for me. I’ll do better.”
While talking to a friend about it, later on she was upfront. “I don’t think you’re really accepting the fact that you chose to have a wedding,” she said. “Yes, you agreed,” she said, cutting off a growing protestation from me. “But you keep complaining about it.”
She was right. It was as if I agreed purely to complain about something. And as much as I committed and as many ideas I sourced on Pinterest, I wasn’t fully committed to the wedding, despite being committed to Matt.
So I threw myself into the fray, forming opinions on chairs and linens, leaning on my gut instinct, while simultaneously worrying that everyone would come and hate each other and hate me for making them spend money to come to a wedding and pay for gift in the first place.
And yet, when the U.S. started to take the repercussions of COVID-19 more seriously, and when we started to realize that our upcoming nuptials were most likely going to get cancelled, hearing “Well, you didn’t want a wedding anyway,” from friends and loved ones wasn’t as comforting as the speaker believed.
Although, you had to hand it to the Universe for giving me a middle finger.
A year panicking and tying my shoulders into knots, long talks with Matt articulating my insecurities, worrying with my family on whether my dad should be invited, and the endless decisions we made from the small to the tremendous, all felt for naught.
Matt felt worse. He admitted how he’d see my anxiety over wedding planning build up, but he trucked through because he wanted to show me that the big day would be special. And then I’d see.
We were walking into the grocery store to stock up on much needed quarantine supplies. And as I looked at the empty shelves of meat and paper products, I didn’t realize until that moment that I wanted him to be right.
The Bachelorette
We were two months before our big day, and we were tying up loose ends, wiping our brows, preparing to ease into the denouement of wedding planning, the hard work paying off bit. I immersed myself into making decorations around the clock and planning a bachelorette weekend in New York — returning for the first time since we moved. Like all wedding projects, they balanced a worrying degree of urgency and permanence along with fun. I self consciously did my best to stay in the latter camp.
And yet . . . as we got closer to the bachelorette weekend date and as my panic subsided with finally cemented plans, Coronavirus hit stateside.
I’d get positive but concerned texts from friends who were originally planning to come.
What did I think of what was happening in New York? Was I still pushing forward? Was it okay if they bowed out even if we paid the Airbnb together? Maybe we should wait before we decide?
I watched the news with hope and trepidation. Surely, the States would be better at containing what’s happening. Surely, they were prepared for this?
On Sunday, I finalized the plans for my bachelorette and sent out Facebook event invites. And two days later I cancelled it: as bride and de facto captain for the weekend, I knew I’d feel a hundred times awful if we were trapped in New York just for a weekend of bagels and bachelorettes (seriously my theme). And three days after that, New York went into official lockdown.
Disappointed as I was about the first bit of cancelled plans, I trucked on, hoping for the best for Matt’s bachelor party in a month and our wedding in two.
Walking home with three cakes from the bakery two months before our wedding, I was optimistic and proud of ourselves for being flexible. Here I was really taking on the role of a bride, being responsible to cancel, cakes in tow.
Maybe I was really coming into my own, I thought.
Now, having three types of cake in your fridge at the beginning of quarantine is a great idea and a bad one. On one end, you have a range of choices for any emotionally eating you may need to conduct, and on the other, the cakes start to remind you of all of your hard work with wedding planning going awry.
A week later, we were down to the last pieces of each cake. We decided on having the lemon and the vanilla buttercream. The CDC sent out projections on the spread of the disease and requirements for events in the next few months. And we decided to call it on the wedding.
The Dress Fitting
My final dress fitting happened to fall on one of those final free days before quarantine. Everyone was wary or at least aware of COVID-19 by this point, but no one in the U.S. — least of all our own leaders— understood how serious it would become.
I was still optimistic, albeit wary over what was to come. I came in, feeling confident as this was one of the final to-do’s coming off my list.
Entering the shop, an associate escorted me to a seat alongside a triptych mirror. She gave me a polite head’s up that the fitting specialist was double booked but would be with me shortly.
I took my seat and picked up my phone, careful to avoid the worrying news cycle, when the other bride came out.
Dressed in a satin gown, she kindly and confidently asked the seamstress about minor alterations around the hem. I smiled as she circulated and eyed herself in the mirror.
“You look beautiful,” I said as she took a cautious step back and forth.
She smiled broadly. “Thank you.” She shook out the skirt and made a quarter turn to eye each side.
I couldn’t help it but, “when’s your date?” came out of my mouth before I even acknowledged it as a prevalent worry in my mind. The bride stopped.
“March 28th,” she said. It was a few weeks from now. A tight smile on her features. “But given what’s going on . . .” she trailed off, arms spread out in the air like she were a mime trapped in a glass box.
In such few words, I felt a kindred spirit in my own mental worries. “It will be okay,” I said, knowing that this is what my new friend needed to hear. “I think you’ll be fine.” She perked up, and I repeated myself. And as I said it, I really believed it in that moment, thinking through the headlines I heard, the news friends have passed along. Flitting all of it away for the sake of emotional stability.
“You think?” she asked, hopefully or maybe just politeness.
I nodded, exuding a confidence I didn’t even have for myself at the time. And we were off. She asked about my own nuptials, before giving me the same reassuring sentiments, each of us squealing at each other’s plans and ideas.
Wedding planning talk just works that way. It connects people immediately and quickly, similar to how you can immediately commiserate with fellow drunks in the bathroom at the bar. You know the feelings. You want to help.
And as I spoke to this fellow bride, we exchanged reassurances about COVID-19 and timing and weddings till I was buoyed up to go try on my dress.
I love my dress, I admit. My mother and sister somehow convinced me that it was okay to spend money on a large white dress I’d probably wear once and that was marked up because wedding stuff always is. I remember when I was able to take it home and tried it on though, it felt like I was swimming in it, like it was too much and too frou-frou.
But post alterations and taking steps out of the fitting room, I felt okay. I could walk. The fabric skimmed my feet. My boobs sat in place. Standing before the tri-fold mirror, I felt at peace.
My new friend came to say goodbye before she headed out, and I thanked her for easing my mind and for the lovely afternoon she gave me. We exchanged numbers and good lucks, and after she left, the seamstress admitted that she was going to call and see if one of us wanted to reschedule but had a feeling it would be okay.
I agreed.
Wedding Bells, Batman Smells
My worries over the wedding were never about marriage. Quarantined in a one bedroom apartment with my future husband while we freak out whether to cancel a wedding or not? Liveable. And honestly, just further proof we’re ready for the marriage part of our relationship.
Once we decided to postpone officially two things happened: we felt immediately better. No more what if-ing and closely following all of the news and having to watch Trump and speak to friends and family about their thoughts on it. And second, we received an outpouring of support from our loved ones far away. From surprise macarons, cards, a Lizzo mug and Pride and Prejudice candle, so many heartfelt texts, a surprise bagel brunch from my favorite bagel place in New York, and the amount of kind words randomly throughout our days lifted our spirits. One of my bridesmaids reached out and asked if I’d want to do a bachelorette zoom so we got my wedding party together to watch a romcom. Matt’s friends surprised him with booze and a day drinking hangout on his bachelor date. And as I type, my family’s hard at work on surprises aplenty for us to make our wedding day special.
Matt and I decided to save our own date. For a year, we repeated the date to vendors, friends, family, and to each other like a mantra. Burned into our hearts and minds, we knew we still wanted to make a commitment to each other. This date is when it will all come together. This is the date when we’ll be married.
And in a small ceremony with family on zoom and immediate family in place but socially distant, we will be.
