A pop-up wedding? Sure, why not?
I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do.
That’s nine couples who made their marriage vows on Tuesday at a pop-up wedding chapel in downtown Toronto.
From single to matrimonially locked in an hour flat — and pop goes the champagne cork. With all the trimmings added: walk down the aisle, officiant (15-minute ceremony), bouquets and boutonnieres, macaroons and caramel popcorn, family photos and video, white orchids, live musical accompaniment, cocktail reception, toast to the happy couple. Tears.
“It’s all legal,” assured Chelsea Brooks, the PR person in charge. She describes these weddings as “turnkey.” Complete service and ready to rock — or waltz. Also, non-denominational.
Nobody threw rice, though. Probably too messy to clean up, with only minutes between the turnstiles spinning and another wedding party assembling — 20 guests max — at The Loft at Baro, on King Street West.
Admittedly I — nine times a bridesmaid, never a bride (two engagements broken) — don’t know a whole lot about wedding etiquette, except as a bystander in an ugly chiffon dress. And culturally the wedding celebrations I’ve witnessed have mostly been elaborate Italian-style affairs, years in the planning. (Not as elaborate, however, as the weddings I attended in Afghanistan, where families go into financial ruin, staging the most extravagant festivities imaginable, the show-off-y event of a lifetime.)
Seems like everything has gone pop-up these days, so why not marriage? If you can swipe right to date and left to dump, hop on the matchmaking app carousel to meet, speed-dial to try on instant compatibility — change lobsters and dance — then jiffy nuptials are hardly gonzo. Not so different, really, than an in-and-out at city hall or tying the knot at a Vegas wedding chapel. Just with more bells and whistles, on a deadline.
Millennials, with the attention span of a newt, seem particularly drawn to four-barsand-off, as explained to me by Lynzie Kent, founder of PopUp Chapel Co., which has wedlocked upwards of 300 couples in five cities across Canada since 2017.
“The way millennials get married now, their values are really changing,” said Kent. “They don’t want to spend a ton of money. They’d rather put that money towards buying a house or starting a life together.”
Couples are more frequently footing their own bill. They view excessive spending as wasteful, particularly for a one-day knees-up and toss-thegarter. Honeymoons are frequently deferred or ditched entirely because modern life and cohabiting have pretty much taken the honey out of the marital moon.
This particular pop-up package costs about $3,000, soup to nuts, albeit with neither soup nor nuts. And Tuesday’s marriages (three more on Wednesday) were comped by Birks, the Canadian jewelry company, which picked 15 couples from a write-in online campaign, choosing from the hopefuls’ narratives. (Birks also donated the cost of the ceremonies to an Indigenous sports charity.) As event sponsor, there was plenty of Birks blue in the decor. While I wouldn’t usually provide free advertising, this annoys me a lot less than having to repeatedly write Rogers Centre or Scotiabank into my copy.
Couples had a month’s warning.
“We debated it,” said Melissa Andrews, first of the brides to pledge her troth on Tuesday — although there was no troth actually mentioned in the vows — looking lovely in her strapless white wedding gown, 10 per cent discounted, preceded down the aisle by bridesmaids in emerald green.
“We’d been talking about getting married for a long time. But we both have big families and then COVID happened.” Also, Hudson and Scarlett happened, their two young children, and it’s hard to plan a wedding around pregnancies and babies.
In fact, Andrews had entered the “contest” without making much mention of it. She got the you’ve-been-selected email while visiting her sister and couldn’t believe it. “No, this can’t be real.” At which point her husband-to-be, Brian Erridge, asked: “What have you done?” “Nothing, I just entered this contest.”
Admittedly, they were skeptical at first. “Like, is this a scam?” Andrews had wondered.
So, what they’d originally envisioned down the road sometime as an event for maybe 120 relatives plus numerous friends was culled down to 19, by my count, not including a newborn. The mothers were be-gowned, the fathers jolly.
“It took away all the stress of planning,” said Erridge, as he peeled a banana for his son. “And it was a beautiful wedding, wasn’t it?”
Though the new Mr. & Missus, from Barrie, were to continue their celebration at the home of Andrews’ parents, they’d booked a hotel for the night. But on Wednesday, he’d be back at his job as a sheetmetal worker and she’d be back at her job in retail.
It’s rather uplifting, actually, that marriages are still being conducted, in whatever fashion, amidst an ongoing pandemic, though untold numbers of weddings have been cancelled, deferred or scrapped due to lockdown restrictions. The aforementioned Brooks, for example, pushed her own destination nuptials (St. Lucia) ahead a year, to next May. Optimistic and promising, like. Carving out a bit of the normal amidst the relentless abnormal.
Impossible to state with any accuracy what COVID has done to the institution of marriage — and divorce, for the matter. Anecdotally, I know of couples that have hied to move in together, especially when lockdowns were at their most restrictive, if more for the sake of convenience than heated attraction. Other couples of my acquaintance have bickered endlessly sharing a confined space and working from home, especially if cooped up with children. Trying times.
Looking through archived newspaper stories, I see where divorce lawyers — this, about halfway through the pandemic — were drooling over a boon in business, some claiming upwards of a 30 per cent increase in divorce filings.
Yet a study of five U.S. states undertaken by the Bowling Green State University’s Center for Family and Demographic Research found that divorces in Florida had actually plummeted by 28 per cent, in March to December 2020 — the meat of the pandemic, before vaccines — while marriages, understandably, had dropped by 33 per cent.
Statistics Canada at this point can provide numbers only for 2020 compared to 2019: 14.36 million married people in Canada in ’20, 14.15 million in ’19; 2.71 million divorced people in ’20, 2.68 million in ’19.
In what was a truly dreadful year for Canadians, more folks got married, without the rented halls and folderol, and fewer got divorced, apparently.
Meanwhile, back at the popup chapel, next couple on the itinerary is Lauren Baker and Declan Best.
And they all lived happily ever after …
Couples are more frequently footing their own bill. They view excessive spending as wasteful, particularly for a one-day knees-up and toss-the-garter