No Planner is Exempt

ALEX & STEVE O'NEILL

March 13, 2020

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I wanted to take a moment to just write about our COVID-19 wedding experience as I know many brides have unfortunately had “an experience” with COVID in 2020 and now into 2021.

We had planned our wedding for March 28th, which ended up being the hottest Saturday in March ever (95 degrees), I would have melted in my dress. But it was funny, after working in the wedding industry for 6 years and never being the girl who really gave that much thought to her own wedding when I was younger, we decided to kind of do our own thing regarding our wedding, traditions were not a thing for us.

My husband is a head brewer, we like to party and have a good time, so we wanted the reception to be the best ever. We planned to get married at the courthouse on Friday with close family and have a rehearsal lunch that afternoon. Then on Saturday we had the big party planned. Two bands, great venue (Terminal B @ Fortnight Beer Company), our awesome photographer, amazing food and of course craft beer. We were so close to the wedding day, when we started to hear about Covid-19.

I honestly remember thinking “there’s no way they can close down the entire state, we will be fine”.

We had a few friends who worked for the court system, and they tend to get updates before the general public. They started to warn us of what may be coming. As March 10th and 11th started creeping up, I started to get phone calls from my family saying they didn’t think they would feel safe traveling anymore and were going to have to cancel coming for the wedding. I was upset, confused and frustrated and my husband was feeling the same. This was the one and only time we were going to get married in our life and were pretty devastated that it inevitably wasn’t going to happen the way we had planned. We still think back now and say, “dang that was gonna be the best party ever!”

On Thursday March 12th my husband called me at work and said, “Alex if we want to get married, we better go tomorrow before the courts shut down”, and that’s exactly what we ended up doing. At the end of the day, we wanted to be married, so we went down to the courthouse around midday on Friday March 13th (yes Friday the 13th, felt very 2020) and got married!

Honestly it was just as emotional that day as it would have been 2 weeks later. We ended up having to cancel the reception party and were fortunately able to get a lot of our money back. With COVID still around and so unknown we decided we could celebrate another time with family and friends. We still plan to wear our outfits one day, maybe an anniversary party, we still are unsure. I would say for any couple trying to decide what the heck to do, just get married. Fortunately for us the day was basically taken from us, we didn’t really have a choice since the entire country shut down on our original wedding date. But if you are able to get married, even if it is just a small group of people, the act of getting married and starting that next chapter was so important to me and I was ready. I am so glad we didn’t wait and made the choice we did!

Here’s to hoping things do go back to normal soon, so we can all celebrate the weddings, birthdays, milestones and celebrations that we missed out on this past year.

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