We decided to cancel our wedding – it’s sad but also a source of relief

Next week, Holly Baxter and her fiancé should have been flying back to the UK to make preparations and see their parents for the first time since Christmas. Alas coronavirus put an end to all that

Ester Concilio and Rafaele Carbonelli kiss following their wedding ceremony in Briosco, Italy, this week (AFP/Getty)

This week – week nine of quarantine for New Yorkers like my fiancé and me – we decided to cancel our wedding. It’s sad to see it written down like that, in uncompromising black and white, but it’s also an undeniable source of relief. When councils in England shut down, our appointment to give notice was cancelled indefinitely; when Boris Johnson announced that any arrivals by air would have to isolate for 14 days, we knew that was curtains for a large portion of our guest list and potential upheaval for ourselves. As the months went by – and people we knew started postponing their own weddings from March, April, May and June – we realised that we would be competing against a huge amount of brides- and grooms-to-be if we did end up wanting to reschedule in 2021. After a discussion with our venue over the weekend, we decided to pull the trigger on Monday: our September 2020 wedding will now be happening in May 2021.

Now comes the admin of dismantling what should have been our happy day. First came the hen and stag weekends, which we were supposed to be attending in two weeks’ time; they were cancelled last week, while we still hoped we might be able to go ahead with the ceremony. My bridesmaids and hen party attendees have been touchingly lovely about it all, and sent me a large bunch of flowers as a morale boost. We’ve agreed to sign in on Zoom and video-chat with drinks during the day we would have done my bachelorette activities in a villa in Austria.

Next week, we should have been flying back to the UK to do our tastings, as well as my hair and make-up trials. Even if we’d been deluded enough to think those could still go ahead, Norwegian Air made the decision for us by cancelling our flights this week. We haven’t just lost wedding prep, of course, but also a fortnight period when we were due to see our parents for the first time since Christmas; now, we just hope we’ll be able to see them in time for Christmas 2020 (or it’s a Chinese takeaway in a studio apartment for us). I’m sad about it, but I have also had a lot of quality time with my parents since the pandemic began through much more regular and much longer phone calls than I ever bothered to do previously. Every cloud, eh?

The time zones and the various ways in which two separate governments influence our lives mean that despite decades of technological progress, we are very, very far away

In April, I got the automated notification that my wedding dress was “ready for collection”. I can only presume it’s now sitting in a deserted store in Manhattan, waiting for its owner to materialise from the apocalyptically empty streets. My fiancé’s suit is in London; his first fitting should have been soon. Considering how long it might take for tailors and bridal stores to open up again, it’s probably for the best that we didn’t stick with a September date and two badly fitting, very expensive outfits. Hopefully it’ll be worth the wait.

Last of all, we now have to cancel our honeymoon. It was a once-in-a-lifetime holiday we’d saved money up for over a period of two years. Not ones to usually plan anything in advance, this time we’d made an exception and put a large amount of money down for our flights and hotels when we saw special non-refundable deals in 2019 (clearly fate heard us when we said it was safe to do that because the wedding was such a guarantee). I remain cautiously optimistic that we will get most of the money back so long as we’re patient enough to stay in phone queues for days on end; luckily, I’m renowned for my stubbornness and I come from a skinflint Yorkshire family, so if there’s refunds to be had, I presume I’ll be first in line.

Put simply, this week has shown how tough it can sometimes be to be an expat. In our interconnected world, we always felt that we were only eight hours away from our families; that the distance hardly counted for much when a quick hop across the Atlantic was as frequent and affordable as it was pre-pandemic. We’ve now come to realise that the distance, the time zones and the various ways in which two separate governments influence our lives mean that despite decades of technological progress, we are very, very far away. I didn’t get to hug my mum this week when I told her that the wedding was off – but then many people even within Britain haven’t been able to do that either.

In terms of my relationship with my fiancé, very little will change. We were functionally married to start with, having lived together for five years. While some will go ahead with socially distanced weddings sans guests (like one we saw a couple of days ago in a park in Brooklyn, where strangers like us clapped and cheered as they said their “I do’s”), or will choose to take up New York state on its offer of doing nuptials by Zoom, we’re happy to wait and have it the way we imagined. We have each other, and that’s really all that matters; we still feel very lucky. We’ll just be saying “fiancé” and “fiancée” rather than “husband” and “wife” a few months longer than we thought.