Anyone else feel like covid ruined their entire wedding experience?

COVID messed with our wedding is SO many ways. First we had to postpone our wedding by a year, then as a precaution we cut our guest list by 75% and changed our plans and lost $10K in the process only to find out weeks later that the original plans could have gone ahead. Then, amongst other things, we had dresses go missing in transit due to COVID related repercussions on shipping routes and had scaffolding around our ceremony venue due to the venue's decision to rectify some building damage at that particular time due to COVID closures (and didn't finish this before our wedding).

I can fully relate to feeling like COVID ruined the wedding experience because with all the hurdles we were put through it was blow after blow that began chipping away at my desire to plan a wedding let alone get married, and it took a really long time to perk up.

For me personally, I eventually came around and promised myself that I wouldn't let myself ruin the experience by focusing on the negatives and I made a point to instead be grateful for what we achieved. In my thank you speech at our wedding I made fun of all the hurdles we got through in order to get married, and I tried to see the silver linings where they existed and for me personally that really, really helped.

It is ok to feel disappointed because obviously the circumstances completely altered the wonderful plans you had made, but remember, the wedding experience won't define the rest of your marriage, and maybe one day years down the track you might actually come to find that it wasn't so bad after all since you got there in the end. Sending hugs OP!

I think what MrsW says is all true.

We booked our wedding 18 months out in the hope that we would avoid covid, and ended up having to postpone 7 weeks out because lockdown restrictions meant that we, the majority of our guests and our vendors were legally not allowed to even travel to our venue. And, if we'd moved it to somewhere here, my parents wouldn't have been able to come. Our wedding is re-booked in for Feb, and we now have the omicron variant surging here and they've said there won't be any more lockdowns but who knows how bad it will get or what will happen?

I'll have been engaged for just short of 2 years when we get married (assuming it can go ahead) and honestly I'm done planning, done thinking about it, I just want to move onto the next stage in our lives.

But equally, I don't want to elope or cancel if we can't go ahead because like you, I've had a dream in my head of this day for a long time, and I want so much to be able to have the day I'd dreamed of, and that my fiance and I have worked so hard to plan together.

Then on the other hand - I obviously don't want to put that dream above our vendors and guests' safety and wellbeing.

It is very hard not to feel like we've had it extremely hard and been cheated in many ways, but it is what it is and there's not much we can do about it.

I guess when our grandkids ask us about what our weddings were like, we'll have a good story to tell! It makes me wish I could have asked my grandmother more about her wedding - it was done in a rush as it was WW2, and she had a dress being made but they were afraid my grandfather (a Doctor) would get called up so she just had to wear her every day coat and a normal dress. I imagine it wasn't anything like what she'd hoped for, and she considered herself lucky to get her husband back at all, but it must still have been so incredibly disappointing.

We had a very small legal ceremony on our original wedding day in May 2020 with just our parents and some of our wedding party (needed to keep the total count to 10 people including photographer and officiant) and then a "redo" wedding celebration with vaccinated friends and family (about 50 people total) in June 2021. Neither was what our wedding should have been - at our celebration some really important people were missing and the ceremony didn't really feel emotional at all because we were already married and basically just going through the motions to share with family and get our money's worth out of our venue and vendors. After our celebration I was mostly just relived that everything we had planned and waited for for so long was finally over and I didn't need to think or stress about it any more. Our wedding was the first "big event" most of our guests had been to since the pandemic, so while getting together again was wonderful most petered out and left early and we didn't celebrate late into the night. It kind of came and went. Both events were about as good as they could have been considering the circumstances, but the circumstances sucked.

In the end we are married, and I don't think being married would feel any differently if we had had our dream wedding or had to elope at a courthouse. Being married to my person is amazing and lovely and the warmest, most "at home" feeling I could ever imagine. In my mind, having a wedding during a pandemic sucked, but it doesn't change that marrying my person was and is still wonderful.

I definitely don't think you are alone in feeling that Covid stole something from your wedding. It did. I think the only people whose weddings truly escaped Covid are those who haven't been taking the pandemic seriously. Maybe ignorance is bliss but I was fully aware of all of the compromises having a safe wedding during a pandemic entailed, and it absolutely wasn't the same experience we would have had if we didn't have to deal with Covid.

Our wedding is in February and I'm just constantly stressing about whether we'll be allowed to go ahead with it, whether we will need to cut down our guest list at the last minute and if people will pull out last minute because of COVID worries. I literally can't sleep because of the stress. Our local government will be announcing new restrictions mid January and it's pretty last minute. So yeah, COVID is ruining everything for me. I should contact our DJ again soon, but I just can't bring myself to make any plans when I don't know if we'll be allowed to even throw that party.
But we'll definitely be getting married on that date, even if we won't be allowed to celebrate, so that's at least one thing to be looking forward to.

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Thank you, and I'm sorry to hear COVID messed with your wedding in so many ways too! I think I would've gotten to a more peaceful place about everything by the wedding day if it weren't for the timing of our little scare - I just had no chance to recover from that. At least I have fond memories of the civil ceremony.

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Ugh, I'm so sorry this happened to you - we didn't have to deal with international travel and I know that is a whole other level of complication. :-( I 100% feel you on all of this, especially being done planning and thinking about it / just wanting to move on but at the same time not being willing to give up your dream wedding altogether. That's exactly where I was pretty much as soon as Delta variant appeared and all the way up to our wedding day. I hope it works out that you can have something that's at least close to the wedding you planned! Ours really was pretty close, it was just the feeling I had of not being ready that was so hard for me. I ended up hating the way I looked because I spent more time on last minute details (and other people's COVID anxiety) than actually thinking about what was important to me as far as hair/makeup and photos go. Failed to anticipate that too many outdoor photos would make my hair go flat - and I didn't even want the outdoor photos! I should've stopped our photographers and asked to move inside - BP was cold and miserable and I didn't get the photos I actually wanted because I was trying to be understanding of the fact that vendors were still setting up inside. Anyway, by the time the ceremony started my hair was so flat and stringy I almost cried when I saw myself in the mirror before my walk down the aisle - and not in a good way. I really hope you'll be able to sit back and focus on yourself and your FH in those last few days leading up to the wedding! That's the one thing I would go back and change that might have made the experience better, I think.

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Yes, I totally feel all of this. :-/ I think that's why the private ceremony felt so great to me - we had to wear masks for it of course, so it wasn't entirely "normal," but I had never dreamed of having a courthouse wedding so I was able to go into it without any real expectations. And by definition it was supposed to be just us, so it didn't feel like anyone was missing or there were important traditions that didn't go right, etc. The big wedding is something that has lived in my head for years, and there were lots of moments I had always looked forward to that just ended up awkward (never practiced our first dance, for example and we never ever dance together so it was awful). Also like you, the ceremony in front of friends and family felt like such a sad, watered-down version of our original ceremony - we used the same vows for both so they were a surprise to us both the first time, but not the second time. While I still think that was the right decision, I was disappointed that neither one of us was as emotional the second time. Thankfully I did have one friend come to our private ceremony to record it on her phone, so we have that video and it might become the only wedding memento I really care about.

I think I'll feel better about the whole thing once people stop asking about / mentioning the wedding and sending me pictures they took, because I honestly just don't want to be reminded. Last week was my first week back to work, so everyone I talked to wanted to hear about it, and my teeth were on edge all week having to choose between lying and say it was great or admitting it wasn't great and having people just gape at me and not know what to say.

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So sorry you are dealing with this too! You summed up the way I felt in the past few months before our wedding perfectly, "can't bring myself to make any plans when I don't know if we'll be allowed to even throw that party." My only advice is to chip away at the planning you can do without spending a bunch more money, like confirming timelines and finishing any DIY projects, etc., so at least that's out of the way and you aren't too stressed the last few weeks before the wedding -- like I was when COVID came into my house at exactly the time I needed to be making final plans. :-/ But also give yourself a break from planning when you can tell you're just starting to feel burnt out and resenting the need to plan at all. If I had crossed just a couple of little things off my list each day those last couple of months, I think I would've ended up in a much better place.

If you do have to just get married on your wedding date without celebrating (which I really hope you don't!), I do highly recommend the private ceremony experience. If you're thinking you'd go to a courthouse, check and see if your city/county requires appointments due to COVID - ours does and they were booked about 6 weeks out, but we were able to get our dating anniversary which was great and felt so meaningful. We had our photographer come and she took a bunch of pictures of us in the area around the courthouse (city where we met) before our appointment. I ordered a silk bouquet on Etsy (though it was hard to get one even with over a month's notice!) and wore a Lulu's dress since my "real" one was nowhere near ready yet. Our wedding venue was out in the country an hour and a half away, but at one time I really imagined myself getting married in the city I love, so that was one silver lining - I actually kind of got the city wedding that I thought I had passed up.

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Aww, thank you so much! It wasn't even international, can you believe? Just local areas - lockdown orders were so strict that you were not able to travel outside of your local government area or more than 10km. My parents live about 150 km away so well out of the zone we were allowed to travel in!

I'm so sorry you had that experience too. Even if you weren't the type to dream of your wedding since you were a tiny child, it is still SO disappointing to spend so much, put so much time into planning an event, only to be so disappointed.

I will absolutely take to heart what you've said, so at least feel better knowing you've shared your wisdom for someone else to learn from!

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You don't owe it to anyone to pretend to be happy about a wedding that wasn't what you hoped it would be. Coworkers who ask how it went should be prepared for an honest response.

Weddings are stressful anyway, without a pandemic. I'm sure there are many brides who feel disappointed about their pre-Covid weddings but also feel like those emotions aren't widely accepted, so maybe they just focus on the good parts. Focusing on the good parts isn't a bad thing! Both of our events went really well for the most part - our venue and vendors were all amazing and helped the days come together beautifully - but those days were tainted by a pandemic that had everyone on edge, socially out of practice, our emotions fried, etc. It just wasn't the same and never could be.

Also shifting the timeframe of our wedding impacted things - my mom was diagnosed with cancer 10 days before our original date. So in additional to spending a full year stressing about if we'd ever have our wedding and get to celebrate with loved ones, I was having my mom go through cancer alone (I live in a different state) and being really limited as to what I could do because of the pandemic, travel restrictions, etc. Between our May 2020 and June 2021 events she lost three dress sizes and she showed up to our celebration with a bunch of different dresses because the MOB dress we originally picked out together didn't fit anymore - I ended up picking something out of my own closet for her to wear. My best friend (who was to be my MOH and only bridesmaid) ended up getting pregnant and having a baby the week of our celebration, so I got married without any bridal party at all, and the vision I had of our wedding colors and wedding party photos never came to fruition. We required vaccinations for our wedding celebration (our parents are high risk) and my husband had to call one of his groomsmen just weeks before to "uninvite" him because he wasn't getting vaccinated. We still haven't seen a single person invited to our wedding that refused to get vaccinated, so those friendships we valued have pretty much been put on hold indefinitely. We never had any pre-wedding celebrations - no bachelor party or bachelorette, etc. It was just so so so different than it would have been if we had the wedding we planned on the day we originally planned without a global pandemic at play. Part of the reason it was so hard for us was because we got SO CLOSE - everything had been planned and paid for before Covid hit, so at no point were pandemic considerations on our radar as we were envisioning everything. I feel like it would have been a much less harsh reality if Covid had been a consideration throughout our engagement and planning process. We had no reason to believe anything would derail our plans so massively. If Covid had already been a thing, we would have planned a very different wedding and I don't think I would have felt nearly as crushed if we hadn't put so much work into something that went from being real to impossible overnight.

Did I hate our wedding? Not at all. Do I feel disappointed? Absolutely. My wedding was stolen from me and nothing will ever recover that. But focusing on the good things that came out of it - my marriage, having some other friends step up to help when I had no bridesmaids, ending up with gorgeous weather, still fitting into my dress a year later (lol), our vendors nailing it - I do find some joy in those days.

I do think the bad feelings will dull as time goes on; the pain will be less fresh. As you move into married life together you'll find new things to look forward to as well.

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Wow - yes we have never gotten anywhere near that restrictive on travel where we live, that must have been so stressful!

I totally was the type who had dreamed about my wedding my whole life. It evolved a lot, it's not like I had the same vision for this that I had for my dream wedding when I was a teenager, but I did have my heart set on fall and a general color scheme since a few years before I met my husband. After we got engaged I fell in love with our venue because it was the perfect way to tie that vision together with a backdrop that reminded us both of one of our favorite trips we've ever taken. The color scheme was a superficial thing of course, but pretty much every other detail of that wedding meant SO much to me that it's honestly devastating to see how it turned out and hate it. Got our preview pics today and I hate the way I look in pretty much all of them. Partly because I was unhappy and as hard as I tried to fake it, I can see in the photos that I feel awkward, tense and uncomfortable. And partly because of the flat, stringy hair from being outside for too long. As I suspected, deeply regretting that I didn't just say I wanted most of the pictures indoors and we needed to figure out a way to make that happen.

So, definitely speak up for what you care about! I was trying so hard to be considerate of our vendors and not be a "bridezilla" that I sabotaged my own wedding experience AND all of our photos - really angry at myself for that.

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I'm so sorry you went through all of this. :-( I hope your mom is doing better now.

I expected to feel lucky that we weren't in that boat of having planned everything and then having to reschedule (or cancel altogether - I know several people who decided to just cut their losses SO close to the finish line, and I just can't imagine how hard that must have been). It isn't really better on the other side though (knowing about COVID and having to plan around it from the beginning), just bad in a different way - we got engaged June 2020 and planned for late 2021 thinking I wanted fall anyway and everything should be much better by then (insert bitter laughter at our innocent cluelessness here). So it's not like COVID ever shocked us, but it did put a damper on our entire engagement, even the proposal. I could never really excitedly anticipate our wedding because there were so many ups and downs over that year and a half, positive developments making it look like we really would be OK and then huge setbacks like lagging vaccination rates, Delta variant, etc.

There were also no normal experiences of engagement celebrations, dress shopping with friends and family, etc. - I did have a bachelorette party but it turned into a ton of stressful drama because one of my bridesmaids wasn't vaccinated, and I opted out of a bridal shower partly because of COVID but mostly because of a serious problem in my husband's family that blew up late last year. I always wanted to savor the planning process and was looking forward to every one of those vendor visits, shopping for dresses, pre-wedding parties, etc. - way more than I was looking forward to the actual wedding, I think. So the parts of the experience I really wanted were the ones I generally didn't get. Our civil ceremony was lovely and genuine and I'll remember it forever, but our engagement and "big" wedding were honestly just kinda crappy (not entirely because of COVID, husband's family drama was a huge part of it too, but COVID had a starring role). I honestly just hope I forget the whole experience eventually!

As much as I hate to say this - the simple answer is yes.
My husband and I got engaged in May '21 and married in October. Now... I am the stereotype in that I've dreamed of my wedding since I was little. I don't want kids, I've never had a "dream house" or "dream car", etc., so when it comes to big life events, THE WEDDING is the only thing I've really wanted.

We intended to do a small ceremony and reception because of Covid and then do the "big wedding" later. Well... the "small" wedding ended up being 30 people and, to be honest, pretty nice/fancy for a church/backyard wedding. And this was 100% my doing because I had a fear that the "bigger dream wedding" wouldn't actually happen due to comments from my husband and his side of the family.

The icing on the cake is that a brother-in-law got engaged and married this year also, and they did a big wedding, so there were A LOT of people who gave me vibe that our wedding didn't count because it was small. And then when we talk about having the bigger wedding, a lot of people are saying it's a waste of time and money. So, in any capacity that I got married, it seemed like it was irrelevant to a lot of people that matter to us both.

Don't get me wrong... the day was awesome and went so smoothly (shocking!) and it was a ton of fun. I'm grateful for my husband and the fact that we could get married. But it's not the wedding I wanted. I'm trying to remain positive that it will happen when it happens, but DAMN it's pretty hard sometimes.

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I'm sorry this happened to you. :-/ The whole "a wedding is a waste of time and money because you're already married / because you don't know what will happen with COVID" attitude is so common and SO insensitive. I heard a lot of that during our engagement too, and I've fantasized about slapping a lot of people who had the wedding they wanted before COVID and actually had the audacity to say or imply that it wasn't "worth it" for me. A lot of people need to learn that their experiences don't necessarily translate to others and just because they think they've "been there" doesn't mean they can predict what another person's experience is going to be like or whether it's "worth it" for them to pursue having that experience at all. So many people seem to think that their one experience of getting married makes them an expert who can now wisely advise everyone else on the best way for *them* to get married - but this is an incredibly personal decision and nobody else's experience is really all that relevant to making the choice that is right for you. I've dreamed of my wedding since I was little too, and I still feel like I was robbed of the experience - mostly because of people not being supportive in exactly the ways that you describe, those little comments that aren't helpful and could easily just be kept to themselves.

I'm glad you were able to enjoy the celebration that you did have, it sounds like it was beautiful! And I really hope you get to have your "dream wedding" at some point down the line too. You deserve to have the wedding you really want if that's something you really care about experiencing!

I got married on 11/20/21 too. So many cancellations the week before… long, Covid, drawn out explanations. I just couldn’t get over the amount of money we basically threw in the trash and why these people just wouldn’t decline on the rsvp? I had a cry fest the morning of the wedding because I got a few more texts from people who weren’t coming… ended up being 27 no shows.. almost $8,000 wasted…


I’m in school and our first planned wedding (that was canceled for Covid) was scheduled nicely around that. This one wasn’t. I was in the thick of class all the way up until 5pm the Friday before.
I didn’t have a hair trial.. ended up not really liking my hair. But, dealt with it. I was uncomfortable in the dress picking process and settled with something.
And. I really cared about the florals. I wanted dahlias and white anemones with greens. The florist couldn’t get them in the week of. So I had chrysanthemums and roses.
And, I didn’t want to be upset and just rolled with stuff. To the point where I didn’t vocalize anything. So, there’s a lot of pictures I wanted that we didn’t get.
But, it was a nice day overall. I got drunk and danced the night away and just ignored the sad stuff. But, once in a while, I get hit with the wedding blues. I should just be grateful and not dwell on the negative stuff, but it felt really good to talk about it. And, to know I’m not alone.

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Always nice to meet a date twin on here, but it seems like you had it even worse than we did with the cancelations - most of ours were on-time declines plus a handful of dramatic last-minute COVID cancelations, and that was bad enough. I'm sorry you had so many of these to deal with and especially sorry that it translated into so much wasted money!

It seemed like the stuff I cared about most was exactly what went wrong too, so I feel you on that as well. I'm already planning our 10-year (private) vow renewal in Napa in my head... I just feel like I need a do-over.

Also, IMO, when it comes to how you feel about an experience as deeply personal as your wedding, there is no "should." People love to shame others for expressing negative emotions, but it's far healthier to sit with them and allow yourself to feel them than it is to try and force positivity or tell yourself to "just be grateful." You can be grateful for the good things you have and angry / sad about the experiences you missed out on, all at the same time - it doesn't make you ungrateful or negative, it just makes you a human being!