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Nothing about a pandemic is very wedding-friendly. Think about your fairytale, traditional wedding. You have lots of guests – perhaps over 100. Your wedding day is one of the biggest days of your life, you will (hopefully) just have the one, and so you want everyone who has ever meant anything to you to be there. That means everyone spanning from your childhood through your college years up to the present. That’s a lot of people, and you’re not supposed to have a lot of people in one place during a pandemic. Now add the fact that many of your loved ones are spread out all over the country and even the globe, so being present for your wedding requires another thing that’s not being embraced during the pandemic: traveling. And what do you do at a wedding? You sit shoulder to shoulder at tables, clink the glasses you’ve put your mouths on during toasts, dance, and hug. Having a wedding that is both standard and safe these days is just not possible. You can have one or the other, but not both.
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted rapid and sometimes total changes to many industries and traditions, including the wedding industry. For those hoping to follow the guidelines to be safe, a complete redesign of their big day was required. Any vendor who relies on the wedding industry to survive had to become innovative, as did any betrothed couples who were still set on having their big day, pandemic be damned. As a result, some new wedding trends emerged. We gathered statistics from WeddingWire, The Knot, and other sources on wedding trends that came about during COVID.
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Hometown weddings
Parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins who pressured you in the past to hold your big day in your hometown may have finally gotten their wish, even if it wasn’t your preference. Hometown weddings were up from 25 percent to 41 percent from 2019 to 2020. Meanwhile, nearly 60 percent of couples got married where they currently live. While in non-pandemic times, couples may have had a, “It’s our big day. The dozens of you can travel to wherever the two of us want to be” mentality, that’s flipped. There’s less risk involved in just the two betrothed individuals traveling to (or staying) where the majority of their loved ones already live and having small nuptials, rather than asking a number of guests to hop on planes for a destination wedding.
