Couples married during the Covid pandemic reflect five years later

On March 21, 2020, Julie Samuels and Joe Hillley's wedding in Montclair, New Jersey, was led into an unparalleled era due to vows and minivaux lines. Due to the coronavirus pandemic and its crowd-sized social responsibility duties, couples had to be creative about how to quit their wedding.

Samuels and Hillley had fiancées on their home's front porch as friends and family Honking Convoy ran around the block and cheered.

A couple met at Dunkin's Drive-Thru Window in Edmond, Oklahoma. She swears the same window as the guest as an employee, he as a customer – as a car park. Fashion model and labor activist Sarah Ziff married photographer Reed Young at a station in Philiptown, New York.

There are many reasons why you don't want to wait. Respect the long-awaited wedding date and follow your dream of securing health insurance or starting a family.

If the wedding looked different five years ago, the permutation of romance that led them was stable. Wedding cancellations have become commonplace. Love endured. Here, let's take a look at the four couples who were married during Covid despite their difficulties and their reflections on how they shaped the relationship they are now, saying “I'll do it” at such a time.

Julie Samuels and Joe Hillley

“On our wedding day, we grew glasses across the driveway with Brian and Andy,” Samuels said of Brian Jewelgens and Andy Swist, referring to the neighbors who decorated their pouches with bright crepe paper balls to help the couple celebrate. “We then went inside and stayed there for two years.”

Samuels, now 58, is an intellectual property and commercial transaction attorney in Manhattan. Hillley, 63, is Scholastic's director of logistics and postal affairs, working far from the Connecticut home where the couple moved in 2024.

The size of their rental home in Montclair helped them survive the first few years of their marriage. Not all newlywed couples they agree to, but they benefit from so much unity.

“I don't recommend locking up with my new husband 24/7 under stressful circumstances,” Samuels said. “I think there was a moment when “friendlyness is lightly empty.” ”

Both learned that those moments melt in a closed room. Every day, they retreated to separate their home offices and checked in with each other to coordinate their dinner plans. (When he began dating in 2007, Hillier, whose love of cooking that won Samuels' heart supported him, became an even more skilled chef during the closure.

They are happy that they have begun marrying the world in danger. But “weathered it all, come out on the other side and still want to marry each other, and ultimately, it's proof of this relationship,” Samuels said. With the pandemic emergency over, she said, “We're really good at expressing gratitude for what others are doing.

Leader of Kirsten Wazalis and Glenn

Kirsten Wazalis and Glenn leader were married wearing “Mr.” and masking faces outside a row shop in Philadelphia in April 2020 as a friend of “Mrs.” from the Philadelphia Flyers watched from an idling car. When Covid was roved, they didn't think there was anything new to learn about each other.

In their eight years as a couple, they survived a series of medical crises brought about by Cowden Syndrome. This is a rare genetic disorder in which Wazalis grows tumors throughout her body. Their decision to get married in 2020 came as Leader, now 51, wanted to make sure Wazalis, now 54, have access to health insurance. She had experienced endometrial, breast cancer and thyroid cancer. A clerical error caused her to lose her Medicare benefits.

After getting married in front of a homemade scoreboard reading the homemade scoreboard “Covid 19:0, Leader: 1”, life wasn't easy in front of health. Wazalis' thyroid cancer returned, the tumor surfaced in her gallbladder, and she had to start seeing a cardiologist with heart problems. But the pandemic has changed couples. The couple met at a local bar and formed a jukebox hit in the 1980s.

In a nutshell, “We've become bored,” said Wazalis, who can't work for her medical issues. Mr. Leader is a landscape gardener for the Department of Agriculture in Windmoor, Pennsylvania.

When they got married, she already had three grandchildren. Currently, there are five people aged 2 to 11. Grandson is a regular group sleepover at the house the couple bought three blocks from rowhouse last year, calling Wazalis “Honey” and Mr. Leader “Poppop.”

“We won't go out anymore, but our kids have brought us even closer,” said Leader, known as the “milkshake man,” for his skill in blending liquid treats for his grandchildren. He and Wazalis are judges in the weekly sliding competition on a small teak sliding board they set up in their living room.

Wazalis said that Leader loves her more than he got married. “When I can't lie down and go to the store, he takes me my favorite cherry blossom ice, so I can say,” she said. “He will never forget me.”

Helen Kim and Peter Moon

Health wasn't the best for Helen Kim and Peter Moon when they got married on September 12, 2020 in the backyard of the Moon family in Wilmette, Illinois. They are trying to keep Kim's Chicago coffee shop in place, avoiding other cafes and restaurants succumbing to the pandemic death spiral.

“What we should do during Covid was to order a lot of takeaway to support small businesses,” Moon said. “It meant eating a lot of food that wasn't very good for us,” Kim and Moon are now 33 years old and later sold Coffee Labs and Roasters. There, Moon took on the duties of barista when things looked particularly miserable. Their mental health has since improved, they said.

“We worked seven days a week,” said Kim, who sold the store to employees in 2023. “We were always stressed,” she is now the Tea Production Manager for local company Spirit Tea. Mr. Moon is a server at Ginsei Mot, a sushi restaurant in Chicago. “It's good to be an employee,” Kim said.

The couple held their second wedding celebration for 140 people at Green House Loft in Chicago in December 2021. Only 20 masked guests attended the 2020 backyard wedding. The friend who was not there was represented by a life-size face photograph. At their second wedding, Kim and Moon lived a dance fantasy until dawn. “We finally felt like we could close the wedding chapter,” Moon said.

Kim's father, Moody Kim, had fully embraced Mr. Moon by then. When the couple began dating, in 2019, Moon liked metalcore music and his use of profanity on social media set Kim on the edge. “But my dad really likes Peter right now,” Kim said. “He would look at me sometimes and say, 'You're well married.' Everything gets better over time. ”

Sasha Jackson and Stephen Small Warner II

“Looking back, we washed away that the pandemic wasn't an issue,” said Stephen Small Warner II, who married Sasha Jackson on February 7, 2021 at the family Brownstone of Bedford Stuyvesant in a Brooklyn neighborhood. “I was able to focus on what I wanted to have in the waves.”

The couple met as undergraduates at Howard University in 2008, fell in love while working together on a film project, but are now two daughters, two and Siya, six months old.

When they got married, they lived in Los Angeles and worked as independent filmmakers. In 2023, Jackson and now 37-year-old Small Warner II returned to Bedford Stuyvesant to raise their daughter near their family. (Mr. Jackson grew up near Crown Heights.) They are still independent filmmakers with their own projects. But now, between writing a lengthy entry in a shared journal and understanding who it is to give a girl a bath, they are collaborating on feature films about their love story.

A family of 10 who took the Covid test before gathering at Brownstone support them on their filmmaking journey. The pandemic provided a perspective. “It changed our lives dramatically,” Jackson said. “It's everything from the film industry to us who come up with ways to navigate the world together at this new pace.”

Like other couples who held firm hold on to each other when the world quieted in 2020, they emerged from the mist of pandemic uncertainty that they felt grateful for. “It was a scary and tragic time,” Jackson said. But now, “We can see a more clearly built foundation for our families,” said Small Warner II. “We're stronger than ever.”