Elopement Pivot: Reflections on Having an Elopement When You Planned for a Wedding
Like many COVID-19 couples, Max and I decided to postpone our planned wedding celebration and get eloped with our closest two friends. This was the best decision we could have made. We were ready to get married and begin a new chapter of our lives as husband and wife. Though our photos were beautiful and the experience was sacred, I still have grief for the celebration that could have been. Five months after our decision to elope and three months after getting married, I am still processing what this postponed wedding celebration will look like and how I will feel about it once it comes.
THE WEDDING GRIEF TRIGGERS.
Yesterday, my best friend started chatting with me about her new wedding-inspired Pinterest board. I told her that I’d recently taken a workshop on mood boards and Pinterest curation and was eager to share some of those concepts with her. Eventually, our conversation turned more concrete, about the actual wedding behind her boards. Her aesthetic goals were beautiful, her ideas behind the celebration were so intentional, and I started to bristle. I started to become agitated and sad.
It wasn't her. I wasn't jealous of the wedding that wasn't even beginning to be planned. But, I was jealous of her certainty. She was in that place where she knew that she could bring her vision to life. Her celebration would look the way her and her to-be fiance wanted it to look. Because they weren't planning on getting married for a few years, it would include the people she wanted it to include. Her decisions would be her own.
I realized how gutted I was by that. She, of course, did not mean to make me feel this way, but I did nevertheless. I was in an irritated mood the rest of the day, not wanting to admit what made me so upset.
I was so jealous of the breadth of possibility.
This was my grief. I had an elopement, I married my best friend, I had a beautiful day and laughed and was so quietly happy (my favorite type of happy), and I celebrated in my own way with some of my favorite people. That being said, that first item on that list wasn't in the plan. I wanted to celebrate with all of the people I loved, and I spent a good nine months planning and crafting my way to that celebration. I had started crafting an eighty-foot long faux floral installation that was going to hang in our tent. I was going alllll out.
And despite all that work, I couldn’t find a way to safely turn our celebration into a smaller form of our original vision. Having an immune-compromised family meant that intimate celebrations weren't on the table. The amount of deposits and payments we had already put into the wedding meant that we couldn't create all of the experiences we would have wanted out of an elopement as compared to if we had chosen that from the beginning. Unlike couples who decide to have an elopement because it aligned with their values, I felt that I chose an elopement because it was the best option available. Even with all I gained in choosing it (a more intimate ceremony, a less stressful day, more time with my husband), I still lost the family and friends who I wanted to witness the celebration and be an integral part of it. This is a value I wish I spent more time including into my elopement day and the part that I grieve the most. We compromised with COVID and made the best of the day we could. And it was a beautiful day.
But I still hold some grief.
SOCIETY + WEDDINGS + UGH.
SO LET’S BE HONEST ABOUT IT! Weddings have so much built up societal juju and emotional nonsense that it’s natural for us to feel all sorts of things about them (positive/negative), no matter the circumstances. Weddings during COVID hurt. Even if you manage to have an intimate wedding or put people in pods, you aren’t throwing your arms around everyone and celebrating on the dance floor the way you might have imagined.
Society and media throw the wedding planning process at women from every angle, from books to television to movies. We are shown what to expect and how to experience it. In general, you are supposed to be unbelievably happy and grateful. But COVID makes it even more difficult to feel those emotions about your wedding.
While I know that wedding processes and feelings aren't always the highest of highs, I had an expectation that for the most part, my wedding was going to be a positive experience.
And well, it wasn't all positive, really (And it isn't for some couples!). And that has contributed to my grief much more than I tend to admit. Working in the wedding industry, I have learned over and over that weddings tend to be full of mixed emotions. We put so much pressure on the day and moment, that sometimes the experience can feel like a let-down, or your annoying aunt is just really on a roll the day you don’t want her to be. In general, yes, weddings are lovely, happy celebrations, but incorporate external expectations, insecurities, family history, etc… and a large gathering can be a recipe for emotional breakdown for some. Many couples avoid these possibilities by turning to elopements. I am in a weird in between the two. I am balancing my disappointment in the day not being exactly what I imagined and acknowledging that the day was probably less stressful than it would be otherwise. Simply: I was happy throughout my day, but I deeply missed those that weren’t able to be there and wished they were able to join us.
On top of the grief of not having my family present, I also grieve not having gone through the set of traditions that our culture expects for a bride. I wanted to have a bridal shower, a bachelorette party, a night before the wedding slumber party with my bridesmaids, a rehearsal dinner, and a post-wedding send off to our honeymoon. These were the events planned to surround the wedding and build community to create excitement for the day we actually got married. They are also the events that I have been primed to expect with my wedding. They didn't happen in the way I envisioned them, so when the day came, the energy felt so different than I expected, and so different than what I had been told it would look like. COVID hit too late into the planning process to actively pivot every single one of those events along with the wedding.
In general, I was too overwhelmed in April to figure out how to get back into the “bridal” frame of mind.
I am teaching myself that that is okay. That I did the best I could in the circumstances. If I have learned anything working at Tapestry, it’s that no process is perfect and that we are always learning, pandemic or not. Society and the media don’t usually show the whole human picture in weddings and wedding planning, the stress we put on ourselves to make it exactly as imagined or expected to be. Because of that, we can have dueling emotions. You don’t need to be perfect on your wedding day or have a perfect wedding day, to have a good marriage. You can love your wedding day and still wish it was a little different. It’s all YES AND! It’s all both.
WHAT WAS VS. WHAT IS.
When I first began to plan our wedding in earnest, I knew I wanted to handle as much of the planning as I could. One, because I wanted to take on the process and own it. And two, because I wasn't working full time and wanted the project to fill up my day. I made intentional decisions about the planning process, design elements, vendors. I made sure to bring in elements that Max was excited about and eliminated the ones he hated. The wedding included most of our very large extended families and was going to be as much of a way to honor and care for the family that supported us throughout our relationship pre-marriage as it was going to be a giant party starring us.
Today, I am starting my own business and working as full-time as I can. We have a puppy. My husband is on his way to a promotion and has more responsibilities at work. Planning a wedding celebration two years into the future gives me very little joy. We are not in the same place we were when we started this process. In two years, who knows where we will be.
The beautiful thing about postponing our big celebration is that I can tailor it to the life I have in two years. I may not need to have a bridal shower, but I could have a Womxn’s Retreat Day. Or Max and I could be buying a house, so we could host a House Warming Shower. In any case, I am teaching myself to look forward to the celebration that future me calls to and am learning to let go of the ones I had to leave behind. I will grieve them, but I can turn that grief into something new as well.
Choosing to elope after cancelling your wedding has complicated feelings surrounding it. It’s OK to feel really happy on the day and sad the next week. Being sad doesn’t make your day any less special or meaningful; it just carries a different type of weight. Wherever you are in your own process of COVID wedding, whether postponing, pivoting, or reflecting, WE SEE YOU. Any reaction is OK because there aren’t any rules. This is new. And we are all in it together.
— Kelleen, Tapestry Content Manager