The COVID pandemic has launched a new way to say ‘I do’: the Tuesday wedding

Planning how to celebrate their wedding proper, though, was a bigger challenge for the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based couple. “We were in a state of limbo,” she recalls. “Venues were fully booked from weddings that had been rebooked, and it felt like things would be shutting down again—which, in fact, they did.”

In the pandemic’s first summer, they were pragmatic. Smarter to plan for a smaller wedding, the pair reasoned, that would be less likely to get caught up in regulations. A positive side effect of culling numbers was they could stretch their budget further so the overall experience was more luxurious. When they looked at calendars for dates, they realized the easiest way to celebrate sooner, and up the cachet for the same cash: ditch a traditional Saturday in favor of a weekday wedding.

So on Monday, Dec. 6, 2021, at Sunstone Winery in Santa Ynez, they said their “I dos.” “The wedding on Saturday or Sunday would have eaten into our budget quite a bit. It allowed us more flexibility, to go more luxe with catering and flowers,” Soloff says of their 50-person bash. “Logistically, it worked—we had guests coming in from Florida, so they could spend the weekend with the wedding as the grand finale.”

As their wedding planner Kimberly Sisti puts it: “In 10 years from now, no one will remember your wedding was on a Tuesday. What matters is what happens on that day, not the day of the week.”

Soloff and Smith aren’t alone. Among the varied impacts the pandemic has had on the wedding industry, from a rash of postponements to a rush of celebrations, a loosening of rules and upending of traditions is perhaps one of the more major. According to the 2019 Real Weddings Study from the Knot, two-thirds of nuptials took place on Saturday, while the remaining one-third was mostly Friday or Sunday. Per Wedding Wire, just 2% of nuptials pre-pandemic were scheduled for a Monday.

According to data supplied to Bloomberg from venue hire specialist PartySlate, there was a 1,080% jump in web pages published to focus on ‘weekday weddings’ over the year ended January 2021, typically the month when wedding planning starts. The highest search volume, per PartySlate, was for “Thursday wedding.”

Elaina Featherstone, 36, is one such bride who opted for that nuptial flexibility. The Lexington, Mass.-based events planner and her fiancé, 56-year-old Scott, who works in commercial real estate, are scheduled to marry on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022, at the Mount, Edith Wharton’s former New England estate. Featherstone and her planner, Kayla Hoey, are treating the 100-person event differently from a conventional, larger weekend wedding.

“We aren’t having an engagement party, bachelor parties, or showers, and we aren’t hosting a rehearsal event before the ceremony,” Featherstone says. “Covid was actually the catalyst for this nontraditional take—we didn’t want to plan a bunch of single-day gatherings that might have to be canceled anyways, so we are going all-in on the one event.”

A weekday wedding, she continues, is likelier to include just close pals and family—folks much more willing to use up their paid time off for the occasion. Many have racked up rolled-over vacation days, Featherstone says, making them even readier to spend them on a glorious long weekend over summer in the Berkshires. The smaller guest list, and slimmed-down wedding calendar, has freed up the couple’s budget, too.

“We have absolutely been able to splurge,” she says. “We are putting that savings towards paying for travel and lodging for many of our guests—we exclusively hired a big lake house for most of our guests to stay in and are planning to host parties by the lake throughout the weekend.”

There’s also a VIP aspect to opting out of the weekend, as their planner points out. “You will not have another competing wedding on-site with a Monday or Thursday wedding and can get venue exclusivity,” Hoey says, which is especially helpful given that nontraditional wedding choices are becoming, well, more of the norm. Of the 15 weddings she coordinated in summer 2020, just one was in a church. Couples whose nuptials were canceled or postponed due to Covid-19, she continues, are better set up logistically for a reschedule as well. “Ideal vendors are less likely to be booked on a weekday, and this allows them to keep their ‘dream team’ or even get into a venue that is booked into 2024.”

Forced cancellation was a factor for 30-year-old Ginna Oates, a marriage and family therapist in San Francisco who married her fiancé, 30-year-old software engineer Tyler Allen, on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2020. They’d initially planned a huge bash in September that year. “We were about 85% done planning our wedding in March 2020, and we thought the whole [pandemic] would pass fairly quickly, so we decided to sit tight, keep planning, and cross our fingers.” They eventually postponed their large celebration but were still keen to get married quickly with a select few guests on hand.

“The future was unknown. We had concerns we’d have to continue moving our wedding,” she recalls, so they booked a 20-guest bash in Linville, N.C. Married in the morning, they then hosted a mimosa and bloody mary-powered wedding brunch; the couple were able to score in-demand local vendors, such as photographer Julia Wade and bluegrass band the Mountain Men, more easily.

“We definitely got some raised eyebrows and questions when we mentioned we were planning a weekday wedding, but most people seemed to be merely curious, instead of judgmental,” Oates says. With just 20 people, she continues, every guest stood up and made a toast—a delightful surprise. “Covid stripped away all the fluff and excess and allowed us to focus on the most important part: the marriage,” she says.

And it isn’t just stateside where weddings are shifting away from the weekend. Take the Republic of Ireland, a country that had some of the toughest lockdown regulations in Europe, including 103 days when it was forbidden to travel farther than 5km (around 3 miles) from home; infractions resulted in on-the-spot fines.

Ellen Bailey, a 28-year-old who works in property development, and her now-husband, Geoff Mullan, 31, who works for the Kind snack company, live just outside Dublin. They saw their wedding snarled by red tape—not once, not twice, but three times. The couple, initially slated to marry in a destination wedding, held off signing that contract in March 2020, fearful of the uncertainty around news of the novel coronavirus. They pivoted, juggling a ceremony with a small group of guests plus a much larger, later celebration, booking and rebooking several times.

“When the delta variant was discovered and Covid was once again rampant across the world, we decided to ultimately cancel our larger celebration and make our micro wedding ceremony a little more macro,” Bailey says. They worked with planner Tara Fay to throw a 110-person bash on Dec. 17, 2021, a Friday, at Dublin’s city center Merrion Hotel, with festivities starting on Wednesday, when the couple checked into the hotel.

“We wanted to host our wedding around Christmas when our friends and particularly my bridesmaids were home from abroad,” she says, conscious of pandemic-related travel snafus. “We didn’t know what day it was. You are so caught up in a love and celebration bubble that days of the week go out the door. All you can and want to do is smile and toast to the occasion with a glass of Champagne in hand.”

Ten days later, two of their closest friends also got married—in this case, on a Tuesday. “Thankfully we were off due to our wedding—we had booked extra annual leave,” she says with a laugh. “So it was simply like ours, a great celebration of a fabulous couple, and no one was any wiser.”