Rich and I were high school sweethearts, dating all the way until we decided to go to college in different states—California for him and Virginia for me. Yet even though we had broken up, I still thought about him. When we reconnected in 2018, the sparks flew, all my doubts were gone, and I knew for sure this was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. We got engaged nine months later on June 23, 2019. While that may seem quick to some people, really we’d been preparing for this since the eleventh grade!
We planned our dream wedding: a beautiful flower-strewn ceremony in front of nearly 200 of our friends and family in San Diego, followed by a grand reception and then off on our honeymoon. The date we picked was April 18, which was right smack dab in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. We live in California so we were among the first Americans to be put under a shelter-in-place in order. It was just three weeks before our wedding yet we weren’t even supposed to go out to eat, much less have a huge party. We had to cancel our wedding. Find out how event planners cancel major live events.