Five years later, four couples who married at the peak of Covid quarantine share how their relationships were shaped and where they are today.
The March 21, 2020, wedding of Julie Samuels and Joe Hillyer in Montclair, N.J., ushered in an unparalleled time for the Vows and Mini-Vows columns. Because of the coronavirus pandemic and its crowd-size and social-distancing mandates, couples had to get creative about how to pull off weddings.
Ms. Samuels and Mr. Hillyer had their nuptials on the front porch of their home as a honking convoy of friends and family drove in circles around the block cheering them on.
A couple who met at the Dunkin’ drive-through window in Edmond, Okla. — she as an employee, he as a customer — said their vows through that same window with guests watching from the parking lot. The fashion model and labor activist Sara Ziff married the photographer Reed Young at a train station in Philipstown, N.Y. And some couples married with no one else in the room, their officiant beaming in over Zoom.
Their reasons for not wanting to wait varied: to honor a long-awaited wedding date, secure health insurance or to follow their dream of starting a family.
If weddings looked different five years ago, the permutations of romance that led to them held steady. Canceling weddings became commonplace. Love endured. Here is a look at four couples who married during Covid despite the difficulties involved, and their reflections on how saying “I do” at such a fraught time shaped the relationships they’re in now.
Julie Samuels and Joe Hillyer
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