Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve received at least one email a week from someone I’ve never met wanting my advice about their wedding.
These people are not my clients. They’re just people looking for answers about how to safely plan, attend, or work a wedding during COVID. They find me because I’ve spent the past two years writing about these very topics including a book about modern wedding etiquette.
What follows is one of those emails. I’ve anonymized the person and, where needed, updated or removed certain details. The person has also OK’d that I share our conversation.
I’m calling this series “Dear Wedding Planner.” Join my newsletter to learn when I publish the next question. See previous installments here.
Dear Wedding Planner:
My partner and I are planning our wedding for summer 2022 but we’ve been seeing a lot of posts and articles about 2022 being even busier than 2021 because of a “wedding boom.”
We’re getting kind of stressed out and are worried that we’re already really behind in our planning even though the wedding itself isn’t for more than eight months. Any advice?
Sincerely,
Anxiously Planning
Dear Anxiously Planning:
Sorry, you’re screwed. It sounds like you and your partner are total idiots who got engaged and took 24 hours to enjoy it rather than immediately start paying people thousands of dollars for a wedding that you hadn’t even had a moment to conceptualize yet. I’m not sure what you’ve been doing with the last decade of your life but really, it should have been spent on planning an event you weren’t even sure would happen.
Or, at least, that’s what the Wedding Industrial Complex would like you to think, and if that name is too conspiracy theories and yarn-covered bulletin boards for you, all good. You’ll still find what follows interesting.
Let’s start with where this whole wedding boom thing came from.
I’ve got a natural interest in this kind of thing plus five years of experience as a journalist so I spent some time researching this question. From what I can tell, the survey that kicked everything off was this one from a place called The Wedding Report.
I’m not going to get into the credentials of The Wedding Report or even the methodology of the survey because, honestly, all surveys in the wedding industry are shit. I rage about this every year when I report on the Real Weddings Study, which is the only comprehensive survey of my $72 billion a year industry and also funded by The Knot, which isn’t exactly an impartial third-party.
But I won’t bore you with that rant because I already wrote a draft like that and it was 2,000 words of vitriol that was completely cathartic but didn’t answer your question.
Instead, I’m going to point out that the survey that inspired this Fast Company story, this Axios article, this piece on Yahoo!, and also this story on NPR isn’t actually all that clear on how bad the wedding boom actually is.
There’s a projected forecast — the 2.47 million weddings in 2022 number that has gotten so much attention — but the actual survey results are muddled. Notably:
“Some [wedding businesses] are seeing surges already while others are not.”
“5 percent of couples reporting hard to find a venue for their date.”
And, my personal favorite: “87 percent of couples say they are not having any issues finding what they need or want.” (Emphasis added.)
These results are similar to what another survey on the same topic found. This one comes from Sara Dunn, who is an SEO advisor who works directly with wedding vendors. Sara’s survey was exclusively of wedding vendors (435 of them) in September 2021 while The Wedding Report survey was of “2,229 consumers and 283 businesses” in June 2021.
Here’s what Sara found:
“54 percent of respondents rated 2022 as somewhat busier or significantly busier than ‘average’ wedding seasons pre-COVID.”
“26 percent of respondents aren’t feeling the 2022 boom, rating 2022 as somewhat or significantly less busy than average.”
And, again my favorite: “Every wedding business is individual, experiencing different things for their current and upcoming seasons.”
This sounds salty and I don’t mean for it to. I’m glad these surveys exist because goddamn does the wedding industry need more hard numbers to back up its own bullshit. I also think these surveys are an excellent reminder of something that, rationally, we all already know: There are no simple stories, particularly when COVID is involved.
Does this mean the 2022 wedding boom doesn’t exist?
No, that’s not what this means.
There are still chronic staffing shortages in the service industry which, surprise, the wedding industry is a part of. There are still supply chain issues holding up things like flowers and fabric. There are still a lot of very tired people who are feeling trapped in an industry that hasn’t supported them and in many ways, actively harmed them and their families during a global pandemic.
And there’s not a damn thing you and your partner can do about any of it.
Because that’s what couples are really asking me when they say, “How bad is the boom?” They want to know how to fix a thing that could have really bad implications for something they care a lot about.
You can’t fix it. It’s too big and too messy and really, you have better things to do with your time, money, and brainpower that fight a thing that probably isn’t quite as bad as it’s rumored to be anyway. The good news is that while you can’t fix the wedding boom, you can make it work for you.
And as for my fellow wedding vendors out there, I hope you take this moment to exhale. Because you’ve all been telling me the same things that couples are telling me: “I keep reading about the wedding boom but I must be doing something wrong because my numbers are pretty much the same as they always have been.”
The Wedding Industrial Complex doesn’t play fair. It’s mean and it’s nasty and it could care less how it makes people feel because it’s not a person, it’s a system and what it wants more than anything is to make you feel so stressed out that you throw money at the feeling to make it go away.
We all give into this in some way. Hell, I wrote a book about wedding planning and it’s available on Amazon. The trick is to make these choices as consciously as possible with the goal of inflicting as little harm on other humans as possible.
For you, Anxiously Planning, that means being nice to yourself.
Remember that you and your partner have already done the hard part: You found each other.
Note that neither of you are getting a sabbatical to plan your wedding. Sure, in an ideal world, everything would have been done yesterday, but that’s not reality. Reality is holding your partner and asking, “Why are we having a wedding? How do we want to feel?”
Some stupid wedding boom isn’t going to change your intention. Get clear on that and the rest will follow. I promise.
Best,
Beth
Want to submit your own “Dear Wedding Planner” question? Email me at elisabeth@elisabethkramer.com. For the next installment, please subscribe to my newsletter. Thanks for reading.
Elisabeth “Beth” Kramer (she/her) is a wedding planner in Portland, Oregon, who’s fighting the Wedding Industrial Complex. She regularly consults on and coordinates weddings. A former magazine editor, Beth is the author of Modern Etiquette Wedding Planner, the host of the podcast The Teardown, and co-founder of Altared, an international event for wedding vendors who want to change the wedding industry. Learn more about her work by getting her newsletter and following her on Instagram and Twitter.
Elisabeth “Beth” Kramer (she/her). Photo: Marissa Solini Photography