People used to grimace a little when I told them I was getting married overseas. Not in a mean way, of course, but in a “how in the world are you doing that” kind of way. During a bulk of the process, it was fairly straightforward actually. Well, straightforward until the world shut down.
General Planning
James and I got engaged in August 2019 and decided to be married in October 2020. Once we had chosen a date, James and his sister went and toured four wedding venues of which there was a clear winner. Once we booked that in, I got to work on the vendors. Social media is very handy when it comes to wedding planning. After following various accounts and looking at what our venue recommended, I was able to narrow down fairly easily who would be our photographer, baker, decorator, and florist. We met with them during my visit in December of that year just to confirm everything and sign contracts.
Legal Planning
Being married in England means giving notice of your intent to marry. Generally, this is fairly easy. You go to your local registrar’s office and tell them you are getting married. When you don’t live in the UK, it gets more complicated. To simplify the confusing process, I had to “establish residency” for exactly 8 nights at a single UK address. I even had to have James’s parents write a letter saying I’d been there for that exact amount of time. We then went to an interview at a registry office in Manchester to declare our intent. Around two weeks later, we learned we had “passed” our interview and were allowed to be married.
The Pandemic Hits
When the pandemic hit in March, I didn’t think it would be much of an issue over six months later, but I was very wrong. James and I were very optimistic about our wedding going forward as planned until around August. In August, regulations in the UK were relatively light, so we had planned with our venue to have most of our previous plans in place with a few alterations to table arrangements and ceremony seating.
On September 22nd, everything changed. Weddings were now limited to 15 people and isolation protocols were stricter than ever. Because James and I needed to get married in order to move the visa process along, it was not an option to simply postpone the wedding entirely. My family, who was still planning on coming, had to make big decisions. Ultimately, I was more heartbroken about getting married without my family than I was about having to postpone most of our wedding arrangements. In the end, my mom decided she would come and quarantine with me two weeks before our wedding. The people attending would be minimal—my mother, James’s parents, sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew, and his best man. We would only have the ceremony and a dinner in the hotel restaurant. No dancing, no decorations, only a few flowers. It would be nice and intimate, but very far from what I’d been planning for the past year.
Our Wedding Day
Despite the situation, I felt relatively relaxed as the day began. With only a few people to coordinate, there was far less pressure to make sure everything was perfect. My mom and I had a nice time chatting to our hair and makeup ladies and the flowers and cake arrived without a hitch. Soon I was making my way down to see James for the first time. I read him a poem I had written specifically for our wedding day. Before we knew it, we were standing outside the ceremony room waiting for it to start. The ceremony was lovely and livestreamed to people all across the globe. It felt relaxed as our nephew kept stealing a pumpkin from the table and trying to eat it. You can watch our recording of it here (Thanks Adam). After the ceremony, we headed out to the lawn for some family pictures. Lucky for us, despite the rainy and dreadful start to the day, the sky had cleared and the sun was shining down. Because we had loads of time before dinner, we spent many hours taking pictures on the grounds and driving to a scenic pass for even more photos. We returned just before dinner and enjoyed a three course meal as well as some cake though most of us were too full to eat much of it. It was a lovely day, and though I am glad our families were there, particularly my mom, I am glad I spent much of it laughing alongside James.
Thinking Ahead
Something that has been on my mind is that if we had been able to go ahead with a traditional wedding, it would be over now. Though a pandemic is certainly not a blessing, we still have two more events to celebrate our wedding which I am very much looking forward to. In December, we will host a casual event in Wichita for my American family and friends to attend. Next summer, we are hoping to have the event we had originally planned in the UK just without the legal ceremony. As James would say, wearing my dress twice is way more cost effective. Though the certainty of the future is very much unknown, we are hopeful that we’ll be able to host these events as planned.
A big thank you to our families for supporting James and I through planning these events and helping us stay positive through it all. We look forward to celebrating properly soon!
All photos credited to our amazing wedding photographer, James Hicks.