Waiting it Out: When Wedding Plans Get Rescheduled
My fiancé Tommy Dinunzio and I have attended several weddings this summer that were rescheduled from last year – all of them beautiful and moving events, especially because we know that the couples involved were heartbroken last summer as they watched their original wedding plans slip from their grasp due to COVID restrictions. When I started writing this piece, it was going to be about planning the loveliest autumn wedding possible. And then the news of possible re-masking began popping up. Tommy and I are planning a fall 2022 wedding, and when we started talking with event planners and vendors earlier this year, we were blissfully confident that COVID wouldn’t affect our plans. Now, of course, we have no idea what to expect.
I started talking with friends about the events that used to cancel weddings, namely snowstorms up north and tropical storms down south. And boy oh boy, have I got a story for you.
Nicole Becker is a native upstate New Yorker living in Boston with her husband Matt Petlinski. These two planned a destination wedding in Charleston, South Carolina, in October 2016. All systems were go for a charming Southern wedding day until Hurricane Matthew started making its way towards the coast,
joined by Hurricane Nicole in short order. I’m not kidding you – Nicole and Matt sat watching two monster eponymous (sort of) storms barreling toward their wedding venue just days prior to their I do’s. When I say that Nicole is herself a force of nature, I mean it in the best possible way. She is high-energy, quick-witted, and a person you will never forget after speaking with her even briefly. Had she been prone to a bridal meltdown, her energy could have colluded with the storms to create a mega-natureevent. Instead, they printed t-shirts celebrating this once-in-a-lifetime coincidence and kept their eyes on the radar.
Other weddings were canceled that week; Matt and Nicole’s fortunately went on as planned. But remembering their near-miss and staunch refusal to let a couple of storms rain on their wedding parade put things in perspective for me, and I hope it will speak to other brides-to-be as well. If Tommy and I have to change our plans due to COVID, we’ll have some time to think about a new date and time, and there’s no use crying over things that are out of our control. And like the couples who finally made it to the altar this summer, the celebration – wherever, whenever it happens – will be well worth the wait.