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Change the Date: The Stories of JLW’s COVID-19 Brides
Sarah Valerio
“Change the Dates,” “micro-weddings,” and “bridal masks” didn’t used to be common parlance among brides-to-be. COVID-19 changed that by having a profound impact on the lives of many. The pandemic has disrupted cherished milestone events, including the weddings of many JLW members. The postponement of a wedding is more than just a celebration delayed. It means putting life – including many times the hopes of starting a family or taking adventures – on hold.
During a time that should be full of joy and excitement planning one of the happiest days of their lives, the Junior League of Washington’s (JLW) affianced found their plans turned upside down and their excitement turned to stress and agony.
They faced the decision of whether to go forward and potentially risk the health and safety of their family, friends, and loved ones, to have a drastically different or smaller celebration, or to put their futures on hold and lose deposits, vendors, and venues.
SARAH VALERIO I write this as a COVID-19 bride myself. My fiance, Ford O’Connell, and I were engaged on January 1, 2020. At this time, still blissfully ignorant of the COVID-19 disease then largely relegated to China, we planned our destination wedding for November 14, 2020 in Nassau, Bahamas.
When the COVID-19 outbreak struck the U.S. and lockdowns began to occur in March 2020, I began to panic, but with news outlets discussing reopenings in a matter of weeks or by Easter or Memorial Day, we were relieved that our wedding wasn’t until late fall.
As things worsened and the Bahamas closed their borders, we made the decision in July 2020 to postpone our wedding to March 13, 2021. This, we figured, would give the vaccine time to roll out.
We ordered and mailed out “Change the Dates,” which I had only recently learned were a thing, contacted our wedding vendors to reschedule, and amended all of our contracts with the new date. We canceled any future plans for a bridal shower or bachelor or bachelorette parties. To us, they were simply not worth the risk. At that point, we were just hoping for a wedding.
As we got into winter and our new date approached, several hotels near our venue remained shuttered and our venue informed us dancing on their property
SCARY TIMES ARE A GUT CHECK ON WHAT REALLY MATTERS...YOU JUST WANT THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE TO BE OKAY.
was banned through at least the end of the year. We weighed what our new wedding would look like. We would only have a handful of guests. Everyone would have to wear masks except when eating or drinking. Dancing might still be prohibited. Tables would be restricted to fewer seats, meaning more tables, more centerpieces, and more expenses. Buffets were disallowed, changing our welcome rehearsal dinner plans.
By January, the vaccine rollout still had not progressed widely enough to guarantee the safety of all of our guests. I spent days crying about a second postponement. I ordered another round of Change the Dates. Our new (and current as of this publication) date will be December 11, 2021.
As trying as it has been, I count my blessings. I’m grateful to still have a job when so many are not so lucky, and to have my friends and family alive and well. My fiance and one of my uncles were hospitalized with COVID-19, but they made it home safely in the end. Scary times are a gut check on what really matters and during times like that, a wedding postponement seems very small and insignificant. You just want the people you love to be okay.
I also have my fiance by my side loving and supporting me. Adversity can bring people together or tear them apart, and for us, the experience has brought us closer and we hope will make the celebration all the more joyful when we finally get to have it.
I knew there had to be other brides in JLW in the same boat and when I reached out, I was inundated with responses. Here are their stories about love persevering during a very trying time.
GABRIELLE KAUFMAN: Wedding Date(s): May 23, 2020 > April 24, 2021 > April 23, 2022 Wedding Location: Woodlawn House, Alexandria, VA Gabrielle Kaufman lost not only her wedding date, but her job as a result of the pandemic. Her first COVID-19 wedding disruption came as she was planning her March 14, 2020 bachelorette party in Paris, a place where she had spent most of her 20s and where she had gone to college. According to Kaufman, “I was trying on little white dresses to pack while simultaneously setting a google alert for ‘France Coronavirus.’ My colleague’s husband worked in federal aviation and by Monday, March 9 she relayed information that made me seriously doubt I’d be flying on Thursday. When I told my colleagues that I was canceling my trip and was concerned about my bridal shower in April and my wedding in May, I distinctly recall them accusing me of being too dramatic. By the next afternoon, HR circulated our offices asking anyone who had been on a plane in the previous two weeks to start telework. We didn’t know then that we’d never return to our office.”
That Thursday evening, the very same night Kaufman was to fly out for her now-canceled bachelorette party, all travel from Europe was halted due to the surge in cases on the continent.
She and her fiance quickly rescheduled their May 23, 2020 wedding, postponing for nearly an entire year to April 24, 2021. She says people again thought she was overreacting by pushing so far out, “but we were certain 6 months wouldn’t be enough time to ensure large gatherings were safe and figured an entire year would be largely enough time. You have no idea how naive I feel now! Our wedding planner was wonderful in postponing all of our vendors swiftly and although many were resistant, wanting us to push our wedding to fall, she managed to convince them all. I don’t think people realized yet the scope of what we were about to experience.”
Weeks after postponing her wedding, Kaufman, who worked in an industry with a lot of international travel, was laid off, along with over 50% of her colleagues. According to Kaufman, it was done “with very little warning.” Having spent her entire career working in events, she says she saw her industry vanish overnight. “I grieved the loss of my job and of my career far more than I expected, perhaps because the early days of the pandemic offered so little distraction other than Tiger King and baking bread.”
Still, Kaufman tried to stay optimistic. “There were upsides – I learned to cook, I finally had time to spend with my fiance after years of us both traveling for work, but I missed my family and I missed my friends. Even as restrictions lifted, the numbers were high and it didn’t feel safe to gather with people. It was also painful to see large weddings being celebrated in the press all summer long. I thought of my mother and of my in-laws, of all the people we wanted to gather together for our wedding, and how risky it would be should anyone get sick.”
As fall stretched into winter, it became increasingly clear to Kaufman that her April 2021 wedding wouldn’t happen either. “I had a health scare that made me even more cautious about the dangers of COVID. I knew I had to start thinking about wedding dress alterations and new Save the Dates, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it – in my heart, I knew that we’d have to postpone again. As someone who worked in events, it felt horrible to imagine the precarious situations the vendors
found themselves in and I was truly torn between forging ahead with a small wedding or waiting to have something closer to what we had originally planned. When my fiance mentioned that we wouldn’t need a band or a DJ because we wouldn’t be able to have any dancing, the decision was clear for me.”
She postponed another year. “Although we’ll have to pay price increases and many of our guests will no longer be able to attend, it feels worth it to have a wedding that feels closer to ‘normal’. What is heartbreaking, however, is that by the third postponement it feels like the joy of being a bride has been taken. There is no more looking forward to events, only crossing fingers and praying that no variants prove vaccine-resistant. It feels like all of the wonderful things that a bride gets to experience – the shower, the bachelorette, the bridal luncheon, the fittings – are all out of reach now.” One of the most challenging aspects for me has been finding the emotional capacity to grieve this situation. As a Junior Leaguer, I’m involved in my community which means I see the real devastation this pandemic has caused – death, sickness, economic suffering. It feels flippant to grieve the loss of a wedding with so much hardship around us. The first time we postponed, it felt like we were doing something noble and good for our community. But I’ve taken our second postponement much more personally, in large part because our parents, who are in their 70s, are all at risk for getting seriously ill from COVID, and I pray that they’ll make it to our wedding. I lost my dad as a teenager and I have genuinely spent months petrified that my mother would get COVID and not make it to my wedding.”
“Something that did help me put things in perspective, however, was the teenagers in my life,” Kaufman reflects. “My fiance’s daughter graduated high school in 2020 and started college this past September. While we were able to postpone our wedding, she has entirely missed out on prom, graduation, and a normal freshman year of college – she recently rushed a sorority entirely via Zoom. These are things that can’t be postponed, although I do reassure her that the class of 2020 will at least be written into the history books!”
“The pandemic has been so strange – the entire world is grieving the loss of our lives as we knew them. We’ve all had a terrible year. But something that has heartened me has been to see how people are really talking about mental health and how missing out on a wedding or graduation really can be devastating. I hope that my experience will let other brides know that it’s okay to be sad about your wedding and care about what’s happening in the world – there is space for both. And that together, we will all get through this.”
ALLIE WILLIAMS: Wedding Date(s): September 5, 2020 > September 4, 2021 Wedding Location: Roanoke, VA Allie Williams, a recent transfer from the Junior League of Seattle, knew early that COVID-19 wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. She decided in April 2020 to push her September 5, 2020 wedding back one full year. “We felt like there was so much uncertainty even then when COVID had barely started in the US that we didn’t want to take on the stress of trying to fully revamp our wedding with so much unknown,” Williams explains.
While she would wait to celebrate her wedding, she and her then-fiance didn’t want to wait to get married. “We bounced around a ton of ideas as to what we could do in 2020 in lieu of our full wedding. We considered a small ceremony with just family but finding an appropriate and safe location for such a thing was proving difficult as both families would have needed to travel. Many of our immediate family members also fell into the essential worker category so we felt uneasy about gathering. After discovering that DC is one of only three or four places where you can legally marry yourselves without an ordained individual to do the ceremony, my now husband and I chose to do a private elopement with just the two of us and a photographer here in Rock Creek Park. I didn’t wear my wedding gown, I didn’t even wear white. I went with a floral, summery dress and a bouquet of tulips from Whole Foods. We scrambled to get our hands on rings and I ended up slipping a $2 silicon band on my husband’s hand after his got lost in the mail,” says Williams, adding, “But that was fine because for this ceremony, we didn’t need fancy things; we just needed each other.”
Williams feels confident that come September, their outdoor, rooftop venue will be a comfortable and safe place to host their original guest list. “We’ll be revising our plans a bit to turn our ceremony into more of a vows renewal and I’ll finally get to wear my wedding gown that’s been hiding in the closet for a year!”
NICOLE BLUM: Wedding Date(s): April 10, 2020 > October 16, 2021 Wedding Location: The Roosevelt, New Orleans, Louisiana Nicole Blum is in her second year with JLW and is a member of the Digital Media Committee. She and her fiance, Jeff Huberman, got engaged on February 29, 2020, on the precipice of COVID-19 shutdowns in the U.S., after three and a half years of dating.
“Jeff decided to take me on a surprise “day-date,” which required a flight out of DCA. We flew into the city where we met, New Orleans, and he proposed to me that day! Little did we know just a few very short weeks after celebrating our engagement, our engagement period would offer us more time to plan the wedding than we expected.”
“In April 2020,” Blum explains, “we certainly thought we’d be in the COVIDclear by April 2021.”
So, she started planning. She booked her venues, bands, florists, photographers and all the rest for a 220-person affair at The Roosevelt in New Orleans, all with the hope that things would be back to normal.
“By the time late-fall of 2020 hit, we knew we had a decision to make. Questions
from our friends weren’t so much ‘Are you excited? Just six more months!’ but ‘So what are you going to do? Will you just get married and have a party later?’,” says Blum. “We realized that rather than celebrating and enjoying our engagement, we were fielding questions, weighing options, and creating contingency plans to ensure we were prepared to move the event.”
By the end of 2020, Blum and her fiance officially made the call and postponed their wedding in hopes of a safer celebration down the road.
“Luckily, we were able to shift all of our plans, lock in most of our previouslyconfirmed vendors, and let our friends and family know that love is not cancelled, we’re just giving them more time to practice their dance moves,” Blum adds.
“We learned along the way that we really weren’t married to the date of this life milestone, but that we just wanted to take this journey through life together and this experience was all just a part of that. I think what kept us going and what kept us grounded against our emotions was thinking about the reality of the situation. People were and still are fighting for their lives, fighting for the lives of others, and to us that always remained top-of-mind,” she says.
“While at times there were feelings of frustration and asking, ‘Why is it this way for me? My other friends and family got to have the most exciting engagements and have everything they ever wanted for their wedding’, ultimately we knew that the love we have for one another and the idea of building our lives together was so much stronger than the temporary nuances of rescheduling our wedding plans.”
COURTNEY PAUL: Wedding Date(s): April 17, 2021 > September 18, 2021 Wedding Location: The Willard, Washington, DC Courtney Paul, a JLW member since 2017, got engaged on a cruise in the Caribbean with her now-fiance, Sam McAuliffe, and her family. “Our 2019-2020 cruise departed December 29 – and Sam proposed that night in the middle of the ocean! Sam and I had been shopping for an engagement ring back in October, but, still, I was totally surprised. I didn’t think he would propose without his family being present / easily reachable. Fortunately, we were able to use the cruise wifi to call them and celebrate virtually.”
Paul had no idea that the online celebration she and her new fiance had that night would be a precursor for a world of celebrations about to go virtual in the months to come.
“While we were on this cruise, Sam and I booked another cruise for just the two of us a few months away as a kind of engagement-moon. Little did we know, the world was about to change big time,” Paul says.
As soon as Paul got home from her vacation, still blissfully unaware of the disaster on the horizon, she and her fiance started looking at venues in downtown Washington, DC to accommodate their 300-person guest list – an event-size that would become virtually unheard of mere months later.
They landed on The Willard.
“We signed the contract for April 17, 2021 toward the end of January – At that point, COVID felt like a distant problem. It was still just a cluster of cases in Wuhan, and experts were still studying to understand the risk of transmission and outbreak,” says Paul. “We thought the country would bounce back to normal relatively soon. We weren’t worried about the wedding – it was so far away! Everyone was saying spring would be safe. So, we pressed forward and booked several vendors. Vaccines were on track to be delivered by the new year, meaning people could be vaccinated and protected by the time my wedding rolled around.”
As Paul moved forward planning her still far-off wedding, she began to feel the impact on her plans. “I moved forward with floral and linens contracts – the impact of social distancing measures became abundantly clear. More space meant more tables – so, more linens and flower arrangements. Costs ballooned. I had to pick two different linens to mix and match, because there weren’t enough stock of any individual
option. We also began talking about ‘where we would draw the line.’ Would we still want to have our wedding if people had to wear masks? If they couldn’t congregate on a dance floor? We thought those were the biggest problems,” she reflects.
“Summer showed us just how dangerous gathering could be. Every party became a super spreader. I heard multiple horror stories about guests – family members – contracting COVID at weddings and becoming severely ill. Couples had to end their honeymoons early to come say goodbyes at the bedside. And experts were emphasizing: This is just the beginning. It’s going to get worse. I stopped sleeping, and even when I did sleep, I had nightmares. I knew at the end of the summer, I wanted to move my date. April didn’t seem feasible. Even if everyone was miraculously vaccinated by then, event restrictions wouldn’t magically open up overnight,” says Paul, adding “I simply couldn’t bear the thought of hosting a party that cost someone their life.”
In the early fall, she made the decision to push her wedding to September 18, 2021. “All of this – the new date and the new contract – was a big weight off my shoulders. Plus, we were able to get all of our chosen vendors to move to that date, too – and we only had to pay one small rebooking fee for one vendor. I feel so grateful.”
Now, she says, she is worried even September may not be far enough out. Paul says that if things aren’t safe by then, she will have a small, intimate wedding instead of waiting to get married again, and have a bigger celebration down the road. “We’ll still look forward to holding our big party at the Willard down the road, whenever that might be. 2023? Who knows?”
BETSY BENNETT: Wedding Date(s): May 23, 2020 > May 29, 2021 Wedding Location: The Sagamore Hotel, Lake George, NY Betsy Bennett, a JLW member since 2016, counts herself lucky to have had a bridal shower before COVID entered the scene. She had no idea it would be the only bit of normalcy she and her fiance, John Goerlich, would experience in her wedding journey.
“My bachelorette was planned for the first weekend in April 2020. I canceled it in early March when cases first started coming to the U.S.”
Shortly thereafter, the rest of Bennett’s plans changed rapidly as well. Mere months out from her wedding, “we had nearly every detail planned and contract signed, it was very difficult to watch COVID hit the US so quickly,” she says.
From there, things went from bad to worse as the true scale of COVID-19 came into focus for Bennett and things quickly grew out of her hands.
“My dress was being hand made in Milan, Italy at a small atelier. It was scheduled to be shipped to the US in early April. It was the first week of March and I saw on Instagram the atelier shut down all dressmaking operations and converted all of their available materials to mask making.”
By mid-March, Bennett says her venue furloughed all of its employees and sent an email to guests canceling their events.
She says she is thankful, however, that she was able to book a new date a year in the future, and that all of her contracts were able to be rolled over to the new date.
“My dress is now in the US, safe and sound,” Bennett says. This time around, they will have fewer in attendance to meet New York state regulations, but, she adds, “if this year has taught me anything it is the value of being with loved ones over being with everyone.”
BAILEY ARAGON: Wedding Date(s): July 4, 2020 > Summer 2022 Wedding Location: New Mexico Fifth year JLW member Bailey Aragon and her husband, Andrew, had always planned on a relatively small backyard wedding with family and just a few close friends. But as COVID-19 hit, she realized even that may not be possible.
The domino effect that would eventually cancel her wedding began with the cancelation of her May 2020 bridal shower and bachelorette party. “As our date drew closer, we realized we weren’t going to be comfortable holding an event and risk getting any of our family members sick”, says Aragon.
Still, she and her then-fiance did not want to wait to be married any longer.
“We decided we’d get married in DC on our original date and planned to postpone our original celebration to summer 2021. It was a really difficult decision – truly one of the most difficult decisions I’ve made. To have your family and wedding party all watch you get married 1,600 miles away on a Zoom call is less than ideal, but for us, it was better to do that, knowing they were safe than to have the day we wanted and risk losing anyone.”
When she started the process of planning wedding round two and started reaching out to venues in January and February, Aragon discovered many venues in New Mexico still weren’t holding gatherings.
“At this point,” says Aragon, “we’ve opted to postpone an additional summer rather than put ourselves through the ‘will we or won’t we’ stress for another go around. By the time we’re able to have any of the celebrations we originally wanted, we’ll be coming up on two years of marriage. I hope people will still be excited and want to celebrate, but it is very strange to wait your whole life for something that you’ve imagined and wanted, for it to happen with very little fanfare. I do get sad about that part, but at the end of the day I’m really glad we didn’t let the pandemic stop us and got married on the timeline we wanted to. In the long run, it was probably a good lesson for myself to stop waiting for life to happen and to just make it happen when I want it!”
SARAH STEINBERG: Wedding Date(s): May 24, 2020 > October 18, 2020 Wedding Location: Hendry House, Arlington, VA When COVID-19 entered the scene in March 2020, fourth year JLW member
Sarah Steinberg, co-chair of the JLW Holiday Cocktail Party, was having her engagement photos taken with her thenfiance, Shane Steinberg, and doing her hair and makeup trials.
“We obviously were concerned about what was happening, but figured we had two months and at that point, no one thought it would still be an issue,” says Steinberg. She sent out her invitations, paid her final deposits, and RSVPs started rolling in. She was 44 days out from her May 24, 2020 wedding date when Virginia, the location of her wedding, announced its stay-at-home order that would, at that time, run through the beginning of June. “At that point, we didn’t have a choice, but to postpone,” says Steinberg. “We couldn’t even get a marriage license, as there wasn’t a process in place that early on to get one issued remotely and the offices were closed.”
She reached out to her vendors with a new date of October 18, 2020. “We hoped that things would be better in 6 months - and our tent company at that time gave us a credit that had to be used in 6 months - so we set the new date for October. I sent an email to all the guests and ordered new save the dates, and just moved forward. Obviously,” Steinberg says looking back, “as we got a few months down the road, we realized it would be a long time before things got to normal, but we were determined to get married. I’m in my mid-30s and we want kids, so I didn’t feel like postponing again.”
In the early fall of 2020, Steinberg and her fiance started having conversations with her family and wedding party as to what they were comfortable with.
“Being a COVID bride has not been easy,” Steinberg reflects. “In a lot of ways, I feel like I missed out on a lot. I didn’t have a wedding shower or a bachelorette party. Both of those got cancelled less than a month before they were scheduled to happen [last] April. I missed out on getting to celebrate with my girlfriends in person,” though she adds that she did eventually have a virtual bachelorette party. But she says she feels, “like I missed out on most of the experiences where you actually get to feel like a bride and just get to enjoy the fact that you are getting married. All of that was replaced with doing a lot of stuff alone, planning and replanning, being filled with anxiety about whether or not we would actually be able to get married or if we would have to postpone again.” “After discussions with our family and taking into consideration that my father-in-law is high-risk, we decided to move forward with just immediate family and the wedding party, which would be a maximum of 25 people. Not everyone was comfortable coming or traveling to get here, so in the end there were 17 of us at the wedding. It may have been smaller than we originally planned, but it wound up being the perfect day,” she says.
Sarah Steinberg with friends and family on her wedding day
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