At the end of the month, I should be doing a wedding. This fact by itself isn’t all that noteworthy. In my part of the world, we’re six months into the COVID-19 pandemic and all of my 2020 weddings have changed plans (for obvious, very good reasons).
Back in June, the couple getting married at the end of this month decided (and I agreed) to reschedule their October reception to next year.
Like many of my 2020 couples, the bride and the groom decided they would still have a wedding this year on their original wedding date. It’ll be a much smaller gathering of only immediate loved ones to make sure that they and theirs stay safe. I won’t be at that wedding but am working next year’s.
Usually at this point, I butt out because a couple planning a wedding already has so many things going on and if they need me, they know I’m here for them. But I do check in because I am a Virgo and I just can’t help myself.
What she said
I wrote this particular couple and the bride replied. She told me that the past couple of weeks have been a blur between finalizing the timeline and coordinating the small details for the day. I read what she wrote and I nodded. I know that life. It’s kind of my job.
Which got me thinking: 100 precent of my couples have had to change their wedding plans because of COVID. That’s just life now. Of those clients, the majority have done what this couple chose to do: get married this year, do something next year.
There’s a term for this and I kind of hate it: The couple is having a sequel wedding. I’ll spare you the reasons I so strongly dislike the term (and rant about them in another post).
Instead, I want to point out something that seems painfully obvious to me but I haven’t seen anybody talking about: Couples are now planning not just one wedding, but two. And if that couple is straight, experience has shown me time and again that it’s the bride who’s doing most of the work.
10 hours a week into forever
Planning a wedding takes a lot of work. Hard numbers on this are difficult to come by but the best survey I know about calculated that wedding planning takes, on average, 10 hours a week.
This survey has its flaws — it’s old (2010) and it has a small, vague sample size (1,055 “working women”) — but it’s the only one I know about that talks about the actual time commitment of wedding planning. Plus, judging from the dozens of weddings that I’ve planned, 10 hours a week is just about right.
So what does that mean in this new era? Before COVID, the average length of an engagement (a.k.a. often the time when a couple plans their wedding) was 14 months.
Now, even if a couple gets married and thus ends the engagement part of their relationship, the planning goes on and on, if they’ve elected to also celebrate sometime in the future. We’re talking 25, maybe even 30 months of a regular weekly commitment.
True, the planning is often much lighter than it usually would be. This is because, more often than not, a couple had already lined up all the dominos for their 2020 event. They just needed to do the actual “go to the wedding” part. Then, COVID came along and they picked up their 2020 celebration and moved it (or, at least, part of it) into a new year, often 2021.
So sure, the hiring of vendors, the inviting of guests, the mocking up of timelines has all already happened (or can’t really happen until we get a lot closer to the 2021 date) but that doesn’t mean the work goes away.
There’s still the communicating to loved ones (“So, how’s the wedding planning?”). There’s still the emailing to vendors, some of whom may have (or will) go out of business between now and 2021. There’s still the shuffling and reshuffling of all of those cardboard boxes sitting in the hallway.
“Are you saying 2021 was a bad idea?”
No. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying check in with you and your partner. Assess your own brainpower. Identify your values as a couple in this particular situation.
For many couples, a 2021 celebration makes the most sense. This is because they want to celebrate with all of their people, not just the immediate, related ones. It’s also because they stand to lose a lot of money if they don’t.
For very good reasons, wedding vendors make deposits non-refundable. My fellow wedding planner Cindy Savage of Aisle Less Traveled writes about this much better than I can but in a nutshell, I make my deposits non-refundable because it’s the money I live on.
Also, as Cindy writes, “dates are our inventory” as wedding vendors. When you hire me, I am selling you a particular date and I can’t sell that date to anybody else.
So if you end your work with me on that date — even for very good, understandable reasons like a global pandemic — I’m kinda screwed. I’ve turned down all of the other customers who also wanted that date and there’s no getting them back. I know that’s not your fault but it’s why any money you’ve given me has to stay with me. It’s how I pay my bills.
I explain all this because if a couple decides to cancel all of their contracts with vendors, there’s a very good chance they’re not going to get their money back. In most situations, people want to get what they pay for and thus, we reschedule. We have the so-called “sequel wedding.”
So, now what?
I wrote this story because I want you to know that you’re not alone.
If you are feeling overwhelmed by wedding planning, I hear you.
If you are wondering if rescheduling was even a good idea but next summer is a long time away and a lot can happen between now and then right???, I hear you.
If you are finding you get unusually angry/anxious/annoyed/sad when people ask about your wedding, I hear you.
There are good reasons for this. I wish I had a way to make this easier for couples and for vendors but, unfortunately, fate did not make me an epidemiologist. So instead, I wrote this to give you a little context on what might be happening. I wanted to acknowledge that all over the world, couples are planning not just one but two weddings and it’s stressing them the hell out.
You’re doing a good job.