For millions of Americans, weddings will be the first gatherings at which they will be surrounded by dozens—even hundreds—of people after a year of relative isolation. Deciding to attend likely means committing to interactions with strangers whose health status and adherence to guidelines you may not know.
It could mean booking airfare and accommodations with little idea of how things will look when the big day finally arrives. They have a set date, and they need an answer: Are you coming or not? Like me, Kari Post got legally married last year. I wanted a day when we could actually celebrate and feel safe to relax. The couple is planning a June wedding in New Hampshire, and trying to do so in the safest way possible, starting with a clear requirement: all guests must be vaccinated.
For a while she was texting friends every time their state expanded eligibility. Just schedule the damn appointment. She thinks most guests will comply, but across the U. Totally fine. We will rent less chairs and order less food. His presence was so meaningful to the couple that they considered changing their rules but ultimately decided to keep the original plan in place.
Feige, they agreed, would attend the outdoor ceremony but not the indoor reception. I have grappled with the idea of making people come to a party that is all about me and risking themselves in some way. And that really freaks me out still. Landis Bejar, a licensed mental health counselor, says such anxiety is now common.
She founded AisleTalk, a company that specializes in counseling couples as they plan their weddings, in Many of her patients are struggling to accept the fact that anyone who attends their wedding is consenting to some degree of risk. Herb Feige changed his mind about getting vaccinated.
Several I spoke to mentioned a person wedding in Maine last August that turned into a superspreader event : COVID cases were linked to the nuptials, and seven people died, none of whom actually attended the wedding.
Brides and grooms have been forced to become amateur public-health prognosticators. Until recently the CDC had recommended that vaccinated people continue to wear masks indoors in most settings. And state regulations for weddings are ever-changing and often inscrutable. California employs a tiered system based on case counts, which means a couple in one county might be able to host four times the number of guests as a couple in the next county. Mayor Muriel Bowser banned dancing at weddings, prompting a bride-to-be to file a lawsuit against the mayor in May.
Though that moratorium may sound like a grim rule torn from Footloose, the U. Can you seat strangers at the same table? What if the adults are vaccinated but their young children are not? Will people really want to crowd together on a dance floor? Do you require those who are not vaccinated to wear masks? Meanwhile, unless guests talk through their every concern with the engaged couple, they must decide whether to RSVP yes with at least some questions unanswered.
Of course not every attendee brings the same degree of worry. She left before dinner. Many brides and grooms have sunk a significant amount of money into rescheduling their events. And, as Post points out, the timing matters for those hoping to start a family. The narrow window became even narrower. The bad news for guests—a group not mutually exclusive from the brides and grooms, especially those of a certain age who find themselves on the wedding circuit—is there may not be, at least not for a while.
The flood of weddings means that many people will have to run through their cost-benefit analyses again and again. How social had they been during those months I spent secluded in my apartment interacting only with my husband? Was that girl drinking martinis maskless in a bar or her own home? It took me another several weeks to politely say I felt comfortable attending outdoor events but not indoor ones. The issue would come up again with a bridal shower, another wedding reception to be held indoors, and in trying to plan my own bachelorette party.
A beautiful mansion and sprawling estate cannot be separated from a horrifying violent history. These are monuments to American slavery, not a place to hold a celebration or a backdrop for beautiful photos. White Southerners may be the most likely candidates to choose a plantation wedding, as it might be the popular venue in the area, but they are far from alone.
Speaking to representatives for plantations like Middleton Place near Charleston, they say that people from all over the world, of all races and genders, opt to have their ceremony and reception there.
There are even celebrity examples. Though they received mostly positive coverage at the time, it has sparked criticism on social media since and it is something Reynolds says he and Lively now deeply regret. What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest.
What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy. Years ago we got married again at home—but shame works in weird ways. A giant fucking mistake like that can either cause you to shut down or it can reframe things and move you into action. Reynold's apology acknowledges a devastating blind spot that's shared by many: A willful ignorance of what plantations really were.
Joy Banner, director of communications at the Whitney Plantation , a museum in Louisiana dedicated to the history of slavery and its legacies. Ignorance of that fact will be much harder to justify in the future. Last year, The Knot , Zola , Martha Stewart Weddings , Pinterest, and others stopped promoting plantations as wedding venues, after Color of Change, an organization that advocates for racial justice, approached the companies with their objections to the practice.
Their letter outlined not only the history of these sites as places where humans were enslaved, abused, and separated from their families, but how their use as wedding and event venues continues to affect Black Americans today.
Plantations are former forced labor camps that brutalized and murdered millions of Black people in this country—they are not party spaces. Some wedding vendors have also begun to rethink their participation in weddings held at plantations.
Owners of Nashville florist studio FLWR Shop, Alex Vaughan and Quinn Kiesow, were doing a walkthrough with a wedding client several years ago on a plantation, when they came across the slave cabins.
Rather than confront it, we sweep it under the rug. To be sure, plantations do have value for modern society —just not as wedding venues. There are about plantation museums active in the United States today, and many do not hold weddings.
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