Engaged couple faces challenges leading up to wedding due to COVID-19
The wedding industry is booming again as many central Indiana couples tie the knot after a two-year delay.
In a five-part series, Lakyn McGee looks at the pandemic’s effect on weddings.
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — It’s wedding season, and some couples are finally getting married after the coronavirus pandemic interrupted their plans.
Jennifer Keller and her now-husband are one of those couples.
Keller wrote to News 8 and said she and her husband faced challenges getting to the altar because of the pandemic.
The message inspired News 8’s Lakyn McGee to take a deeper look into the wedding industry and find out how it was impacted by COVID-19.
Keller says she got engaged after her husband convinced her to get on a plane at the height of the pandemic.
“I kind of thrown a fit,” Keller said. “I was like, ‘I’m not getting on a plane. I’m not going anywhere right now. I’m not sitting on a plane wearing a mask.’”
She did go on the trip and then the wedding planning started–with a couple of hiccups along the way.
“It was like everything was stacked against us,” Keller said. “We actually planned our wedding twice.”
Keller added: “We were going to go down to the Bourbon Trail and have a wedding. After about three of the distilleries declined due to the pandemic and not wanting to make a lot of commitments we were like, ‘Okay, fine. We’re just going to push it out. We’ll just push it out to 2022.’”
Then, Keller says, her fiancé’s father was diagnosed with cancer and passed away.
“Things kept happening and we couldn’t get married,” Keller explained. “I kept going back to, ‘Should we get married? Is this a sign?’ And finally, he was like, ‘This isn’t a sign. It’s a sign that we don’t need to wait to get married on a really, really big wedding. We just need to get married.’”
They tied the knot on April 30, 2022.
Their original wedding guest list had 160 people. This wedding had eight people.
“I think that’s the reality of it, just being accommodating to all of the restrictions that could come about,” Keller said. “I don’t feel like we’re done with it. I think we just got to work around it.”