- I remember someone saying, yeah,
our work from home plan is until the fall.
And I was like, what? And that's what I was like, Oh, no.
(gently chiming bells)
Hi, I'm Nina.
- And I'm Chris.
- And we are engaged.
- We are?
- [Nina] We've been together for a little over five years.
We met via Tinder.
I swiped right.
- As did I.
- Within like a week we went on our first date.
And it was kind of history from there wasn't it?
A little over a year ago, we got engaged.
- I got a lot of her friends to come meet
two of my friends and I had brunch
and I popped the question basically in front of everybody.
She resents me a little bit for it
because I decided to put a really bad pun in it.
"Would you fian-say yes?"
(laughs)
Pretty good, right, I mean. - No (laughs).
So we were supposed to get married on June 27
in Chicago at a hotel like 275-300 people.
I've really like a really big family
and there's like a really big Sri Lankan community
and you have family too (laughs).
- My side would not be nearly as represented as hers.
- I was really inspired by Nikki's show
called wedding season, which was like
it's about her getting ready for her wedding.
So me and my friend Annie, who also works at BuzzFeed
decided to produce a another season of wedding season
all centered around me planning my wedding.
As we started production,
there was a lot happening,
I have my full time job still to do.
And then I was also doing a writing fellowship
planning the actual wedding
as well as doing all the things
that I had to do for wedding season.
One of the videos we're doing as diet and fitness video,
so I had to start like working out a bunch
and like meal planning,
things were in full swing
and it was getting very stressful (laughs).
As we were kind of in the middle of production
and shooting all these episodes,
the pandemic started really affecting our lives.
There were some kind of red flags happening that made us
worry about the state of our wedding.
I think the first for me anyways was that
we got an email at work basically saying that
we were going to have to work from home,
extended, you know, for a month
and then they would keep pushing back the deadline
and it was just like, it felt like okay,
I don't know when I'm going back into work.
- I'm the Dean of a small pop music college.
The of our winter quarter
was mid March,
which is basically right when
(censured) you know what hits the fan.
On the last day of school.
The night before it,
I had to contact all the students all the faculty say okay,
last day of school was canceled
and that's kind of when I got a feeling,
you know, this was gonna be pretty bad and pretty serious.
(jazz music)
- It was a very strange kind of waiting game
with determining whether or not to postpone the wedding
because I think when my cousin's wedding got canceled.
Theirs is canceled, but ours is three months away
and everything will be fine in three months,
we can totally gather 300 people
in unenclosed space three months,
but like at the time that it seemed fine.
I remember someone saying our work from home plan
is until the fall and I was like, what?
And that's when I was like, oh no, like,
things are gonna have to shift significantly.
The decision to postpone things came kind of incrementally
I wouldn't say there was one moment,
we were supposed to fly back to Chicago
to have a bridal shower, cake tasting, flower selection
all in the last weekend of March,
I think a week before or something we're like, yeah,
we can't do this.
Our wedding planner sent us a bunch of dates
from like August to December
of what was still available at our hotel,
but we couldn't select any of those dates
unless we gave up our June 27 date.
And I was like, well, we can't
like what if everything's okay?
There was a moment where I think I was just like, okay,
what do we have in 2021
and that was like a big moment i think.
(upbeat music)
They let us know that
June 26 was available.
- Just take a sharpie to all the
invitations and everything
just you know change the zero to one you know, it's easy.
- Once we realized all the vendors were available
and our venue was accommodating us.
- After strong arming them a bit, you know.
- A little bit.
- Your mother boss up,
let them know what's up.
- For our vendors
because we're having our wedding in a hotel,
the food is coming from the hotel,
so we didn't have to do anything
on that front food and alcohol was taken care of
with some of our vendors.
We had pitched other dates to them
where they weren't available.
If they weren't available,
they kept the deposits.
We were incentivized to find a date
where everyone was still available
in order to not lose those deposits.
Then we kind of had to reassess our contract.
Our DJ company was pretty chill,
like right when this all started,
they were like if it's within a year of your original date,
we'll just move in no charge, no problem.
For some of our other vendors, for example, our photographer
she was not available for our new wedding date.
So we're using a different photographer from that studio.
And that came with a cost change.
Some wedding vendors just increased prices,
as years go on for cost of living
and just like inflation and all that stuff.
In the grand scheme of things with our vendors were
pretty lucky because I heard about some people
just getting completely screwed
and like not getting any deposits back
and that really sucks.
- In short, only a small cluster (beep).
- We kind of add a lot of details
still up in the air
when the pandemic hit.
And in that way we were kind of protected.
- You got registry and stuff like this,
we didn't have anything like that set up yet.
- Not having to think about all of this stuff
all at the same time has been nice.
I think I was getting close to a point
of maybe a light breakdown
in terms of the amount of work I had to do,
was gonna be pretty stressful few weeks,
potentially a couple of months.
And so kind of taking all of that off my plate.
I will say it was not the worst thing necessarily.
I think I had just made our wedding website,
which is still up I guess I should change the date.
Hopefully nobody shows up in Chicago (laughs).
- Save the date again.
- I mean, I think I'm gonna do that.
- Yeah, mine as well.
- I think it's really cute.
(slow jam music)
- Well, the health experts were basically saying that
there might be a sort of second wave of Coronavirus
when the weather cools down
and so we thought it prudent
to basically postpone until summertime of next year.
- For us I think we shifted our date relatively early,
it was still over a year out.
So there were still dates available.
I think now is the time when it's getting
to be really difficult for people.
We still definitely held on
towards original date for quite a while
but I think we made the decision earlier than most people
to push it really far and that helped us in the end.
We had always planned to like
get our marriage license from the courthouse
as people do in Chicago.
I had always planned for that still to be like
a cute thing that we did where we like got
dressed up and maybe took some photos.
- Another reason to do a photo shoot.
- Our real wedding got push like
I still wanna get married.
- Yeah, me we kind of had our hearts set on 2020.
And so we really wanted to
kind of honor that commitment to each other.
Formally, even though we couldn't really do
the hoopla shenanigans in June of this year,
we still wanted to sort of sign the papers
and you know, make it official.
- We were kinda hoping that we could maybe have
our courthouse wedding close to our original date,
but one of the things we want is
for our parents to be there,
it's not super safe for our parents to travel right now.
And then also the courts have not reopened yet.
So we're kind of just playing it by ear
in terms of when those two things will align so we can do it
but I do have hope that that will happen in 2020.
It's been a little bit difficult emotionally
in a sense of like, you know,
we've basically postponed two versions of a wedding
and even filming this wedding season stuff like
this shouldn't be one of the videos.
This last episode was supposed to be a wedding
and we have nothing to deliver to you.
I'm so sorry (laughs).
June 27, 2020 is still a date
that we want to be special to us.
And I think we still wanna do fun stuff on that day.
We're gonna find our own little ways to celebrate,
like, I want to get dressed up.
- Yeah, you know, we crack open a bottle of something.
- It's not ideal that we've had to
postpone all of this stuff.
But we are very lucky that we have our help
and we help each other.
- And we get to take for photo shoots.
- Okay (laughs).
- And the wedding is just a symbol
of what we've been cultivating for
over five years now.
And you know, of course,
we want everybody to take part in it.
We want everybody to kind of celebrate this union with us.
- You get married, because you love the person
and you are in a strong relationship with them.
And the certificate should not be
a thing that really changes stuff between the two people.
I think whether we get the piece of paper this summer,
next summer,
whatever it happens,
our relationship will just continue to be
something that's strong and fun.
And then I like having in my life.
- This is a great segue for a smooch.
- Okay (laughs).
So we,
hello.
Hey.
(laughs)
We are on our way (laughs) to pick up some food
from a very fancy Italian restaurant
to kind of celebrate our original wedding date.
- Called Russel blue.
- We're gonna have a little night in
and it's gonna be very cute and very special, right?
- And they're gonna be tequila shots.
- And they're going to be tequila shots (laughs).
(jazz music)
Thank you so much for
following along and watching us
as we went on this little journey.
See you next year when we have our actual wedding.
- When we can leave the house.
- Yeah, that'll be a great time.
(jazz music)