Pushing Your Date for covid

I totally hear you! I had to push my May 23rd date out to August 23rd. We’ve decided the wedding will take place no matter what. I’m in the Dallas area where cases are increasing so it’s a bit unsettling. I’ve had to accept that sometimes things don’t always work out the way I planned and that the end goal is to be married. No matter if only 1 person shows up. My focus is marrying the love of my life. If you have to postpone (or choose to), you can always have a big party/reception, etc. at a later date. You know?
I’m so sorry you’re going through this but know you’re not alone. Do what feels right for you. It will all work out. I promise. ❤️

I think a lot of the covid brides who postponed did it cause it boiled down to even if you had to drastically reduce your wedding down or you’re limited to no dancing and social distancing and masks - would you be ok with that? Or it boiled down to not wanting to feeling unsure of the date anymore.

Hello Sarah....
You are not the only one who had to postpone their wedding. Our date was this past Saturday, June 6, 2020. So since we couldn't have the wedding we planned we revamped it. We wanted to keep our original wedding date and the only way we could still have the pastor to do it is to follow CDC's guest rule (10ppl). The venue we had planned allowed us to push it back to June 5, 2021 so we DNT lose our money. Pastor allowed us to use the church and we had my parents, his dad, our 3 kids and a photographer. The rest of our family watch via zoom. We had a family dinner catered at our house afterwards w about 13 ppl. My mom stood in as my Matron of honor and his dad was his best man. We will do what we planned to do this year, next year w family and friends. I hope this helps w some ideas for you guys. I pray y'all have a great wedding one way or another. ❤️

Hi thanks for posting this, been such a wreck thinking about this and i dont like to bring it up because surrounding by everything else that is going on i sometimes feel selfish for worrying about my wedding, original date was May 2nd in Santa Barbara, Ca we decided to continue pushing through and moved our date to Sept 12th this year, as much money as weve put into all of this we just want to make it happen though sometimes i feel like its being selfish as we know guest count will inevitably have to go down, theres just so many plans ahead of us like buying our first real home and expanding the fam, if we dont have this wedding now we are afraid it just wont be a priority down the line. Sorry for the ramble i know im not alone, anyone else still going through with their plans soon and are u experiencing this uneasiness and guilt?

We ended up postponing most of what we had planned to next year, but we're still getting married on our original date. We're making the best of it by still having flowers, catering, etc. and I'm wearing my dress and the groom is wearing his tux. We'll be getting married in my parents' yard, which is definitely not what I had imagined,* but I think it's actually going to be really nice, and we'll still have the big party next year, so it's not like we're going to miss out on anything.


*I think it's fair to say that 2020 is not what anyone had imagined.

Good luck with whatever you decide!

I totally understand where you're coming from. I am in South Jersey and my wedding is scheduled for October 10th. I meet with my coordinator this weekend to see what is going to be happening. While our number of cases in Jersey have dropped significantly and we are starting to open things up on Monday there are still going to be restrictions. Right now they are allowing indoor gatherings of up to 50 people. My guest list has 165 people on it. Our ceremony is outside and the reception is inside. I am hoping that they are not going to require masks and no dancing.

View Quoted Comment Hi Melissa,


I know exactly how you feel! I live in Minneapolis area and with George Floyd protests a wedding seems a little silly to be worrying about. I don’t want my guests exposed to being sick but we’ve been planning this wedding for over a year and we’ve been together for 5. I just want to marry the man I love the way i planned! We’re planning on pushing to next October for our big day right now but part of me wants to still marry him this year and have the party next but my fiancée wants it to be the big special day we planned. It’s so hard but don’t feel guilty! People keep reminding me when I feel guilty for being upset that it’s totally justified to be upset that your big day isn’t going to happen how you wanted.

View Quoted Comment You’re so right! That sounds like it’ll be lovely, best of luck to you too!

View Quoted Comment This is exactly what we’re doing too! Dress/tux and alll.. what’re you doing for first dances? I’m having a dilemma if we do them at the backyard wedding? Or wait until the big one next year? Or just do it twice?

Hey Sarah. I know the feeling and it’s sucks. I pushed my wedding from June to September back in April. Well around May when the talk of Corona coming back, we called our wedding planner, moms and pastor and decided to get married in June. Last Sunday we got married in our backyard with 4 people in attendance and our entire family on Zoom. We didn’t miss a beat!


We saved some things for the actual reception in September like first dance and cake cutting. The thought of waiting 5 more months back in April was killing me! I now wake up to my husband, which is the whole idea! I can’t tell you what to do but I can tell you to go with your heart. Good luck 🍀 to you!

Our day was May 30th and I felt exactly like you did - not worth spending the money if it wasn't the celebration we wanted, and heartbroken by all of the possible "compromises" we came up with. We did end up eloping on our day and postponed the full wedding/reception to June 2021. It still wasn't what it should have been, but I feel much better now that we are actually married, and far less stressed about when the party happens. For us, being able to hug our loved ones and dance and make it a party is important, and I'd rather wait until we can do that then have a half-version of a wedding. I feel like if we did a heavily compromised wedding I would just feel resentment and spite at every future wedding I go to that wasn't marred by social distancing and pandemic precautions, especially if we kept all of the same vendors, etc. For me if our wedding was downgraded to a dinner party, then I would have had a much more conservative budget and picked a less expensive venue with fewer amenities. We didn't pick our venue with a gorgeous ceremony site, amazing bridal loft area, on site AirBnB, concrete dance floor, etc not to use any of those features.

We ended up eloping because my mom was diagnosed with cancer just 10 days before our original date. I'm glad we did it because I wanted my mom to see me in my dress, and I had some very beautiful and sweet moments with my husband on that day, but overall it was stressful and not at all what it should have been. It just didn't feel like a celebration at all with our loved ones standing away from us and wearing masks, and we had to play host to people in our home all weekend - cooking meals for everyone, having five people share a single 90 square foot bathroom, having people crashing on couches and floors - which was not at all relaxing or enjoyable for us. If that was my "only" wedding, I would be really disappointed but I'm looking forward to our "redo" wedding so have been somewhat able to move past the fact that the elopement wasn't really magical or anything dreams are made of. If it hadn't been really important to have our parents there I probably would have preferred to just elope with my husband, an officiant, and photographer and no one else, because then the experience would truly have been centered around us and we would likely have enjoyed more of it.

Based on my experience, I'd say its important for your wedding to FEEL like a celebration to you. Only you know what you need for it to feel that way, and if the restrictions in place are going to prevent you from doing those things, then I feel like the best options are to 1) postpone everything to a later date or 2) do something small that feels celebratory, and then do a bigger thing later. The other piece of advise I have is that your wedding and marriage is about the two of you. Focus on that when making your decision and try as much as possible not to worry about making other people happy about what you decide regarding your marriage/wedding during this awful pandemic. Good luck!

View Quoted Comment I think we're going to hold off and do them next year, but that's mainly because of a space issue. We don't have space for tent that can fit a dance floor in addition to socially distanced tables and I don't really want to plan anything that would be ruined by rain. I don't think there's anything wrong with doing it twice! If you do it this year, it's your actual first dance as a married couple, and next year it'd be part of your introduction to the world (of people you know) as a married couple.

View Quoted Comment So sorry to hear about your mom, hoping she makes a speedy recovery!


Thanks so much for the insight that’s what my fear is and why we wanted to have it all in one big day but we also want the relief of just being married as well. We’ve had a year 1/2 engagement and been together 5 years. I’m ready for this man to be my husband! Thanks again, it’s great to hear from someone who did it this way and get feedback.

View Quoted Comment Thanks so much for the insight Renee! Congrats to you and your new husband!!

View Quoted Comment Hi Shauna, I have the same date, about the same # of guests, and we’re getting married in CT. Curious what your wedding coordinator tells you!!

View Quoted Comment

Yea, I get it! My husband and I are in our mid-30s, we've been together for nearly 5 years, we've lived together for 4 of those years, we have a dog together, own a home, etc. We're 100% committed and I was just ready to be husband and wife. Also be married before trying for kids is really important to us, and pushing that off an entire year was super stressful because our window is already short. Granted with everything going on I'm not sure if/when we will try to start a family now, here is a sense of comfort that comes with being married now and knowing we can just dive into the baby conversation whenever feels right. Frankly, I just didn't want to wait to be married anymore.

I had not been handling the past couple months very well and the time between our original May 30, 2020 date and our rescheduled June 2021 date felt like this really dark and worrisome place for me - what if one of our parents got sick (was thinking covid, not cancer), what if one of us loses our jobs and doesn't have health insurance and then we don't have money to pay for the wedding anymore either, etc. It just felt like this possible lost time and this super uncertain window of anxiety, worry, and pain. I really wanted our wedding day to be one where we woke up engaged and ended married, but also felt like the anxiety of waiting would have been absolute torture. Dragging out what I had been feeling for the past couple months for a full additional year just seemed like an awful self-care decision.

When we decided to elope and went through with it a LOT of our friends and coworkers said they were so happy we did it. The level of "you are amazing for pulling something off it this horrible time and not letting a pandemic change you marrying the love of your life" was kind of amazing. And no one seems disappointed that next year's event won't be a wedding in the more traditional sense.

Some additional perks of eloping now - we wanted to include our dog, which was logistically far less challenging with our 10 person elopement than it would have been with our 80 person wedding. So he was there, we got some cute pictures, and next year we'll just have him in boarding for the weekend, which will be much easier. I got flowers from a different florist, which while not a big deal was kind of fun because there are three local growers/florists I swoon over and obviously only picked one for our wedding. I get to wear my dress twice, which most brides don't get to do. Considering its the most expensive article of clothing I've ever purchased, that's a nice bonus. My husband didn't break in his new shoes at all prior and had awful blisters after wearing them for just a couple hours - so now he knows he needs to wear them before our wedding next year, which will be more like 6-8+ hours in those shoes!

And the biggest perk is now that we are married, I care far less about when the wedding and reception happen. So if Covid is still around next year and we're still living in a socially distant dystopia, then we can push it off until 2022 or later - however long it takes for it to be the celebration we really want it to be!

Our elopement was not everything I wanted it to be, and the wedding I envisioned has had to change, but there was really no other choice. I spent a LOT of time grieving the loss of my wedding. I still feel slighted and am not "over it" and I'll probably always feel like something was stolen from me. But we had no control over it at all. What we wanted and planned just wasn't possible anymore, so we needed to make the best decision for us that could work in the enviroment/situation we were given.

No one can tell you what is right for you and your partner, and there is just no perfect answer or solution right now. The world situation is pretty awful. You just need to really prioritize what is important to you and go with it. Know it won't be perfect, but in the end of the day you being with your love is what matters.

View Quoted Comment

Katy, I will definitely let you know. I know CT is pretty much under the same restrictions that Jersey is.