Pandemic Weddings Offer A New Happy Ever After
When my mother got married she was a 20-year-old college student at Howard University in Washington D.C. My Mom’s dress was sourced from older women in the community – a tailored skirt and top with a tall headdress all made out of this beautiful, stiff embroidered white and silver fabric. She wore no makeup and her hair and henna was done by friends. My parents got married in a room that was typically used by the Muslim Student Association for Friday prayers, in a small building on campus. I remember walking into it decades later and wondering how they had managed to fit over 100 people – not everyone had a chair – into that room. They had two bunches of balloons for decoration, a two-tier cake, people brought their own food, and my Mom walked down the aisle with a simple bouquet of flowers. According to my father they spent $150 on everything. My parent’s 26th wedding anniversary was Feb. 24th and my extended family and I all hopped on a Zoom call to watch the wedding video.
What struck me was that it didn’t seem to matter that the room was sparsely decorated, that my Mom didn’t have on a dress, that my Dad didn’t wear a tux. Everyone in that room was there for my parents, to watch two people who loved each other unite in an Islamic wedding. I watched as the video panned over my parents’ very young faces, wet with tears from all the love they were receiving after the ceremony. That, to me, will always be one of the most perfect weddings I’ve ever seen. There are women I consider aunties who were at that wedding – some who planned it, who will still talk about it fondly, about how everything felt, how much happiness and love was in the room, and how excited people were to welcome this new couple into the community. I think that due to movies, Instagram, and the idolization of celebrities, our perceptions of what a perfect wedding is has changed. This has led to normalizing the growing, out-of-control expectations of families and communities, and the acceptance of astronomical fees attached to a day that should be focused on simply celebrating the unity of the bride and groom.
Weddings have evolved drastically since my parents were married. I am most familiar with Western, Islamic weddings but have experienced weddings in the Middle East, and noticed that we have become more focused on the entertaining part of weddings rather than the act of getting married itself. This de-emphasis on the sanctity of marriage might not be surprising considering that in 2018 the U.S. marriage rate reached a historic low. It is not uncommon to have live music, several course meals, wedding games and sometimes even flash mobs and group dances. Additionally, marriage ceremonies in many cultures used to be a celebration put on in large part by the community – the women would help cook food, share gowns, use local tailors for outfits, and the men would help physically set up a space. But as more people’s finances cannot support feeding and entertaining large gatherings, communities contribute less and less – you have massive event spaces like one I saw in Cambodia one January, where they marry 100 couples a night in the same space back to back just to save costs. Those collaborative, community centered elements of weddings also slowly die off as less people get married and families have the financial capital to hand over those roles to different facets of the wedding industry – florists, DJ’s, caterers, dressmakers, designers, bakers and more. Weddings are now ambitious, entertainment focused events, they are not at all community centered, and are mostly a flex. Even though I was raised by parents who had a wedding for $150, I knew that simply would not be possible for me when it came time for me to get married.
I was determined to make my wedding meaningful by having it on family property in a backyard. However I still wanted everything to look like something off of Pinterest. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone, but I was also determined to prove to myself that I could get the perfect wedding – I had been thinking about and pinning to my Pinterest boards for years – for cheap. My wedding cost about $5,000. My dress was $1,000 and I got it from the clearance rack of a bridal shop. Our delicious food was made by a local Senegalese woman, the cake was made by a small baker, and the most expensive part was probably the chairs, tables, and tent. I was proud of the fact that we’d only spent that much, because the wedding was so beautiful in the end. But this penny pinching, DIY approach to a Western style wedding was not popular or normal – until the pandemic showed up.
The pandemic forced many large weddings, dress boutiques, and caterers’ businesses to grind to a halt due to gathering restrictions. David Wood, president of the Association of Bridal Consultants told the Washington Post that, “most couples – about 80% of them – postponed or canceled their ceremonies after the U.S. outbreak began nearly a year ago.” Although everyone is looking forward to the world getting back to normal we’ve been given the unique opportunity to pause and take a second look at what a simple, intimate celebration of love looks like. I want that to become the new normal. Perhaps we have a chance to return to the focus on community centered and supported weddings – where the focus is on meaningful exchanges of love versus pomp and circumstance. I feel absolutely no sadness watching the pre-pandemic bridal industry die, because it preyed on our Western wedding fantasies and convinced us we needed to spend over $30,000 on a single day to be truly happy. During the pandemic, people who used to contribute all that money to the $55 billion wedding market in the US are finding that they aren’t sacrificing too much if they spend less – which is not something many had previously considered. Because of this, prices in parts of the industry – especially video recording services and wedding dresses – have fluctuated dramatically.
The demand for tools to host virtual weddings has skyrocketed during the pandemic. Whereas prior to COVID your uncle probably shakily held the camera as you walked down the aisle, professional videographers are in high demand. According to a survey of 12,000 couples with weddings booked through October 2020 by Zola, over one third (37%) are now considering virtual weddings. In addition, due to dress shops closing, designers have begun to create wedding dress alternatives that are not so pricey and available to buy online. Even mainstream online retailers like Thread and Needle, and ASOS are providing brides-to-be with gowns under $500 for their big day, all without compromising style or quality. Take online bridal boutique Azazie for example, showcasing $300 dresses (example on the right) that still feature quality embellishments like hand-sewn lace.
We need to get rid of the shame around choosing not to have an expensive dress or a big wedding after the pandemic, because that shame comes from the pressure to satisfy and entertain family, and has almost nothing to do with the people who matter most – the bride and groom. There are brides who had to have weddings over Zoom and consoled loved ones who couldn’t attend in person by saying they’d have bigger, fancier weddings when they feel safe having larger gatherings in person. It is almost as if pandemic weddings are the new elopement. But, the pandemic is still happening and the likelihood that the threat of COVID-19 will be around for several years after 2021 is quite high. My hope is that after all that waiting for the pandemic to end – with no end in sight – families will realize they don’t actually need a big wedding or to see a fancy dress. That the intimate, special ceremony they witnessed over the internet was just as valuable as a five course meal and flexing for the aunties.
Speaking of aunties, we need to bring back that community involvement when it comes to executing weddings. I have watched community members not pitch in to help in wedding festivities, still expect to be invited, and then grumble when they are not fed enough or the decorations are lackluster. The community has become more of a burden than a source of help to couples who may not have the financial means to host a large wedding. My parents were only able to have the wedding they had because everyone including friends, family, and the mothers of friends, all chipped in somewhere, and people were more than happy to do it. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room in the end. We have become more disconnected from our communities and perhaps that is where we can begin to repair this relationship and revive this tradition. The pandemic, despite its horrors, has rejuvenated an alternative approach to meaningful, beautiful weddings, and made it socially acceptable. Currently this concept is only acceptable temporarily. We need to make it acceptable permanently.
I have seen pictures on social media of acquaintances getting married in unpretentious gowns on the beach, the only witness the pastor, or in a single, traditional sari in a living room, the Imam present on Zoom. The bridal industry in the west and all it entails – florists, designers, bakers, musicians and wedding planners – was never really about prioritizing the moment of exchanging rings, vows and kisses, or the gravity of holy matrimony. It was always about profiting off of the entertaining aspect of weddings that has become more front and center. This industry however, truly bows to the whims of brides, the trends that we create, the norms that we set. It’s time for us not to use the ending of the pandemic as an excuse for reviving what we lost in big weddings and pricey dresses, but instead use it as a catalyst for charting a new path that is filled with more love, more happy tears, and being more economical than ever before.