Who else is disappointed about their Covid wedding?

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I'm so sorry you are going through this. We originally planned our "redo" wedding for June 2021, but our venue has said they don't anticipate us being able to host the event we planned then. It's so frustrating to postpone and postpone again. I'm hopeful that something will work out for you - whether being able to have the event you planned or a refund or the option to postpone again or the option to enjoy your venue/destination for your elopement, even if its just you and your partner or a much smaller group of guests. I totally get the "not feeling excited anymore" bit. Virtual hugs!

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Thank you so much! That's exactly how I feel - so happy we are married and so sad about how it happened. I'm hopeful we can celebrate in the future but are weighing a lot and just have to see what happens I guess.

Hi Kari,

I got married in March, the week our state declared emergency status for COVID, & I want to validate your feelings. While I am grateful for many things, including the fact that we pulled it off before that first big lockdown fully struck, I also grieved the many pieces of our wedding that fell away as the situation progressed. It was hurtful when people told me to be grateful for what I did get, because that didn't honor the big part of me that was grieving.

I'm including a definition here of toxic positivity: "the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations. The process of toxic positivity results in the denial, minimization, and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience".

I hear you & I validate your loss. For me, it has felt better as time goes on, & I've been able to gradually focus on the gratitude piece more - but only after letting myself feel the sad & frustrated & angry feelings first. That's just my process, though, & everyone copes & moves through things differently. Sending very warm wishes to you this holiday season.

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Thank you. I was just reading an article about that so it does make me feel a bit better. In regards to the parties you mentioned in your previous post, I told my husband that if we get pregnant he can have a "last bash before baby" with his guys since he was never able to have a bachelor party (of course that's assuming vaccinations go round before baby). I'm really hoping the vaccine rollout is a bit better than anticipated and that we might be able to go "back to normal" by late summer/early fall vs the end of the year.

Congrats on your engagement!

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I'm so sorry to hear about all the complications with your wedding and the loss of your father. My wedding felt very strange without my family there; my parents left right after the ceremony and my only brother, SIL, niece, and nephew were not there. But we are married now, and as long as no one gets sick I will be okay with everything. I hope you have a beautiful wedding!

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I am so sorry for your loss Christa. I lost my dad in college just a few months before graduation, and I feel his loss at every father daughter dance at weddings. When Covid forced us to cancel our wedding, one of my biggest fears was what would happen (and who we might lose) between our original wedding date and the rescheduled one. In fact, the only reason I even found out my mom had anything wrong was because I was telling her I was so afraid of her or one of my husband's parents getting sick if we postponed; the day after I shared my fears with her, she received her cancer diagnosis and my husband and I made the decision to push through and get married on our original date anyway.

I hope you are able to enjoy your wedding day and celebrate with some of your loved ones, whether in person or via some other means. It's such an awful year/time to be a bride, and no one should have to go through so much trauma during a time that is supposed to be celebratory and full of happiness. The one saving grace is having a partner there by your side through all of it. I hope that getting through a Covid wedding will be one of the more difficult hardships couples in our shoes have to face, and that there will be many joyous years ahead with our spouses to make up for it.

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Elisa I'm so sorry your wedding happened the way it did. Do you have plans for a "redo" at any point? I know its so hard to think about it now and plan for a Covid free celebration when we still don't know when the world will be Covid free. I know its not possible for all couples to do and many are dealing with financial challenges, family planning, health of family members on top of all that. I share your feelings of disappointment and sometimes wonder if I'll ever be able to enjoy any other weddings I attend in the future or if I'll always just feel angry and resentful that that ours was taken from us. Some days I feel somewhat okay, like I will be able to get past it eventually, and other days I'm just really bitter.

Thank you so so much for sharing and being vulnerable about your negative experience. It does help to know we aren't alone, I think. I hope that even if your wedding was a disaster that your marriage at least has been good to you. Virtual hugs and lots of sympathy from afar!

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Thank you so much for this post. My husband, who is incredibly kind and makes an tremendous effort to be a supportive partner, doesn't have natural aptitude for talking about feelings or emotionally supportive language. It can be difficult for him to understand why I'm so upset and that I can feel really bad about the way in which we got married but still be super grateful that we did get married. He often tries to frame it with "it was still special to me because I got to marry you" which doesn't make space for the negativity I feel about all the ways in which our day was so stressful and disappointing. I'm an incredibly pragmatic person, and am acutely aware of the things that "went well" along with the things that didn't. I'll even make myself feel guilty about being so upset about that day when it wasn't a complete and total disaster, as if I'm not allowed to feel disappointed just because I didn't get "left at the altar", I got to wear my dress, the weather cooperated, and no one died.

It's helpful to hear that the grief is valid (even though I "know" that, it's helpful to hear it from other brides). I am also hopeful that as times goes on, the pain will feel less, and that I'll be able to either revisit that day and make new memories if we are able to have a "redo" wedding celebration or just move past it once there are other pieces to appreciate and focus on. I think it's particularly hard right now because Covid is still impacting our lives so much; there are many people we haven't seen at all that would have been at our wedding, and it still feels like a very deep loss. There has been no closure at all whatsoever, and I think that will only come once we are able to see people again and can make a determination about next steps with some certainty.

I understand where youre coming from, we eloped on our original date and even though we will be having a party in April this year it is not going to be a “wedding” or anything close to the one we’d been planning for 18 months before it got ruined. The elopement felt very anticlimactic, no one was hugging and we only had our parents and siblings there. Then after my husband and I went home and played beer pong alone lol 😂 I’m so glad to have married him and I know that will be a great story to tell someday but right now I still mostly feel the sting of getting so close to our wedding and having it get ruined. Plus I lost my job about a week before our wedding day. All that to say its okay if it didnt feel like the best day in the world. I cant honestly say that day was magical or anything but its really every day after being married to your spouse that counts

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Thank you Ally. I relate to this so much! Becoming husband and wife has definitely been incredible, regardless of the circumstances.

I am so sorry! Our original planned date is this June 19 2021, and we are SUPER close to calling it off. We have the option to postpone to the following year, which we might do, however this whole process has been so emotional and exhausting for me a huge part of me doesn't want to drag things out longer. That being said, our plan is a wedding of about 65 people (so small anyway). If we cancelled it - I'd still like to get married on our original date with just me, fiance, his parents, my parents and siblings but I hear you bc my fear is I think I will be in tears the whole day. Like it isn't what I pictured, it's been so emotional to begin with, my brain is fresh out of cute creative ideas for this small elopement of sorts and it just makes me sad vs happy whenever I think about it. So you aren't alone, I totally understand.

View Quoted Comment And I agree with you, coming on here and seeing similar stories helps a lot. Seeing people having or planning their weddings as normal stings but its not their fault. Good to know I’m not the only one this happened to!! ❤️

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Our situation had a lot of similarities. We planned a wedding with 60-80 guests (so on the smaller side) for May 2020, and then postponed to June 2021 and eloped on our original day. We just had my mom, his parents, and a few friends in attendance, 12 people in total including our photographer and officiants, plus our dog. His sister couldn't come and one of the 12 wasn't even invited to our wedding so that part still makes me angry, because there are probably 100 people I would have rather had there instead. Our venue let us use their outdoor ceremony site, but we didn't have any chairs or tables, so everyone just stood and we didn't do a meal. My MIL in particularly was really nervous, so everyone was super cautious and kept their distance, and her being so anxious kind of made everyone uncomfortable because they didn't know how to act and didn't want to do anything that would make her feel unsafe. I honestly think a smaller event could have felt fine if we had been able to carefully pick who was included, and they had all really embraced our wedding, but having someone there who didn't feel comfortable being there (even though they really wanted to be and were really happy for us) really put off the mood of the whole event. I feel like other people would have interacted with us and relaxed more if they hadn't been so concerned with my MIL, and I feel like the people who were happiest at our elopement were our moms and not us. Everyone solemnly standing and unsure what to do or how to act felt more like a funeral than a wedding.

After the elopement we stopped by our friends house and they greeted us in the backyard all dressed up and with champagne, and spending time with them felt more celebratory than the ceremony itself because they were so excited to celebrate with us. So I feel like small can be really nice if the people are joyful and happy. Almost like if you are going to do an elopement or micro-wedding do it with people you want to go on vacation with, not just the people who buy you Christmas gifts.

I really hope that even if you have a smaller elopement all of the people there will still be really excited for you and will do whatever they can to make it feel like a celebration and feel special. It is exhausting to plan a whole wedding and get your hopes up about it then have it fall through and even have to think about planning something else. I'm really glad we got married (even moreso now that our venue is saying June 2021 is off the table) but would have scrapped including anyone and just eloped on our own if I had known it would feel as disappointing as it did. I think my husband is happy our parents were there though. So that's tough too when you and your partner agree on this beautiful wedding but then when it comes down to an elopement you might not want the same thing.

I am so sorry you are having to deal with this and hope whatever happens works out for you.

We postponed an entire year from October 2020 to October 2021. So I don’t know how it will ultimately turn out, but we’ll see 🤷🏽‍♀️.


However, I think you raise a good point in that, couples need to know what they REALL want for their wedding before they make drastic changes to the plans. Everyone isn’t excited about quietly eloping or having a handful guests present. Those are some of the exact reasons why we postponed an entire year. We want to actually celebrate with our family and friends in attendance, with everything we planned. But if October 2021 rolls around and we have to scrap everything, we’re not going to postpone again. We’ll just elope with the 2 of us and have a big celebration/renewal for her first anniversary. That would totally work for me!

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Yes, I think we were just caught between a rock and hard place. We knew we wanted to try for kids and that it was important for us to be married first, but because we were already 34/37 it felt like we couldn't push things off another 1-2 years to wait for the pandemic to subside. I think we both felt it was important for our parents to be there, but I'm not sure if we felt that way more "for them" or "for us." When we knew we'd end up eloping, I felt somewhat excited about the opportunity to have some beautiful mountaintop adventure elopement just the two of us, because that was something we had considered originally anyway, but our parents wouldn't have been able to hike with us, and we had a friend and his wife officiating and no other officiant line up, and it felt wrong to include this one couple we knew and not other "more important" people so we didn't do it. I don't think I anticipated how visibly uncomfortable his mom would be at the ceremony and how much that would rub off on how the day felt, or that including my mom would have been the completely stressful logistical nightmare that it ended up being. If we hadn't been so far along in planning our wedding (we had planned every detail at that point, so all the work had been done already) it would have been easier to shift plans and go in a different direction, but I felt like we already roped other people into it, and I felt really guilty not including the groomsmen who bought suits, the officiant who applied to be a JP and got sworn in, our parents who were so looking forward to it and had given us money, etc. If we had really only considered our own feelings, instead of worrying about offending everyone else, I'm pretty sure we would have done different that I was much happier with. Unfortunately, you can't just "do over" your wedding, so I'll have to remember this forever, and even if we eventually get to do a different celebration it just won't be the same. I'm hoping it will at least take some of the edge off though, and I'll feel less bitter.

I hope things will be more or less normal by October 2021 and you can have the wedding you wanted!

View Quoted Comment Thank you so much Kari for your comforting words! You touched my heart and made me cry.
I really appreciate you sharing your experience.

I read your email to my fiancée, and when you said the best thing is “ having a partner there by your side through all of it,” my fiancée raised his arms in excitement!
Again, I appreciate your support!
Blessings to you, Christal

View Quoted Comment Allie, I like your response! Very supportive and kind to Elisa.

View Quoted Comment Thank you, Kayse. I hope you have a fantastic marriage!

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Thank you so much, Christal! You just made my day. You're the best Sending lots of good vibes to you and yours!

View Quoted Comment Awww (smiles)