I have a secret. This is the second time I will be getting married

It’s time to reveal that my husband and I have actually been married for more than a year, and this will have been our second wedding, writes Holly Baxter

Our first wedding day will always have a special place in our hearts (Getty)

Everybody has secrets in their relationship – my husband and I just have a stranger secret than most. And by the time you read this my wedding day will have come and gone (just), so I’m able to share what we’ve been keeping from the world.

This was my second wedding. Not just mine: my husband’s, too. Like a lot of Covid couples across the world, we were faced with a conundrum in 2020: marry legally, despite lockdown and despite the large ceremony we’d already planned and paid for in the UK, and stay in the US together by fulfilling our visa obligations; or hold off and risk my then-fiancé’s deportation. We had a Zoom call with an immigration lawyer, who told us: “I advise you to get married as soon as possible.” We were sat in our studio apartment, eating crisps. “How soon do you reckon?” I replied. “Can we hold out for the postponement in six months, or are we thinking more like two or three months’ time?” The lawyer paused, smiled slightly, and replied: “I’m telling you to get married in the next five days.”

And so we did what we had to do. I ordered a white dress and shoes from Asos; E went down to the only open clothes store and picked up a linen suit. It was July 2020, sweltering hot, and the maximum number of people allowed to meet in public – even outside – was ten. We told our parents to tune in on FaceTime, and we invited eight of our colleagues in New York to come down to the local park.

Thanks to an emergency New York bylaw called Project Cupid, which allowed people like us to marry quickly, we sat in an online queue and then met with a local representative from the council on Zoom. They verified our identity, wished us well, and sent us a printable wedding licence. We then asked if anyone in our local area’s Facebook page was ordained, and someone put their husband forward. He told us he didn’t want any money, and promised to meet us by the lake in the park in two days’ time.

The kindness of strangers was immense during that time. We got dressed together in our flat, and my friend delivered a handheld steamer from Manhattan to Brooklyn so I could smooth out my $100 dress. A hairdresser down my road came out and blow-dried my hair. We picked up a posy of sunflowers from a corner shop on our way to the park, to use as a bouquet, and someone tied a ribbon around them. Our “vicar”, though a stranger to us, wrote a speech based on a short meeting we’d had together. Our other friend coordinated the technology so that our parents, thousands of miles away, could tune in from their sofas with glasses of champagne (the same friend also made a valiant attempt at making us a wedding cake from scratch).

Friends travelled from Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and New Jersey to be there, masked and at a distance, so that we would have a small audience on our wedding day. Someone paid a band playing by the lake to play a song for us to dance to at the end of our modest ceremony. A local bar allowed us to sit at a picnic table outside, and rustled up some food for the ten of us. It wasn’t even legal for us to stand up at the table when giving a toast, but somehow we had a magical evening in the sunshine, with bottles of champagne balanced in the middle of the tables, and large bowls of mac and cheese for dinner.

As I write this, just as the ceremony we planned years ago is due to happen – complete with more than ten of our family and friends – I don’t know what to expect. I’m sure it will be a fantastic day, full of joy and worth the wait. It’ll also be the first time we tell those outside our immediate family that we’ve actually been married for over a year, though we haven’t worn our wedding rings, and have only sneakily called each other husband and wife in social circles well removed from our main set of friends.

The food is going to be fancier, and the clothes a lot more expensive. The venue is a little more upmarket, but the celebrant is still mainly being paid in booze (since now we don’t have to worry about legalities, we’ve drafted in a friend). The weather will undoubtedly be colder and rainier (thanks, England). And we might have more of a honeymoon than a boat ride down the Hudson. But our first wedding day will always have a special place in our hearts, and our wedding licence will always say that we got married at the Prospect Park Boathouse – a ritzy venue that would usually cost tens of thousands of dollars to hire, but for a quick half hour, in the middle of a pandemic shutdown, with just a local band and eight friends present (plus a drunk guy muttering in the background about how he’d try his best not to throw up into the lake), it was ours.