5 Tips for Planning a Pandemic Wedding
Editor’s note: The blog post “5 Tips for Planning a Pandemic Wedding” was first published on Jan. 27, 2021, and was updated on Jan. 29, 2022, for style. Wedding photography by Rianon Stephens.
If you are reading this blog post, congratulations on your engagement! When my husband and I got engaged in November 2018, we took a few months to slow down and enjoy that milestone in our relationship before we jumped into wedding planning. Our engagement was a special time in our life. Although we had been dating for eight years prior, we learned so much about ourselves and our relationship during our two-year engagement. I hope you take time to slow down and enjoy your engagement, too, before jumping into the craziness of planning a pandemic wedding.
Wedding planning reminds me of two of my favorite wedding movies; Bridesmaids with Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph and Bride Wars with Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson. Like the movies, I experienced excitement, stress, disappointments, and fall-outs with certain friends and family members while planning my wedding (and that was before the pandemic). Now, imagine planning your wedding with all those experiences, plus navigating a global pandemic. Not fun. But don't worry, I documented every step of our wedding journey, which you can read at the links below:
My husband and I were married in October 2020 after a series of setbacks due to the pandemic. We went from planning a wedding of 100+ people to having a virtual wedding with 15 in-person attendees. Two of those attendees were my mom and dad, and the other two were our sponsors/witnesses. The other 11 people were vendors we hired.
I felt so heartbroken after we postponed our wedding because of the pandemic, and it took me months to work through my feelings and let go of my big dream wedding. So if you're in the same boat, my heart goes out to you. From one pandemic couple to another, here are our five tips for planning a pandemic wedding.
01. Make safety a priority. As we all know and have experienced, the pandemic can change your wedding's plans at the snap of a finger, and we must work together to keep each other safe. Even if your state doesn't have safe gathering rules, be proactive by making safety a priority at your wedding. Require your guests to wear well-fitted face masks and social distance, and clearly communicate your requirements on your wedding website or invitation.
Before we postponed our wedding, we had many out-of-town guests and older relatives planning on celebrating our marriage with us. When we rescheduled our wedding date, we offered a virtual option, so they didn't feel the need to compromise their health to celebrate with us. Virtual weddings have come a long way since the beginning of the pandemic. I highly recommend researching it as an option at your wedding.
02. Communicate with your partner. In the TV show Friends S7 E17, Chandler shares that he wants the Swing Kings to play at his wedding. When he asks Monica if she wants him to call and book them today, Monica says no, she'll do it. Phoebe asks what his wedding job is, and he says to stay out of it.
As much as I love Friends, that episode was why it was important to include my husband in the wedding planning process. Here are some important topics you and your partner should discuss when planning a pandemic wedding:
Do you and your partner want to get married during the pandemic? Or do you want to wait until the pandemic is over?
Is a pandemic wedding the best option for you and your partner, or should you consider something smaller, like an elopement?
What does a pandemic wedding look like to you? What does it look like to your partner?
Will your wedding be micro-wedding, a virtual wedding, or both?
What are you and your partner's wedding must-haves and nice-to-haves?
How much are you and your partner willing to spend on a pandemic wedding vs. a traditional wedding?
Communicating with your partner while planning a wedding goes beyond the actual planning. It's also checking in with your partner on how you're both feeling during this process. Like I mentioned above, it took me a while to let go of the wedding we planned pre-pandemic after we postponed our wedding. I appreciated how patient my husband was with me during these check-ins, and it meant a lot that I could share my feelings with him.
03. Set a budget. The best thing about planning a pandemic wedding is the money you'll save. Let's be real, weddings are expensive. When we started planning our wedding pre-pandemic, the first thing we did was discuss our budget. My husband and I knew we didn't want to start our marriage in debt from our wedding. After calculating how much we had saved and were willing to spend, we set our budget to $10k. A tiny budget, considering the average cost of a wedding will be $23.52k in 2022. Since we scaled our wedding back due to our state's strict gathering rules, we spent a little over $3k on our entire wedding, including the deposits we lost pre-pandemic. Altogether we saved nearly $7k from our original budget (#win).
Here are some tips for setting a budget for your pandemic wedding:
Be open and honest with each other when setting your budget. Talk about your wedding expectations vs. reality and the must-haves vs. nice-to-haves.
Discuss how you plan on paying for your wedding. Do you want to start your marriage in debt from your wedding? Or would you rather put money aside for this special occasion?
Defer to our state's gathering rules to make it easier for you and your partner to lock in on a budget.
Remember, scaling your wedding back doesn't define you or your relationship. A wedding is just a day, but a marriage is a lifetime.
04. Create a contingency plan. I cannot stress how important it is to create a contingency plan when planning a pandemic wedding. Anything can happen during the pandemic — case counts can go up, businesses can shut down, essential people in your ceremony or reception can get sick, etc. So, it's a good idea to have different "if this, then that" scenarios.
05. Be open and honest with your vendors. My husband and I were so lucky to have understanding wedding vendors when we re-planned our wedding because of the pandemic. After taking some time to celebrate our engagement, we went straight to work booking our vendors even though we weren't getting married until Spring 2020.
Many of our vendors allowed us to keep our 2018 rates when we rescheduled our pandemic wedding with them. When talking with your vendors about your pandemic wedding, ask them to discuss in detail their contract, deposit, and re-booking policy with you. This is also a good time to discuss your new budget and contingency plans. Pro tip: Ask your vendors to email you a recap of everything you discussed for future reference. Also, keep all of your vendor contracts, documents, and receipts organized in a folder for safekeeping and easy referencing. You might want to consider keeping everything 1-2 years after getting married just in case you need to follow up with any vendors at a later date.