The Rise of the Minimony and the Postpone Micro-Wedding

By Anna Russell

Source: The New Yorker

Planning a postpone wedding is a faff at the best of times; during a pandemic, it resembles purgatory. You’ve booked the venue, the flowers, the dance floor, and the d.j., only to be told that the venue will not open this year, the florist is out of business, and dancing is illegal. You rebook at a smaller venue—someone’s back yard, maybe—pick your own flowers (“Farmhouse chic!”), and install, at key entry points, hand-sanitizing stations with tasteful signs (“Spread love, not germs”), only to learn that a quarantine has been imposed on out-of-state visitors. Your parents and siblings will no longer be able to attend. They are upset; you will need to postpone. And so it goes.

For a year and a half, my partner and I had been planning a wedding in Crete, where he grew up. We were already legally married—town-hall ceremony—but we wanted the big shebang: the long train, the complicated seating plan, loved ones from all over the world spilling wine as they danced the sirtaki. We chose a date in June and then watched anxiously as the virus spread through January, and then February. Some time into my own pandemic-wedding purgatory, I began having dreams about my dress fitting in strange and otherworldly ways. The sleeves would inexplicably droop to the floor at the elbows, cartoon-like, or extend past my hands and behind me, like white lines on a highway. One day, in late March, after a relentlessly upbeat weekend at home—quarantinis! CrossFit by Zoom!—I sat down to postpone our wedding. I knew how to write the e-mail because I had already received several, from friends in the same boat. They were always warm, and gracious, and not too self-pitying; “What’s a wedding in all this?” they seemed to say. After I sent the note, I received a flurry of messages of relief and consolation. One friend, who had moved her own wedding twice, wrote simply, “Coronavirus is an asshole.”

All through the spring and summer—which is to say, all through wedding season—the virus wreaked havoc on the wedding industry. “It was bedlam,” Laura Krueger, of Kleinfeld Hotel Blocks, which helps couples book accommodations for their guests, told me. “There were no protocols in place.” On March 13th, the wedding-planning Web sites the Knot and WeddingWire set up an emergency hotline for panicked brides and grooms. “We had hundreds of calls per day for two months following that,” Jeffra Trumpower, at WeddingWire, told me recently. As lockdowns and travel restrictions came into force around the country, “couples started to call and say, ‘What do I do? I’m supposed to get married next weekend.’”

The wedding industry, floundering through waves of postponements, has developed a suite of options—and a vocabulary—for couples wanting to still splash out on their nuptials, global crisis notwithstanding. There’s now the “micro-wedding,” a small ceremony with fifty guests or fewer. You are encouraged to follow this up with a “sequel wedding,” a larger reception, at a later date. But when even fifty guests seems optimistic (or, depending on your location, illegal), there’s a smaller option, touted enthusiastically by the industry, available: the “minimony.” A minimony might have ten guests: parents, siblings, an officiant standing at a distance. It has all the components of a normal wedding—ceremony, reception, three-tiered cake—shrunk to pandemic proportions.

This is a significant shift. In a survey conducted by Zola, the wedding-planning and registry company, of more than two thousand engaged couples planning their wedding during the pandemic, half were planning a minimony. “Smaller guest lists are definitely a trend we see into the future for some time,” Emily Forrest, Zola’s director of communications, told me. In another survey, by the Knot and WeddingWire, of six hundred and eighty-four couples in the U.S. with weddings between September and January, fifty-eight per cent planned to keep their original date, with many opting for a pared-down guest list, and just seven per cent were pulling the plug altogether. “People are not cancelling,” Trumpower said.

All that rejiggering can take a toll on the bride- and groom-to-be, Freeman, the planner, told me: “People are starting to get fatigued, and they’re going through different phases of excitement and enthusiasm, and then resignation and upset.” I recognized the symptoms. She offers her clients guided meditations and advises them to stay present. “At a certain point in time, you can’t talk about the flowers and the music anymore, or the flavor of the cake,” she said. “It’s about so much more than that. How we get through this is how we handle anything in life.”

Six months after we sent our first wedding postponement e-mail, we had another decision to make. Pandemic-wise, nothing had changed. There was still no vaccine, and cases were rising. Should we postpone again? Cancel altogether? Slash our guest list? I scrolled past images of a socially distanced wedding in which the couple had used giant Teddy bears to separate guests. Where did they get the bears? I wondered. At a certain point, I came across a podcast called “Corona Brides,” in which the host, Jordie Shepherd, a coronavirus bride herself, interviews women (and sometimes couples) navigating the wedding-planning process during the pandemic.

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