Love in a Time of Covid

The following story was originally published on morealike.net.

Seven weeks before our wedding, we had a walkthrough with our wedding coordinator. We went over timelines, guest count, and vendors, the seating arrangements at the ceremony, as if nothing were happening on the other side of the world.

Six weeks before our wedding, we sent a devastating email: cancel your flights, because there wouldn’t be a wedding to go to.

In ordinary times, such an email comes with mixed emotions. Those who knew the couple would never work out are secretly relieved; those who can’t get refunds on their flights and hotel reservations are annoyed; and those who didn’t get enough information are confused and perhaps frustrated. In our case, none of these were true. Covid had come, and our email was met only with sadness, with notes of regret and sympathy pinging the email inbox at regular intervals, perhaps the only sound in a very quiet house that day.

That note was not the only email we sent. In anticipation of better times ahead, we optimistically rescheduled our wedding for mid-September, about six months down the road. Surely, things would be safer by then; we would have so much more information and ways to keep ourselves safe. (Or maybe, we hoped but did not dare to speak, it was all an overreaction to a simple, curable illness.) But by late July, we knew that we’d have to send another email. I didn’t cry much about the whole ordeal and accepted it as a very shallow concern compared to what others were dealing with. But as I typed that second email, I was swept up in the waves of collective grief and frustration. I wanted to scream, to throw my computer — a symbol of the mis-information that continued to sow and spread hatred and division — out the window. It bubbled up in my chest, hot and heavy under my sternum, an unavoidable pressure. I looked at the slender golden band on my finger. What was I angry about? 

When we figured out that our plans for a May wedding wouldn’t happen, we decided to get married anyway. Practically nothing was open; I couldn’t get a florist to make me a bouquet or a bakery to make a cake. My dress was in my closet, unfinished. Tommy ordered silicone wedding bands in multiple sizes online, because we couldn’t find a jeweler to size his finger for a metal one. We ended up hosting our ceremony on Zoom, making it a strange kind of elopement: people were there, but at the same time, they weren’t. But still — we were married, legally and emotionally.

So by the time I was reaching out with our second postponement, we had been married for several months. For many, that Zoom wedding was a bright spot in the long months of isolation that felt so dark, even as the days were getting longer in the northern hemisphere. I was happy to be married, but as much as I loved my husband, I couldn’t get over the sense of loss that loomed over me every time I thought about our wedding.

For a long time, I felt ashamed and guilty for feeling that way. Was a wedding really so much about the pomp and circumstance, the blushing bride in the white dress, that I didn’t really want to be married so much as I wanted an extravagant, expensive, American wedding? Everyone says a bride looks beautiful on her wedding day, but I didn’t feel particularly lovely the day we said our vows. (In reality, I had spent so much time making my cake that morning that I hadn’t left enough time to do my hair and makeup.) Was it really that I wanted to be the center of attention so badly that the whole point of actually getting married was only secondary?

So I was left with all these complicated emotions: anger and frustration; guilt and shame; grief and loss. Yet I had done the thing I intended to do. There were rings on our fingers and a bank account in both names. I toyed with what it would mean to cancel our postponed celebration. We would lose several thousand dollars in deposits, but we would save more. All my planning and dreaming would result in nothing, but I had had fun doing it. Everyone important had been at our Zoom marriage and witnessed our ceremony and vows. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to let go of that little-girl fantasy. My mother’s wedding dress, altered to fit me, still hung in my closet.

Seventeen months to the day after our original marriage, we finally hosted our wedding celebration, live and in-person. It was a smaller group of guests than expected, with several canceling at the last minute and travel restrictions across countries preventing others from making it. My family in particular had a small showing; only two of my thirteen aunts and uncles and none of my grandparents or numerous cousins came. Tommy’s parents were trapped in Thailand, a 14-day quarantine separating us in addition to twelve hours and the ocean. I worried, again, that it wasn’t worth it, that I was throwing away my money and putting people at risk for nothing more than a vanity project. I needn’t have worried.

A day has never gone by faster in my life. After months of isolation, loneliness, and separation, masks hiding smiles and distancing keeping us from embracing each other, terrible emails and financial stress and politics, always wondering what was the right thing to do, we were able to laugh and dance. We were able to be fully human, to have joy and to share it, to hold and be held, to nourish one another’s hearts. I didn’t worry about anything. I didn’t care if nothing went right, because everything had already gone wrong. I was even surprised to find that it didn’t really matter who was there and who wasn’t, because I found it hard to think about missing anyone when 60 other people I loved — 61 if you count my dog — were there celebrating with me.

Maybe in the end it was still a vanity project. An American-style wedding is never not going to have some element of selfishness embroiled deep within the fabric of the ritual of it all. But it was so much more than that. We just received our wedding photos, and what I saw captured in them confirms what I felt that day: pure, unadulterated, and unconditional love.