Not Sure What to Do With Your Wedding Plans?

This article is part of our Planning a Wedding in a Pandemic: Covid-19 series.

It is not all bleak when we talk about COVID-19 because it has truly been the driving force of many new ventures. (The Wed Mag itself is one!) However, we are also very aware of how it has caused many plans to stop in their tracks. We are 9 months into the pandemic, and during this time, we have gone through major upheavals that have undoubtedly cause some of us to experience a kind of planning fatigue.  

Still, you know what must be done has to be done. If you’ve been planning or thinking about planning your wedding yet is unsure about where to start or if you should even start, here are some advices from wedding planners in Singapore.

For Couples Who Have Not Started Planning

You might have gotten engaged the past few months, or that a wedding is on your agenda, but nothing has been done yet. So, for you couples who have not started planning:

Begin With What Is Important to You and Your Partner

Have a conversation together with your partner to discuss what is most important to the both of you. By starting out with the essentials, informed decisions can be made efficiently when you’re faced with any possible scenarios.

For example, if having all of your family and friends physically together to celebrate your union is important, and that number exceeds what is currently allowed by the authorities, you may choose to adopt the wait-and-see approach. In the meantime, start doing some groundwork to give you a sense of direction of where your wedding is heading towards. Knowing what you like and don’t will help to speed up the decision-making process when you finally have a date in mind. Your future-self will thank you for that!

Think about what you’d like to do for your wedding. It’s a good time to slowly ease into the initial parts of wedding planning – do your research on vendors, take some time to meet them and understand their work. Go gown shopping. Work on your budgeting, and consider different possibilities for your wedding. You may not have a set date, but at least you’re ready to book right away once you have a date locked in.

Wenxin from The Wedding Stylist

If your celebration can be scaled down or that you like the idea of having your extended guest list join the celebration through a virtual livestreaming platform, you can kickstart the planning process in order to secure your desired wedding professionals. The postponement of weddings from this year to the next will inevitably caused some popular vendors to not be as readily available as before. Just be sure to communicate with them on their level of flexibility in scaling up or down depending on how the pandemic situation unfolds.

There will likely be a surplus of weddings in year 2021, as most couples who were planning to get married in 2020 chose to postpone their weddings. Vendors’ availability might be limited. If the situation becomes better, you will be able to scale up accordingly without worrying about your essential vendor’s availability.

Herlina from Chere Weddings

Consider an Outdoor Space or at Least a Venue With Access to the Outdoors

If you’ve not found a dream venue, consider outdoor spaces in Singapore. With air ventilation becoming a key consideration when it comes to guests’ safety, an outdoor space reduces the risk of virus transmission unlike an indoor space where air is typically recycled.

For Those Who Have Paused Their Planning

You might have set a date, engaged some key professionals but COVID-19 put everything on hold. So, for you couples who have pressed the “Pause” button:

Consider Your Guest’s Demographics When Making Any Plans

The major change to your original plan is likely going to be your guest list. To help determine how to move forward, consider where the important people in the celebration are currently at and if their locations are going to have any significant impact on your wedding plans.  

Look into the demographics of your guests – if many important guests are from overseas and their physical presence is the deciding factor of whether or not the wedding can still take place, then postponing the wedding at least till Q3/Q4 next year might be a safer bet as travel restrictions are likely to stay for a while. Otherwise, you can slowly pick up the planning again based on what is allowed.

Herlina from Chere Weddings

Relook Into Priorities Again and Categorise Them Into Their Levels of Importance

At the beginning, you might already have an idea of how the wedding day is going to go and the list of professionals you will engage. If anything, COVID-19 has set the stage for us to re-evaluate the things that are important to us. After going through the major changes that took place in all key aspects of our lives in the past months, our views and mindset of certain things might have shifted. Review your plans and perhaps you will come to conclude that an e-invite is as good as a physical invitation card or that a dessert bar is not all that important if not impossible to carry out. After filtering through your list, always convey your thoughts and revised plans to your vendors to get their support and to act on the necessary.

Don’t lose momentum or excitement! You now have more time to think about what you really like, to think about whether you were really going to have a wedding that you would have enjoyed. You may realise that some things you wanted for the wedding are part of fleeting trends that may be going out of style soon. Some things that may have seemed like a good idea then may not be the case now – it’s a good time to re-evaluate whether you might change your mind on certain things – who knows, you might realise that everything’s perfect and is still exactly what you wanted!

Wenxin from The Wedding Stylist

If your original plan is already the bare minimum of what you’d consider to be your dream wedding, then look into ranking your priorities based on their level of importance and what is currently permitted. In that way, you can gradually “upgrade” your plan as the restrictions ease.

Consider having different plans in place. For example:
Plan A – to invite people in Guest List A with no live singing and cocktails reception allowed. If measures are further eased, another set of priorities can be added in.
Plan B – to invite people in Guest List B and confirm live band engagement. If it gets even better after that, Plan C can be applied.
Plan C – to invite people in Guest List C and confirm booking of After Party’s venue, etc.

As you can see, this can be a tedious process, but it goes back to nailing down what are the essentials as well as communicating and working closely with vendors for their support. Consider getting a trusted friend or a wedding coordinator / planner to help ease this burden.

Herlina from Chere Weddings

For Those Who Have Postponed Their Wedding

If you have chosen to postpone your wedding, your planning timeline might be much longer – take advantage of it!

If you’d like to, you can afford to take a short breather because you have a slightly longer time to plan now. Or you can also opt to have your elopement style solemnisation ceremony done first. An intimate ceremony has always been a dream to many couples, and it could finally be the time to see it come true.

I will say take a mini break so long as the timeline allows. The decision to postpone is not something that is easily arrived at. Let the fact settle, rest a little and perhaps viewing the wedding as just one of the many celebrations you will continue to have in the future may help minimize the stress. The mini break might even give you some inspiration for the wedding! When you’re ready, pick it up again by sitting down with you partner to re-evaluate what is important and start the ball rolling again. You can even consider doing something small like an ROM first so the stress of one big event is spread into two. Then you can slowly plan for the reception again.

Herlina from Chere Weddings

Something to consider for those who may need to go through with an ROM soon in spite of current restrictions – it’s the perfect chance to live the elopement dream and hold a small wedding ceremony to officiate your marriage. Instead of a hushed, quick fix at the ROM, you have the flexibility to choose a location that is meaningful to the both of you, or maybe perhaps a beautiful spot that stayed in your mind after passing through. Take this opportunity to share a beautiful, private yet significant moment with your partner and those closest to you.

Small weddings are never easy to achieve in Singapore where most of us have huge extended families that add significantly to our guest count. We often hear couples lament about how they’d rather have a small, intimate wedding instead so they can spend quality time with close friends and family. With the current restrictions, why not throw a downscaled wedding party for your nearest and dearest to celebrate? Many professionals and venues are offering special deals for weddings this year that are hard to pass up, and there’s always the option to hold a larger celebration once the situation improves.

Wenxin from The Wedding Stylist

We know that you might be feeling stuck in this planning journey – it is not a surprise given such extraordinary times, we are all navigating through this together. If you would like to kickstart your planning process, follow our upcoming COVID-19 wedding planning series, as we bring to you more advice and tips on planning in a pandemic.

If you need any help, there are plenty of professionals in the community who are just a call or a message away. Also, if you’ve any questions or any topics you require advice on, drop us a message at The Wed Mag!

^{Feature image – Photo by Mel on Unsplash}