covid Wedding Guilt

Just got married yesterday. If people want to wear masks they will. If it's mandated and your venue has some restrictions have your wedding. Honestly we had a great time and covid was really the last thing on my mind because we had so much fun!

My daughter had 85 guests at her outdoor ceremony/reception in August. We let our guests know in several ways that we understood if they were not comfortable attending (50% were traveling 500 miles or more). We were almost hoping people would cancel last minute, but only 5 did. We required masks, had hand sanitizer available, had "bubble" seating charts... Our guests wore masks during the ceremony, cocktail hour and dancing but not while eating/drinking at assigned tables. That's when we had photographer take guest pictures (the small wedding party did not wear masks during ceremony, toasts, bridal party dances). As MOB, I did feel guilty and had many sleepless nights beforehand. I know many people on this site continue to be critical. We made the event as safe as we possibly could and I am pleased to say everyone from that day remains Covid-free. Some will say we we're lucky and took a chance, but we were as responsible as we could possibly be.

I understand your concerns and they are valid. I was in the same boat as you having already postponed once. The only thing that put my mind at ease was having clear and precise covid restrictions.

Guests wore masks at all times unless they were sitting down at their table eating or drinking. Myself and my husband wore masks except during the ceremony, first dances and cake cutting. Otherwise while mingling with guests we wore masks. We distanced the tables far apart and put 4-6 people at tables meant for 10. Even at the ceremony our chairs were very spread out and guests wore masks. My venue was very hands on about and served food from behind plastic shields and wore masks and kept distance. We are a week out and so far no calls of anyone having gotten sick.

Talk to your venue and vendors, mine helped me a lot feel at ease that we were doing our best with the situation we were given.

And at the end of the day if you don't feel comfortable- money is important but not as important as your sanity and health

Thank you for this sensitive post . I love Neeva and JM sunshine responses.


My wedding is scheduled for April 10th. I find it hard for the stupid venue not to allow you to reschedule . If you really wanted to reschedule , I wonder if you can take this to the health department . It’s your right and they should be much more understanding than that.
Anyways , I think if you enforce them to wear masks on dance floor , apply hand sanitizer and maintain social distance when eating and all, should mitigate the risks .
However one thing I would add to EASE your mind is going a step beyond : kindly request them to get a COVid test prior to the wedding ! Tell them to show you the result before coming to the wedding . If they are positive they can stay on a corner table and kindly request to remain socially distant . Honestly I think this is the way we are going to be able to move forward. Only with frequent and adequate testing and contact tracing .

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If anybody tests COVID positive they really shouldn't attend at all.

View Quoted Comment That’s a GREAT point ! just didn’t want to be the one mentioning it !


So you see the point I’m bringing up though. That’s the part our country is missing : mandatory testing .

We finally were able to have our wedding In July after being postponed from April. We took about 20 family members to a beach house for a week and had the wedding on the Saturday. It ended up being a quasi family reunion and we all stayed in a 7 bedroom house. I had extreme anxiety and guilt about it the two weeks before (namely because my parents and FIL would be there) (constant crying and breakdowns that I can now thankfully laugh about but I get the extreme guilt feelings). It was worse because family members were telling me “oh I was exposed a week ago” or they went on out of state trips. I kept asking if everyone was comfortable, wanted to change anything, etc. FH and I bought like 100 masks and had them around the house. We tried to institute a mask rule at all times while inside but honestly it didn’t stick (but this was before people got really serious and accepted it as the responsible thing). At the end of the day, guests did what they were comfortable doing (some lifelong friends and family members who were older didn’t attend) but FH was great about reminding me that we are not adults babysitters and people are free to make their own decisions. It worked out and we were lucky no one got sick or reported issues.


I think the only thing you can do is keep reminding yourself that it is not your responsibility to protect your guests—-people can choose to attend or not and get to decide their comfort level with interacting with other guests. Plus (as my sister told me more than once on the trip) you won’t know whether they got sick attending your event or at work or visiting others, etc. My family were so glad we held the wedding and we have some great memories of it. FH’s uncle died about 2 weeks after what would have been our original date. FH’s father had planned a huge party during our wedding weekend that he’ll never get to have with his brother.. There will be a lot of memories never had because of this pandemic—don’t deprive yourself of them because of worry enjoy the ones you will get.

Our venue was more cooperative, so we postponed our reception to next year, but we still got married and had a small wedding last month. Even though there were only fifteen people, I was still extremely nervous about exposing people to each other.

I decided I'd rather look at my photos and see people wearing masks than see people who had died because I didn't make everyone wear masks, so I made masks for everyone in our wedding colors to make them look less depressing in photos. We put them in boxes with mini hand sanitizers.
I did wear a mask down the aisle. We didn't have a first dance, but we probably wouldn't have worn masks for that because we would've only been close to each other, with everyone else more than six feet away.
We've gotten so used to wearing masks when we're around other people, so it didn't feel weird to wear them at the wedding. People kind of laughed when we had to take our masks off for the kiss, but that was the only moment where they felt really noticeable. We had plenty of mask-free pictures taken of just the two of us. Our other pictures are pretty unusual, but I love them.

View Quoted Comment Love this. Thank you