Yesterday, an article about weddings went viral and I could hardly believe my eyes.
If you’re new to this, the story we’re talking about is “Texas Wedding Photographers Have Seen Some $#!+” as written by Emily McCullar and published in Texas Monthly on December 16, 2020. The article shares the 2020 stories of wedding photographers in Texas.
I read this story and the first thought I had was, “Yep. This is my life.”
My own horror stories
I live in Oregon, not Texas, and I am a wedding planner, not a photographer, but I have spent the majority of 2020 navigating the exact same minefield that these vendors so heart-wrenchingly describe.
The story that leads the article about a wedding photographer who had spent an hour or two inside with the unmasked wedding party only to find out that one of the members had tested positive for COVID? Yep. I’ve heard some version of that tale several times from my vendor friends, many of whom have gotten COVID because of a wedding.
The anecdote about the bridesmaid who told a vendor, “If I’m willing to risk it, why aren’t you?” Mmhmm. Heard that “logic” in my own inbox. In one memorable email I got in September, a mother of the bride wrote me about the “crazy rules” around event regulations in my state. She wanted to know if I knew any places that would be breaking the law (not that she put it like that, of course).
As for that amazing last line about “I understand, but this is her wedding day”? Don’t even get me started on the couple who threatened to sue me.
It’s not just Texas
I am telling you all this because that wildly popular story in Texas Monthly? It’s not just “a Texas thing.” It’s happening everywhere in the U.S.
Just this past Saturday, I co-hosted an event that had 64 wedding vendors from nine states and two countries. The stories that I heard during Altared exactly mirror the stories shared in Texas Monthly.
Vendors are being asked to put themselves and their families at risk and then made to feel bad about it. As McCullar writes in Texas Monthly, “Wedding photographers find themselves in a tight spot. They need to shoot weddings in order to make a living, but that means consistently spending time in large groups … But because they’re serving a couple on their special day, once they’re at the wedding photographers can’t do much, if anything, to enforce any pandemic guidelines.”
This is bad enough but I’m here to tell you it isn’t just photographers. Everyone who is hired for a wedding is having this happen again and again and again. In my own state, which, in my opinion, has had some of the most realistic regulations around health and safety in the country, you won’t see the “w” word mentioned anywhere on the state-provided collateral.
The best we get is “gathering” and “social get-together,” two undefined terms that have very different implications when it comes to guest count. This means that when someone emails me about their wedding, I don’t even have the law to point to and say, “Hey, actually…” because the word “wedding” doesn’t appear.
Money and feelings
Mind you, this isn’t a rant about “stupid people with their stupid weddings,” as I’ve seen more than one person sound off about online in response to the Texas Monthly article. It’s much more complicated than that.
McCullar does a great job of pointing out the very real financial implications of a couple having to change their wedding plans. Do not discount these. They are real! At last count, the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. was $33,900, which, at least in my area, is a pretty decent down payment on an entire house.
Often, the deposit part of that $33,900 is non-refundable. Couples often feel attacked by this, which I understand. It is a lot of money and also, COVID already screwed up your wedding so why won’t [insert vendor] at least give you some money back?
The part to remember here is that deposits are non-refundable not because I, wedding vendor, am Scrooge McDuck diving into my vault of coins but because your deposit pays for my groceries. (My fellow wedding planner Cindy Savage of Aisle Less Traveled writes about this much more eloquently, if you want to learn more.)
Texas Monthly also acknowledges the extremely high emotional price of changing wedding plans. “Postponing a party is one thing,” one photographer told McCullar. “Postponing getting married is another.”
My own experience this year speaks to this so deeply. If I had a nickel for every time a couple has shared their grief with me, I wouldn’t currently be on unemployment. The pain here is real and the ramifications much more than sending a new save-the-date.
Some couples are on the brink of experiencing the second stress of re-re-scheduling. Others have lost their jobs between when they got engaged and now. Still more have lost loved ones they hoped to be at their wedding.
That’s why we — vendors, couples, and loved ones — must challenge ourselves to re-think what getting married looks like during COVID. I know from four years as a wedding planner with more than 30 weddings to her name that this is possible (and, in many ways, is actually good news for couples because the Wedding Industrial Complex has been dealt a mortal blow).
All we have to do — and I know “all” here is a loaded word — is remember joy. Call me crazy but “joy” is a lot easier to feel when we’re not sitting awkwardly in a crowded room of people wondering if that dude who just sneezed on the appetizers gave us COVID.
Where do we go from here?
Seeing the Texas Monthly article go viral gives me hope. Maybe, finally, people are listening to a story that I’ve been reporting for months. Could this be the article that finally inspires people to ask themselves what I know to be the most important question in all of wedding planning: Why are we having a wedding at all?
If you ask yourself that question, person planning a wedding, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the answer. My hope is that it’s rooted in love — for your partner, of course, but also for everyone whom you’re asking to attend your wedding. And if your answer is rooted in love, I think it goes without saying that it is also rooted in prioritizing that person’s health and safety.
Because you can have a wedding during COVID. You just have to play by some very good, throughly vetted rules that involve testing, quarantining, and, as they become more widely available, vaccines. Depending on where you live in the U.S., you may have to set these rules yourself because your local government hasn’t.
Your guests will thank you. So will your vendors. They will do this because as much as we all love a wedding, we love people not dying more.