Well this certainly isn’t the wedding blog post I thought I’d be writing when we booked our venue back in November of 2019, but here we are…
I want to start this post off by saying that this decision wasn’t easy and it’s not right for everyone. We thought about our decision for months, and only just let the majority of our guests know the last few weeks via phone calls and change of plans cards by mail (more on what those look like below). Weddings are extremely personal, and ultimately the decision that Bill and I made was the one that was right for us, our families, our timeline and finances.
If you’re trying to plan, reschedule or cancel a wedding for 2020-2021, my heart goes out to you. It’s hard. There’s no right answer and everyone has an opinion. It’s hard logistically and it’s hard mentally. It’s also just plain sad. I think it goes without saying that I don’t judge anyone’s wedding decisions because I know just how difficult they can be to make.
I also want to acknowledge that there are so many things that are happening in the world right now that are far, far worse than having to change your wedding plans. I’m aware that there are people struggling with illness, social injustice, election insanity, death, job loss, there’s so much. I’m grateful that Bill and I are healthy and have healthy families, but everyone I know has been impacted by this year in some way, shape or form. I also feel terribly for those who work in the wedding industry, vendors and venues. I know they’re struggling too. Overall, I’m aware things could be much worse, but that doesn’t make changing the wedding you’ve been looking forward to for most of your life a fun or easy decision to make.
I’m sharing our story because when we were trying to come to a decision, we both felt upset, anxious, and frustrated. Personally, I felt indecisive, alone and cheated. We’ve come out on the other side of it, but I know that there are so many 2020 and 2021 couples or newly engaged couples that might be going through something similar. Personally, I found reading about other couple’s experiences and new plans to be helpful and inspiring, so here’s our experience navigating wedding planning (and changing plans) during the time of COVID-19…
OUR ORIGINAL PLAN
After getting engaged in October of 2019, Bill and I started looking at venues. We looked all over before finding one close to us in Connecticut that we absolutely loved. After a fun tour with our parents, we booked the venue for the end of May 2021 with a guest list of 225 people.
We started planning, booked all our vendors, booked the church and started looking at rehearsal dinner spots before the end of the year. Going into 2020 I was excited and felt like we had all the major boxes checked. We planned an engagement party, picked out save the dates, went dress shopping, Bill and I asked our bridal party and then COVID-19 hit hard.
There was so much unknown, and Bill and I watched friend after friend painfully make the choice to move their weddings, move them again and negotiate with venues and vendors.
WHY WE CHANGED OUR PLANS
After a few months of lockdown and more uncertainty, Bill and I were struggling with wedding planning. For us (again this is extremely personal), it wasn’t fun anymore. Every wedding conversation was met with anxiety (mine) and tears (also mine lol), and people in my life (mainly my mom) were concerned. I’m a planner. I don’t do well with uncertainty. I’m a classic control freak. The thought of the unknown and the “what ifs” were weighing on me, and we were still a year out. Even though we were feeling conflicted, we continued to move forward with our original plans and sent out our save the dates.
A couple more months went by (we’re now at the beginning of September 2020) and we still weren’t feeling any better. We’d already made all our deposits, and with some more substantial payments coming up in November, we knew we needed to make a decision. We would either stick with our original plans or change them all together. How did we start? We made a list. We sat down and made a list of things that we absolutely did not want to do when it came to our wedding. This list is personal and reflects our situation, but here it is:
- Push our date back or move to 2022 – Bill and I have been together for just around 5.5 years (6 by the time we get married) and we’ve lived together for 4.5 of them. We’re ready to be married and we didn’t want to push our date back.
- Cut our guest list to between 50-100 people – this is specific but given that we sent out save the dates to 225 people, we did not want to cut our guest list down to somewhere between 50-100 people. We wanted a big wedding, and if there was any uncertainty around being able to do that in 2021, we didn’t just want to cut our guest list in hopes we could still get married. Our bridal party alone was 20 people, and with guests it would be close to 40. We both have decently sized families, and if we cut down to a number between 50-100 people, we’d be picking between best friends, cousins, aunts and uncles, our parent’s close friends and then some. Ultimately, that was something we didn’t want to do. We tried to do it. We tried different combinations of 50, 75, 100 people and ultimately, we couldn’t.
- Live in limbo – this point was at the top of my list. Like I mentioned above, I like being in control and the uncertainty of 2021 was weighing on me. The uncertainty of our wedding plans (in combination of everything else happening in the world) was impacting my mental health. I was upset about planning a wedding I had dreamed of for years and I really didn’t even want to talk about it. Instead of waiting for our venue to tell us what we could do come our 2021 date, we wanted to take control of the situation.
- When it comes to this point, I realize Bill and I are lucky that we were able to make the choice to not live in limbo. We had flexibility that other couples who had or have already made their final payments might not. I realize that walking away from deposits is much easier than walking away from major payments. If we were locked in with major payments to our venue and vendors, we’d be waiting to see how things play out and moving forward with our original plan in any way that we could.
- Worrying about large numbers of people traveling from out of state – Bill and I live in Connecticut, but most of our family does not. My family is based primarily in New Jersey and New York, and apart from Bill’s parents and younger sister who are also here in Connecticut, the rest of his family lives across Chicago, Minnesota and Wisconsin. With so many people traveling (long distances) in from out of town, we could potentially lose a major chunk of our guest list if there are still travel restrictions (outside of the tri-state) heading into 2021. For us, that was a risk we didn’t want to take.
- Be locked into a venue that couldn’t support us should we want to get married outside – this one is specific to our situation, but the wedding venue we booked could not guarantee with 100% certainty that they would be able to secure a tent permit in 2021. Although we had seen them execute a few outdoor, tented weddings during the summer, when we asked it was made clear to us that it wasn’t a guaranteed option. They were also not able to give us an idea of when a tent permit would be confirmed for 2021.
I share the list above because it helped us make our own decision. Some of the points above might not be relevant to you or your situation, but if you’re in the process of planning or changing plans, I wanted to be fully transparent about the questions we asked ourselves.
OUR NEW PLAN
This is the happy part of this post. Sorry it took so long to get here… 😂
Taking into consideration all the factors I mentioned above, Bill and I completely changed our wedding plans. We took our 225 person wedding, cut it down to 13, and can honestly say we feel completely relieved, at peace and excited about the decision. So what are the new plans? Well we’re still getting married on our same 2021 date, but we’re doing it with just our parents, siblings, their significant others and our soon-to-be new nephew who’s arriving in a few months.
We’ve rented a house on Nantucket where we will all be staying, and Bill and I will be getting married and having our reception in the backyard. My brother is marrying us (which I am so excited about), and we were able to keep our amazing photographer and florist on. They were the two vendors I was most eager to book when we started planning our original wedding, and as fate will have it, they were both open and available to travel. I’ll be wearing my wedding dress, the guys will be in tuxes, we found a fantastic caterer, and at the end of the day we’re still having our dream wedding, just on a much smaller scale.
Although we will miss celebrating with the rest of our family and friends, this was the only way we wanted to cut our guest list. We love each other’s immediate families and are beyond lucky that they get along so well. This made our decision even easier. I’m sure that on the day of our wedding Bill and I will feel some sadness, like not getting ready with our bridal party, not having all our family and friends there, etc. but overall we feel good about the decision. At this time, our hope is to throw a larger party, around one year anniversary, where we can celebrate with everyone. Not another wedding (we’re only doing that once 😂), but more of a fun day on our roof or in my parent’s backyard.
Our motto for changing our wedding plans was we either want to have the big wedding we booked, or we wanted to have the most intimate, beautiful wedding we could imagine. I think we’re on the right track for the latter and I can’t wait to share all the details with you guys as we continue to plan.
If you have any questions, are going through something similar, or want to talk about the process, please DM me on Instagram or shoot me an email. Now that we’ve worked through all the change of plans logistics, I’m more than happy to share our experience and what we learned along the way!
Black and white film engagement photos by our talented photographer Brooke Allison Photo
Wedding change of plans cards by Papier (we also used Papier to create our save the dates)
Custom wedding crest by Whodrew