admin Feeling discouraged because Covid has changed your wedding plans? Don’t be! Lots of people are still having beautiful weddings and today I’m sharing Samantha’s Covid wedding story. You can find her at A Thriving State of Mind. All photography for Samantha’s wedding was done by Abby Byrd and you can find her here! Thank you to Samantha for sharing her Covid wedding story.
Samantha and Chris’s Wedding Story
“Chris and I met on Bumble in October of 2019. Even before our first date we bonded over messaging, and once we met we were inseparable. As the world came to a crashing halt in March 2020, we had so much extra time to spend together. It was a scary time, but also beautiful as we watched all the sitcoms, talked about all the things, and tried out new (at home) hobbies together. We decided to take a Covid safe trip to a mountain cabin to celebrate our 1 year dating anniversary and Chris surprised me with a gorgeous proposal! I said yes and after sharing the news with dear friends and family, we evaluated our wedding options.
When daydreaming about our wedding day, we imagined a big party, sit down dinner, DJ and dancing…the whole nine yards. At first, we thought about planning for October 2021 since that’s the month we met and got engaged in. We even scouted out a few different dreamy locations for the ceremony and reception.
The difficulty we kept running into was that these places were booked full with the backlog of 2020 and early 2021 weddings that were being rebooked!! Of course it made sense that those couples get first dibs, but it meant we weren’t going to get our first choice of dates or vendors. Or we’d need to push it off to 2022. Neither of us wanted to wait that long to start our marriage chapter!
While researching different solutions, I happened upon a new choice that many Covid couples were going with – a microwedding. With fewer than 10 guests, the risk of causing an outbreak was much lower, but since we really wanted his mom and my parents to be there, it seemed like the perfect option. We originally wanted to have it in Savannah, but eventually decided to stay in Atlanta to reduce the chance of exposure for us and our family. Luckily we came to that conclusion right before signing vendor contracts, whew!!
Turns out, planning a tiny wedding on a Wednesday evening at the end of March opened up our options so much! There’s not much competition for Wednesday evenings, which was awesome. We chose a riverside restaurant with a lovely wedding site right on the river bank. Building our wedding team of glam squad, photography, videography, music, florist, and officiant (my dear friend) all fell into place! Even better, we were able to get our first vaccine doses before the ceremony so we felt much safer.
Our wedding day dawned stormy and rainy meaning we had to move to our backup tent, but it didn’t even matter. We were surrounded by so much love between my parents, his mom, and my daughter. Miraculously, the rain let up just in time to take photos outdoors, so we still got the pictures next to the river that we had imagined. My friend led us in a gorgeous ceremony, where Chris and I shared vows we had written ourselves. The night wrapped up with a celebratory dinner!
We do plan to have a party at some point in the future to share our joy with friends (maybe a 5 year vow renewal?), but I would not have done our wedding any other way in this time of Covid-19. Everything was perfect, everyone stayed healthy, and we have many beautiful memories to last forever.”
Want to share your Covid wedding story? Let me know in the comments! Also make sure to check out Danielle and Katie’s Covid wedding stories
Great story, thanks for sharing.
Wow, these are some gorgeous photos and it truly looks and sounds like you still had a fantastic wedding! Things like the weather always make me nervous about weddings, but it’s great to see that the rain didn’t ruin things too much since you had a backup tent!
very interesting. Thanks for sharing.