On 19 March, three things happened at once. Australia made the unprecedented announcement that its borders would close. Our plans to elope fell to pieces, like a virus touching soap. And our reasons for wanting to get married in the first place, much like international borders, hardened from something porous into solid concrete. We wanted the protection of marriage, fast.
My partner and I were born 16,400km apart, in Newton, Massachusetts and Canberra, Australia respectively. This brings a frisson to our relationship – we spend hours swapping notes on the similarities and differences in our social milieus; we always have something to share that the other hasn’t seen; a reason to travel and a reason to come home.
As the daughter of an unwed couple who’ve been together close to 40 years, I’d always been sceptical about marriage. But being with someone from another country has a way of making it seem more like an administrative necessity. It’s not quite a guarantee, but marriage is a magic piece of paper that makes it that much more likely you’ll get to spend the rest of your life with the person you love, regardless of where you’re going, where you’re from, or how quickly you have to get there. With the possibility of tragedy edging closer, we needed that magic.
Between us we’ve lived in three countries and eight cities – there are people we love all over the world. Without an enormous expenditure of capital and carbon, we could never exchange vows without leaving somebody important out. If we eloped, at least everyone could feel equally angry at us.
Meanwhile, the world seemed to flatten – when all your communication takes place on the phone or through a computer screen, it doesn’t matter who lives up the road and who lives a 24-hour flight away.
Early in the evening of 22 March I made a proposal. Micah looked at me as though I was crazy. Then we hit the same wavelength, he called me a genius and pecked me on the lips.
Covid-19 had already robbed the world of thousands of lives, jobs and freedoms – but could it give us our dream wedding? No complex travel arrangements, no savings drained. When most people’s realities have been completely upended, getting married on the internet just didn’t seem that weird any more. We could skip the most painful gut churn of wedding planning – weighing up our love for our friends against the cost of feeding them – and invite anyone who wanted to come. We just had to act fast.
On 25 March we met our celebrant in a park – a “blue-eyed ninja” she called herself, in a black mask and blue rubber – gloves, and within five minutes, standing metres apart, we signed our notice of intended marriage. In Australia you have to fill in this paperwork at least 30 days before your ceremony. We gave ourselves 31 – hoping for the best, but preparing to cancel at any moment.
As soon as the ink dried, it began. With government regulations setting a maximum of five people at weddings we were allowed two more people to join us in person as witnesses to this mad act of hope – I called my event planner friend, a set designer and “human Swiss army knife” Joshua, who would be tasked with turning our kitchen into something resembling an altar.
Then we approached Charles, another close friend and videographer, who’d been contemplating setting up a livestreaming business. We wanted to be his first clients.
Although I’d never imagined having one myself, I’ve always loved weddings. I love the dressing up and sense of occasion. But most of all, I love the chance to reconnect with old friends and make new ones. I love their sense of social possibility. I love the embarrassing stories.
I wanted, more than anything, for our guests to have that feeling and I was confident I could find the perfect digital “venue”. Turns out, I was overconfident.
Anyone who’s ever heard a feedback-induced portal to hell open on Zoom is probably aware that, although it is 2020, video conferencing technology never works how it should. Every night for the next week, I experimented with platforms. There was the one that crashed constantly and looked like science fiction from the 70s. There was the one that could ruin the entire ceremony if a single guest failed to hit mute. The one that cost hundreds of dollars and could only be purchased with an annual subscription – that we would be using a grand total of once.
The best option was brand new. It launched around the same time Covid-19 was declared a pandemic. Designed for conferences and expos, the platform is called HopIn. It would allow for a “centre stage” for the ceremony. It would allow for different groups to sit at different “tables”, it would let guests send each other private messages; set up their own video chats and even bump into each other, in a function similar to that late-2000s forest of flashing – Chat Roulette. It looked perfect.
So, as Australia’s curve began to flatten; and America’s began its terrifying ascent, our plans snowballed. Wedding planning became our answer to iso-baking.
Micah learned how to dye my hair, and retouched my roots using a YouTube tutorial. Emily, a makeup artist, spent two hours teaching me how to paint a heavy face over Houseparty. Emma, a stylist, found me shoes and a pearl headdress online with lightning speed. Alex arranged a Zoom bucks and hens night, complete with an embarrassing PowerPoint presentation and a hangover that was anything but virtual. Nadine, who’d been on Micah and my first date, agreed to do a reading. A generous handful of friends, despite the pressures of being parents in confinement, managed to film gorgeous videos of their kids holding foliage so we could have flower children at our ceremony. Micah’s cousin in Chicago, a rabbi, agreed to give us a blessing. My closest friend, locked down in Paris and recovering from coronavirus, sewed a tuxedo for her dog’s favourite toy and turned her puppy into our ring bearer.
But the biggest help came from our families. My 90-year-old grandmother, obeying stay-at-home orders in Sydney, agreed to wrap her head around a new piece of technology in order to give a speech live. “It’s like you’re making an episode of Married at First Sight,” she said on the phone, dryly one day, as I ran her through our to-do list. My mother found me the perfect wedding dress – the nightgown her late mother had worn on the night of her own wedding ceremony in 1952. Using measurements I’d emailed her, she hand-tailored it to fit me. Since our aisle would be the hallway from our bedroom to our kitchen, getting married in pyjamas felt entirely appropriate.
Before the ceremony had even started, more than 40 people from all over the world had helped us make it happen. Lying in bed at night, Micah and I quietly wondered again and again whether we’d made the right decision. The thought of doing something so intimate and optimistic, in front of so many people, when the world was in such turmoil, made us both feel anxious. But then our inbox would ping from an invitee telling us how excited they were to be included, and our nerves would settle.
On the day of our wedding, I was running late. My friend had arranged a “bridal prep” breakfast, complete with pink champagne and some of the people closest to me. My hands were trembling as I did my makeup. I glued my eyelids together trying to insert false lashes. I screamed and swore, and ran through our final rehearsal with blurry vision. I left my phone on the floor and showed my bridal party my underpants as I stepped over it in a panic. But seeing their faces on screen together – from Sydney, Canberra, New York, London and Paris, but all right there with me – brought on a wave of calm.
We sent the last invitation to our wedding – via Instagram DM – just seven minutes before the ceremony started. And somehow, despite all the technical hurdles and physical barriers, miraculously removed by two tech support angels who offered to help even though they didn’t know us, it all worked out.
To be a bride is to be on display, but it was still confronting to see myself as our guests saw me, in a tiny screen, weeping. As our celebrant mentioned the horror of the world around us in this moment, I locked eyes with Joshua. Coronavirus had taken someone close to him but still he was prepared to be there for us on this day; making lemonade out of bitter fruit.
After the ceremony and speeches, we socialised with guests. I cheered when two of our friends – whose own vows had been delayed by the virus – stood up wearing full tuxedos on top with underpants and socks on the bottom. As we answered questions, our guests were talking to each other. My boss met my parents. People ran into exes, they offended each other with off-colour jokes. They saw old friends for the first time in years and made new connections.
When the event concluded, we wandered the neighbourhood for photographs. On the street, the few cars that passed honked. A friend down the road walked by for a moment to catch my bouquet. Our inbox filled with pictures of our 400 or so guests; with messages of love, and gossip from the event.
I crackled with nerves from the magnitude of it all, and clung close to my new husband. We ate cake, delivered by yet another friend, and kissed on the floor of our ersatz chapel. We revelled in our ability to be with each other that night, in a way that would not have been possible if our guests had been there too. At one point, I lay on the bathroom floor in silence, encoding the magnitude of what we’d entered into. I could never have handled being a bride in real life.
But we’d managed to skip past all the parts of a wedding that made us most stressed, and keep the parts that mattered to us. If only we could have hugged our guests afterwards.
On our first day as husband and wife, we lay in bed watching movies. We read the chatlog from our event and laughed at the highlights. No one asked us when we would have “a real wedding”. Beaming into the homes of everyone we love, from the home we built together, it felt about as real as it gets.