What It’s Like to Have a Quarantine Wedding

Love in the time of coronavirus is a challenge. Particularly for couples who were planning to get married this year, and now have to completely rethink what their wedding day will look like. What would it be like to get married during quarantine?

Lucas Holt, a production assistant for Relevant Radio®, married his wife Gina just last week, and he stopped by Trending with Timmerie to share what this unusual experience was like.

On having a quarantine wedding, Lucas said, “It was a bit of a bummer. Neither of our families could be there in person, but it was really beautiful. We were able to live stream it on YouTube, and they were able to join us that way. Then afterwards we had a room set up where they could join us via Zoom and they could watch the reception. We had different family members make speeches and all of that.”

While their wedding certainly looked different than they originally imagined, Lucas suggested that there was still a quiet beauty in a ceremony with only a handful of people.

“It was a little strange, I’m not gonna lie, walking into this huge church and then it being pretty empty,” he admitted. “We did have a few close friends and people who supported us along the way, and a really good priest friend of ours. So it was below 10 people. But I can’t tell you how many people said, ‘Hey, that was such a beautiful wedding.'”

“It just shows that the beauty of the sacrament, the beauty of the Mass reaches beyond just the physical parameters that we have,” Lucas said. “Obviously being in person is ideal but, you know, praise God for the gift of technology.”

In wedding planning during more normal times, it can be easy to get swept up in the externals and little details of the wedding day. But Lucas pointed out that a quarantine wedding strips a lot of those things away, giving space to think about the marriage, not just the wedding.

“It really drew my attention to the sacramentality of marriage,” he told Timmerie. “Not just the party, of getting together, of celebrating and dancing and eating food. But what this is all about, why is this a thing, why has God instituted it, and what are we really celebrating here?”

While a quarantine wedding can come with many disappointments, in many ways getting married during quarantine is an act of hope, and a reminder that marriage is an image of our heavenly union with God. Though a Zoom marriage banquet isn’t what these couples hoped for, it is a reminder that a wedding lasts one day, but we are living for a heavenly banquet that will last for eternity.

“Gina and I coming together as one, it brought me so much joy to think of the fact that no matter how happy I am with her, I’m going to be infinitely more happy in the union with God in the wedding to come,” Lucas said. “And that’s the cause for celebration. The fact that we have hope, as followers of Christ. Even if we may face trials right now, ultimately we’re going to be wed to our Maker and that is cause for celebration and joy.”

Listen to the full conversation with Lucas Holt below, and tune-in to Trending with Timmerie weekdays at 6:00 p.m. Central on Relevant Radio and the Relevant Radio App.

Stephanie Foley serves as a Digital Media Producer at Relevant Radio®. She is a graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, where she studied journalism, and she has worked in Catholic radio for 12 years. Stephanie is a wife, a mother of three boys, and in her free time she enjoys reading, running, and really good coffee. You can find more of Stephanie’s writing at relevantradio.com and on the free Relevant Radio mobile app.