I’m writing this in November 2020, which I note at the start because time has such heightened importance this year. The posts I shared in the spring feel like diary entries from a different era. Remember the one I wrote about this thing called COVID that’s just arrived in my city? Well, you know what they say about hindsight.
I’m writing this in November at the official end of my 2020 wedding season. I did three weddings this year, a far cry from my pre-pandemic goal of 20 but still more than I did my very first year in business so that’s something, right?
My next wedding isn’t until May and I don’t really count that one as the start of my season because, if it happens, it’ll be 35 people in a bar celebrating a marriage that began this year, not next. That means my first wedding of 2021, the one that I consider the start of my season, isn’t until June.
This was both an intentional and unintentional choice. It was intentional because I had a wedding booked for January 2021. This was a client who hired me in January 2020 and whom I really wanted to work for.
I made the decision to break up with that wedding because I personally didn’t feel safe working indoors with 50 people who would wear masks until they took them off to eat. I found a planner who did feel OK with this, refunded the couple half their money, and did my best to leave the campsite cleaner than I found it.
It is unclear to me if I succeeded. The couple seemed aloof in their emails though, thankfully, they didn’t threaten to sue me like the other couple whom I broke up with earlier this year.
The unintentional part of my 2021 season starting in June is that for months, I haven’t had a lead for next spring. This bucks historical trends — normally I would have booked at least two or three weddings for the months of April and May — but the silence doesn’t surprise me. It feels like the whole world is holding its breath and, honestly, I’m relieved not to be tempted to work weddings I likely wouldn’t feel safe at.
Which brings me to the point of this particular post. I’ve spent the last eight months thinking a lot about my career and I’ve realized something. COVID has done to the wedding industry what I wanted to do: Killed it.
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I have been in business for four years and went full-time in 2019. When I made the choice to leave my $72,000 a year magazine editor job for my $30,000 a year wedding planner job, I did so with the very clear goal of eventually working my way out of wedding coordinating.
The hours are long. The pay is shit. The labor is hell on my body. I didn’t want to be a 40-something wedding planner with swollen ankles, a bad back, and no money for retirement. I wanted something more.
In those famous last words, my intentions were good. I wanted to fight all of those nasty -isms that I saw concentrated in the wedding industry. I wanted to speak truth to power and make the world pay attention. The wedding industry makes $72 billion a year but publishers tell me my work is too niche. Nobody cares even as couple after couple tells me they feel forgotten, ignored, and even attacked by an industry that claimed to be about the one thing in the universe I believe to be holy: love.
I wanted to change that reality. I wanted to create a new world, a world with a wedding industry that prioritizes a couple’s lifetime of marriage over the one day of their wedding, that empowers people to have the vulnerable and important conversations about identity that the ritual of a wedding brings up but that we currently ignore, that bands vendors together so that we can create sustainable businesses that don’t break us and our families.
More than anything, I wanted to help.
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This post isn’t a declaration of defeat. I am not done.
I am about to launch the second season of my podcast and host the third iteration of an event I co-founded in 2018. For the first time ever, both ventures have sponsors; people are actually giving me money for things I’ve created out of thin air. That is a triumph, particularly now.
I have also written a book, a memoir-manifesto from a wedding planner who thought she knew it all until she got engaged. It is a 56,000-word story that has taken two years and the most difficult conversations of my life to create. So far I have pitched six agents. Two have said no. Four haven’t said anything. I am told this is the way of these things, that until I have a large enough platform or a viral article or an inside connection, the going will be tough and perhaps even impossible.
Last but certainly not least, I am serving my clients. I have 14 for 2021 and 1 in 2022. Every couple I book matters to me but these couples have a special place in my heart; COVID has come for all of their weddings.
Ten of them are reschedules from 2020. These couples have had to sit across from each other at their dining room table and have challenging conversations, perhaps the most challenging of their whole relationship. Who do we invite? Are we being selfish? Will we inadvertently spread illness and cause death?
The other five couples started planning during COVID and my heart aches for them, too. They want something so simple and pure: to marry the person they love even as the world burns around us.
It matters to me to serve these couples. They have already gone through so much. I must also prioritize my health and safety and that of my husband, the one person I live with. I do not yet know how to do this but, like all of us, I hope for the best.
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The funny thing is that, in some ways, I think the best has already happened: I wanted to burn down the wedding industry and make something new, and here I am standing in the smoldering ruins. The only difference is that I thought I’d be holding the match.
Instead, COVID has done what I always wanted: It has forced couples to talk. By necessity, they’ve been unable to default to the standard; 120 guests, $30,000, and wedding parties of 12 make much less sense mid-pandemic. Because of this, couples have had to ask themselves the question that I have long believed is the most important question when planning a wedding. Not where or when or how much but how do we want to feel on the day we get married.
COVID has also drained the money from my industry and like the tide going out, left many stranded. I have never seen such hardship and suffering as I have seen this year among my fellow vendors. Speaking for myself, I will make half of what I did in 2019, not counting government assistance.
Because of this loss, I have had to ask myself a question that I think many vendors are asking themselves: Why do I do this? “Easy money” is no longer an adequate answer because while I would argue that working weddings has never been easy, it most certainly isn’t now. Is $2,000 worth potentially catching a lethal virus or, worse yet, bringing it home? I do not know the answer but that question has made me ask so many others of myself and my work.
It is in asking those questions that I realized something big: The change that I have fought so hard for has already happened. The wedding industry is dead. Yes, yes, people are still having pre-pandemic weddings with the large guest counts and hugging and unmasked affection. But I believe these are the last breaths of a dying institution. By November 2021 — an impossible 12 months from now — such weddings will not only be out of fashion, they will be sneered at as the super spreader events that they are. Perhaps they will even be banned in all 50 states.
Will everything change when a vaccine arrives? Of course. Everything is always changing. Has 2020 taught us nothing? But I’ve come to believe that even if a vaccine arrives soon and the rollout is perfect and everyone takes it and no one reacts poorly, something fundamental has already shifted and from that, there is no going back.
Because here’s the thing: Couples really like their smaller, more intimate, less expensive weddings.
Countless couples have told me as much. Of course they wish COVID hadn’t come for their wedding, they’re honestly really happy with the final result.
Because of COVID, they could do away with so many traditions that didn’t feel like them but, under normal circumstances, they would have done “just because.” They could invite fewer people and as such, actually talk to all of their guests. And they’re desperately relieved to have spent a little less money on one single day. Now, maybe, just maybe, they can also afford that house or that kid or that trip they they wanted, too.
These conversations tell me that people have, inadvertently and under duress, discovered the truth that I have fought so hard to share with the world, the truth that is the thesis of my book, the mission statement of my podcast, the guiding star of everything that I do as a wedding planner fighting the Wedding Industrial Complex: There is no such thing as the perfect wedding except of course there is and it’s yours because you get to marry the person you love and there’s nothing more perfect than love.
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So what next? The answer is one that I have spent this whole long year learning to get comfortable saying: I don’t know.
I am serving my clients. I am pitching my book. I am publishing my podcast. I am hosting my event. I am applying for jobs. I am standing ankle-deep in ash and wondering what green tendril will push out of the ruins.
I wrote all of this down because, despite everything this year has taken, I find myself still clutching a small shred of hope that I can still get what I wanted: I can help.
Nine days out of ten, I look forward to what this new world will bring. How will the behemoths of my industry adapt even as they continue to produce out-of-touch surveys? How will couples wield their newly discovered power and advocate for wedding businesses that give as much as they take? How will vendors challenge themselves to collaborate for change rather than fight over scraps?
I don’t know but I can’t wait to find out.