Coronavirus Made Me Reconsider a Big Wedding
And to be honest, the only thing that I ever really wanted from my wedding was to marry the person I love
I got engaged in December of last year. It was right before Christmas and long before coronavirus, so we had plenty of time to celebrate with friends and family and bask in the joy of our engagement before we even started to think about wedding planning.
Then, around mid-February to early March, we finally started putting some (very early stage) ideas together— we drafted up our guest list, researched potential venues, and began imagining what we wanted our wedding to look like.
Personally, I’ve never been the type of person that had a grand vision for my wedding day. I never daydreamed of a big fairytale wedding or had the slightest clue as to how I wanted it to look. I never put much thought into it until I actually got engaged.
And to be honest, the only thing that I ever really wanted from my wedding was to marry the person I love.
However, being one of the few people in my close-knit circle of friends who has yet to get married, I was all of a sudden getting wedding advice from everyone around me.
I soon found myself scouring Pinterest wedding ideas, browsing through bridal magazines, following wedding-related Instagram accounts, and being dragged into the wedding planning frenzy that was contagious amongst my generation of fellow brides.
Then, COVID-19 happened. And similar to the thousands of other brides-to-be out there, wedding planning had to take a back seat.
In comparison to the many weddings that have sadly been cancelled, my fiancé and I were fortunate to not have been too deep into wedding planning when the pandemic hit full force. Frankly, we weren’t even planning on getting married until 2021.
We weren’t in a huge rush, so the fact that we didn’t have a date set actually ended up being a blessing in disguise. But, as the months of staying at home continued on and we now find ourselves embarking on Summer, we started picking back up on the conversation about our wedding.
Of course, there’s not much to talk about since coronavirus is still among us, some businesses are still closed, and it’s hard to tell when there will be an end in sight. So, the conversation about our wedding started changing.
I started breaking away from the wedding planning frenzy that I was in before coronavirus happened and I started getting back to my roots of knowing that the whole point of the wedding was to marry the person I love. And since then, things started looking a little different.
As much as I want all two-hundred people on our original guest list to be present and as much as I want to have a big celebration, I also starting realizing that may longer be any option anymore. I started realizing that it’s not even absolutely necessary anymore.
I started realizing that the idea of a big wedding, as exciting as it is to think about, is not really the point.
I started realizing that what matters is the fact that you are choosing to spend the rest of your life with the person you love. I realized this in the midst of the pandemic, through the months of not seeing the people I usually see on a daily basis, except for my fiancé.
As much as coronavirus has taken away from all of us, there’s one thing that I’ve learned throughout this whole experience. I’ve learned who the truly important people are in my life — the people I’ve missed seeing the most. The people I still keep in touch with despite not be able to see them. The people I’d want most to be present for my wedding.
And when I look at it that way, I realize that coronavirus has made me reconsider a big wedding, not because of the six-feet-apart rule, but because the list of people whom are truly important isn’t as big as I thought.
