On Saturday, I got my second shot. So did my husband, the one other person I live with. This means that we will both be fully vaccinated on June 5, 2021.
That day, ironically, is the same day that my 2021 wedding season should be starting.
I say “should” because months ago, I broke up with June 5. I did this because I wasn’t confident I could safely do my job as a wedding planner if my husband and I weren’t fully vaccinated.
Should I have waited? In hindsight, seems like it. But remember, this was several months back. The vaccine existed but in my part of the world, the earliest we could expect the first shot was July 1 and even that seemed unlikely.
At the time, it felt like I had two options: Wait and see, or do what I’ve always done as a wedding planner and plan.
I picked the latter.
My plan
When I told the couple, they were lovely about it. To be fair, I created my plan with their needs in mind.
I found, vetted, and trained another wedding planner to step in (someone who was already fully vaccinated and thus more confident about working safely). I also offered — and did — work for free so that the balance could go to my replacement, not me.
I did this extra work for two reasons. First, I felt guilty. Any wedding vendor reading this will understand why. Our businesses are literally built on serving others. To assert myself as an individual was not only a risk to my reputation and financial stability, it was blasphemous. Wasn’t I the person whose own website said “I’ll do anything for you on your wedding day except bury a body”?
I’d always meant it until I realized that the body I was talking about might be my husband’s.
The second reason I did what I did was because I was afraid. My contract is strong and written by a lawyer. Still, I feared the couple would seek reprisals because it had happened before. In the most notorious instance, a couple threatened to sue me when I informed them that their plan to never require masks for their 2020 wedding was illegal, never mind unsafe. The result of that situation drained the savings I had in my business and gutted me personally.
I didn’t think this couple would do what that couple had but still, I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t go back to that place of despair. Instead, I did all that I could to prevent it and hoped it was enough.
Why I could literally afford to do this
It is crucial to note that my plan was only possible because my husband’s income was not impacted by the pandemic.
If I didn’t make the money we’d planned on, we might not be able to afford buying a house this year or having a kid next year but we could still make rent on our apartment this month. We could choose our health over my job.
That privilege is not the reality for many people and particularly many wedding vendors. We are service workers who are often self-employed. This means we have no HR departments or legal teams. Vendors have told me that they didn’t feel safe working a wedding but had to so they could make ends meet. Some of those vendors ended up getting COVID.
I don’t have a fix for this, but I would be remiss if I didn’t explain how crucial my husband’s income was in my making the choice that I made. Many people I respect and admire could not do the same, which is one of the reasons I have been so vocal about why regulations need to be clearer for weddings. How can we be expected to do our jobs safely if we don’t even know what is legal?
What I learned
So, after 14 months of back-and-forth, here we are: I’m due up to be fully vaxxed on the same day I should be working a wedding. What have I learned?
The most important question is “why.” Why are we having a wedding? Nobody asked this question before COVID and that’s such a shame. The answer is clarifying. It allows a couple to create the wedding they want, not the wedding they think they should have.
Boundaries matter. Many couples told me that COVID allowed them to have the wedding they always wanted but were too afraid to ask for. Like the question of “why,” I hope we don’t lose this as we move into whatever’s ahead.
What is legal? What is safe? These are the two questions I have used most in my work during COVID. I never thought of them before the pandemic but really, they always apply. Put in a non-pandemic way: Whose joy is celebrated? Who is safe? Who is not?
Any plan is a lie. But that doesn’t mean don’t have a plan. It means leave room for change because weddings are human events and thus are inherently messy.
It’s OK to say “I don’t know.” It sounds simple enough until you realize that my entire job is to know things. As a wedding planner, even when I don’t know things, I know things. Before COVID, you would never hear me tell a client otherwise. It was my job to figure out solutions to problems they hadn’t even thought of. These days? If I don’t know, I (try and) own it.
I want to help people. This is the answer I’m getting whenever I ask myself, “Do I still want to be a wedding planner?” I hear a similar response from other vendors who are still in this industry after the past year. We want to support couples plan weddings that are in line with their values. We want to run businesses that support our families and change the world. We want to help.
Each one is a miracle. The pandemic has reinforced something about a wedding that myself and many wedding vendors already knew: Each one is a miracle. Just think of the phrase “we are gathered here today.” How much have we missed that in the past year? How much will we honor it moving forward?
As is the way of these things, my 2021 wedding season now starts exactly three months from June 5. Between now and then, I’ll be rebuilding — myself and my business. I wrote this story so that as I rebuild, I also remember. I am not the same wedding planner, businessowner, or person I was before COVID. To forget that is a disservice to all I have lived through.