‘Doing the best we can, but doing it together’: McHenry County, and beyond, navigate the pandemic

COVID-19 takes a toll on weddings and the industries that make them happen

Many people dreamed of their wedding day since they were young, but the past year of the COVID-19 pandemic forced some engaged couples to let go of those dreams in the face of a new reality.

Local brides who long imagined walking down the aisle to begin the next chapter of their lives in a room filled with extended family and friends had to postpone and postpone again, said Amy Burrafato, owner of Bella Bridal Hair and Makeup Artistry in Woodstock and president of The Wedding Network.

For some, the stress of planning and re-planning a wedding on top of everything else couples had to manage over the past year felt like too much to bear, but one of Burrafato’s clients, Caitlin Mitchell, said the reality check really put things into perspective.

“At the end of the day, we were like the most important thing is to be married,” Mitchell said. “We’ve just found a lot of peace in that. ... I think, before the pandemic, different things really mattered a lot to us, and now, other things matter more.”

Mitchell was set to marry her fiancé, Michael Muntz, on June 12 in a ceremony of 150 people in Prospect Heights. The venue was booked, the invitations were sent and everything had fallen into place. Mitchell and Muntz were so excited, she said.

They got engaged in 2017 and set the date for 2020. It would be a long, 2 1/2 year engagement, but they would take the time to save up for the wedding of their dreams, Mitchell said.

Come March 2020, Mitchell was packing up her desk to work from home for a few weeks and all of her co-workers assured her that her June wedding would be fine. She recalled them saying, “You guys will be in fine shape. This will be blown over and just a funny memory.”

But as March turned to April and April turned to May, Mitchell said they increasingly were frightened by the state of emergency that gripped the nation and the world. Around early May, they decided to pull the plug.

“We had a lot of long, hard conversations about what are we going to do. Are we going to have our wedding? Are we going to elope?” she said. “There was a lot of frustration and tears.”

Bride-to-be Natalie Barclay tries on a new wedding gown for her mother, JoAnna Barclay, and bridesmaid Megan Colbert on Thursday, April 1, 2021, at Simply Luxe in Algonquin.

For couples young and old, the past year has been an extended exercise in accepting the things you cannot control, Clark Barshinger, a psychologist with Cherry Hill Counseling in McHenry, said Wednesday.

Barshinger, whose practice focuses, in part, on couple’s therapy, said he tried to encourage his clients to be more patient with one another this past year. The goal is to get to a place of serenity, but the road there became more challenging with the backdrop of a worldwide pandemic, he said.

“We worked a lot on awareness or consciousness that this is going to require them to be mindful of the challenge,” he said. “If you’re not mindful of the challenge, you’re going to dissolve pretty quickly into conflict.”

In the case of Mitchell and her fiancé, the added stress of planning a new wedding from scratch weighed on them.

“I think we were both just kind of ... expecting that the other person was going to have all the answers of what we should do, but obviously that’s not a realistic expectation to have of someone,” she said.

Ultimately, they set a new date for Aug. 7, 2020, and got to work. They would have to call every guest to see if they could attend on the new date and rebook the venue and all of the vendors.

“So then we have the Excel spreadsheets going: Okay, these vendors are available these dates and these vendors are available these dates. Does anything line up?” she said.

Meanwhile, the wedding industry was bleeding money, Burrafato said. Her business, Bella’s Bridal Hair and Makeup Artistry, went from working about 100 weddings each year to 13 “very, very small-scale weddings” in 2020, she said.

Burrafato began her business during the recession in 2008 and would tell people that the wedding industry was uniquely “recession proof” because people are willing to spend money on their nuptials no matter how strapped for cash they may be.

“We learned this year that it’s not pandemic proof,” she said. “The industry as a whole lost a lot of money ... a lot of times in this industry that money prior to the event date is already spent, so then having to redo that at a later date or cancel altogether and refund money is really difficult, especially for venues.”

Burrafato said she typically holds two to three expo events each year with The Wedding Network, an event planning business that she runs to connect brides and grooms with venues and vendors. Since the pandemic began, no events have been held.

Over at Simply Luxe Bridal Boutique in Algonquin, co-owner Susan Samway said they had to close up shop for three months at the start of the pandemic and, even when they reopened, clients were very apprehensive about coming in.

“The experience of trying on a wedding gown, that emotional, magical experience, you don’t get that online,” Samway said. “It’s a really emotional and kind of devastating time for what’s supposed to be one of the happiest moments of your life.”

Bride-to-be Natalie Barclay tries on a new wedding gown for her mother, JoAnna Barclay, and bridesmaid Megan Colbert on Thursday, April 1, 2021, at Simply Luxe in Algonquin.

They sanitize the store between appointments and try to make people feel more comfortable, Samway said, and both she and Burrafato have taken on the role of being the shoulder to lean on for overwhelmed brides.

Since the vaccine rollout began, Samway and Burrafato said business has been picking up again and they expect it to continue accelerating as 2020 weddings postponed to 2021 pile on top of weddings originally planned for this year. This will bring a higher number of weddings in 2022 and 2023 as well, Samway said, and this has already shown in the high demand for sought-after local venues.

As Mitchell’s August 2020 wedding date neared, they got word from their venue that would need to restrict their event to 50 people, she said. After another round of difficult conversations, they decided to postpone their wedding to June 2021.

“We’ve already been engaged this long,” she said. “What’s another year?”

Of course, planning a wedding isn’t the only thing that weighed on relationships this past year.

Among the most pressing concerns for Barshinger’s clients have been child care and coparenting in the era of remote work and remote learning, he said. Parents suddenly found themselves asking questions like ‘We’re both on Zoom calls and the baby is screaming. Whose turn is it?’ or ‘What is the pythagorean theorem again?’

The other thing that placed major pressure on relationships in the last year is “the absence of pleasurable diversions,” he said.

“You’re stuck with them day in and day out, and perhaps if there are personality traits that bother you, you’re seeing them every day,” Barshinger said. “Whatever a person’s problems may be and if they cope in ways that are not very healthy, it puts a stress on everybody else.”

Barshinger said it is important to note that these stressors have not been not spread evenly across all couples. Those who are uninsured or otherwise cannot afford mental health support are at a disadvantage and families of lower socioeconomic status are more likely to be dealing with serious issues like job loss or eviction, he said.

For many couples he worked with, the intense pressure of the last year forced them into a sort of survival mode, where they had to find more productive ways of communicating and supporting one another as quarantine left little room for avoiding issues, Barshinger said.

That was the case for Mitchell and her fiancé, she said.

“Having been put in a situation where no one knows what’s going on and it’s really scary and people around you are getting really sick and dying. ... I think it just put an added level of stress and pressure,” she said. “And so we had to find better ways of being patient with one another because we’re just dealing with really unknown territory.”

“Just kind of doing the best we can, but doing it together,” she said.

Mitchell is now looking forward to her third, and hopefully final, wedding date of June 4 with serenity knowing that nothing will come in the way of the most important piece of it – marrying the man she loves.

“This is maybe the universe’s way of saying we put you through a really big test and you didn’t ace it, but you did okay, you passed, and I think we feel much stronger now,” Mitchell said.

“Before it was, ‘We want to get married, we love each other.’ And we still love each other and we want to get married, but now it feels more like, ‘Wow, we can get through hard things together,’” she said. “And that has solidified like, yeah, we should get married. That is something we should do because we’re a good team.”