Being Newlyweds in a Global Pandemic

We got married on 7th February 2020 - a week after the first confirmed case of Coronavirus in the United Kingdom and as we were all dancing the night away in under the fairy lights, little did we know where the rest of the year was going to take us.

At the time, nobody was worried. The only cases in the UK were miles away from us, contracted through foreign travel and were being treated and contained. Nobody was concerned, the government were telling us it was fine, hell, I think there were plenty of jokes made over the course of the weekend. We were the first couple to get married at our wedding venue in 2020 (and in the decade, fun fact) and we were pretty much one of the last too.

I think it’s safe to say we didn’t expect to spend newly married life in lockdown together for 12 weeks and counting, without family and friends and with all our plans for the year in tatters. I don’t know what I envisaged to be honest, I had no real expectations for how it would look but it certainly wasn’t a global pandemic that’s for sure.

I spent the run up to the wedding talking about how unlikely it was that anything would change in our lives. We’ve been together since we were kids, we have lived together for years, I mean - was a legal document going to change anything really? Turns out, no, no it didn’t and when we emerged from the post mini moon bubble with stinking colds it really didn’t feel like anything had changed at all.

Fast forward a month and the uk, and the majority of the world, were in varying degrees of lockdown and our lives had changed beyond comprehension. Gone were the foundations we build our day to day lives on, I was out of work, Jos’ events and markets cancelled for the year, we were without family, our support network and we were relying on daily hours of exercise to keep our spirits up. And now, contrary to everything I discussed pre covid - now I spend my days talking about how we didn’t change after we got married but the world did.

I also feel like we’ve had very few chances to celebrate the wedding and our marriage since the day itself. There is no denying when it’s your big day it’s all you can focus on beforehand and it’s all you want to talk about afterward and there’s plenty of people I’d loved to have caught up with after that stormy weekend back in February. Friends I haven’t seen since that I didn’t get a chance to catch up with at the time, family we planned to see the week after who had to shoot off back home to deal with the pandemic, Jos’ brother and sister in law who live abroad and we likely won’t see now before the year is out. There’s plenty of people, friends and family we haven’t seen since the big day that I’d have loved to have had a chinwag with and seen how they enjoyed themselves and what memories they made that weekend that I was too busy to clock, but by the time we see them now it’ll be old news.

The other problem with the passing of time during this pandemic is how much everyone (understandably, and we feel much the same) are giving up on 2020 as a whole. How many memes have you seen about cancelling the year? About waking up in 2021. My own fav one says "‘2020 was a leap year, and it leaped straight into some bullshit’. Most conversations with friends include the phrase “I hate 2020” or “I have hated this year” and whilst that is absolutely true, and it’s not exactly been my best on record, having your wedding in the most hated year is a little kick in the teeth. Thinking of putting a caveat on all phrases related to hating the whole year of 2020 with a * but you enjoyed our wedding right? Right?

Of course, if you’re going on honeymoon after your wedding you generally don’t expect it to be cancelled because of a world wide travel ban but hey, it’s a hell of a story to tell the grandkids. We had our honeymoon booked for the first week of May and I left it to mid April to decide lockdown definitely wasn’t going to be relaxed and cancelled our trip. In a twist of fate the week we should have been there, the town where we were supposed to stay had an outbreak of covid in a care home and a lot of the news was broadcast from there but it was still a sad marker of what was to come for the year on the day we should have left to go away. Our honeymoon was also all planned around our 10 year anniversary so to spend that at home was not exactly the plan, although we did enjoy our Scottish themed evening at home.

Of course there are some positives to be being newlyweds at this time, primarily the ability to spend more time together. I expected life to return to normal after the wedding and it did, for a month. I went back to work, Jos started on his cider markets, I saw my nieces, met up with friends, we went shopping and had food out and takeaways and we celebrated birthdays. And then lockdown happened and we started spending every day in the house together and actually, it made me realise it is nice to spend some quality time together at this point of our lives. Maybe I would feel different if we were cooped up in a flat together, unable to get out but we are lucky enough to live on a big farm where Jos can continue to work, diversify his business and I can do my own thing indoors. We have time apart, but we’re around, we haven’t argued, we’ve found a renewed love of running, we’re really enjoying going on our daily walks and eating lunch together at the table every day and we haven’t stopped chinwagging. Nice to know the person you married doesn’t do your head in all the time.

Naturally, no matter the downsides of being newly married in a pandemic, the biggest factor is we DID get married. My heart breaks for everyone who didn’t get their big day in the last few months, and for all those who’s weddings still hang in the balance in the future, as well as for all the wedding venues and suppliers who might not survive the lack of a 2020 wedding season. Whenever I am feeling down about the things we have missed or the things we haven’t been able to do, I am grateful our wedding went ahead, before we even really knew there was a risk.

In the end, my favourite thing about having got married pre pandemic in the nick of time was that we pulled together all the people we love, for one last time before we couldn’t do it for some considerable time. Of course, it was unknowingly at the time but in the end it ended up being a blessing in disguise. We got all our loved ones in one room together and we spent 3 glorious days together. There are friends and family we probably won’t see for the rest of this year, there are smaller families within our extended family who were together for the last time pre pandemic who otherwise might not have spent any time together since Christmas. We got one last bash, lots of dancing, laughs and drunken antics in before the world went to shit and I am incredibly grateful we all had that time together.