How We Balanced a Physical & Virtual Wedding

To be honest, at the beginning of planning our wedding, we did not pay much attention to the virtual part of our wedding besides just live streaming it to our friends and family that weren’t able to attend the physical wedding. The aspects of how we made the physical portion of our wedding COVID friendly could be read in my previous blog post here. We were so focused on making the physical wedding as COVID safe as possible, that the virtual portion was unfortunately put on the back burner.

Fast forward to a month before the wedding and we started to have conversations with my dad who was originally going to own all the A/V aspects of the wedding which included music, mics, zoom capability, and video recording. My dad had always been my go-to tech guy growing up so it just made sense for me to initially ask him to help out with this portion of the wedding. 

Then, one of Brandon’s close friends who does video for big tech conferences connected us with one of his friends/co-workers who also does this for living to brainstorm and potentially hire someone to assist with this portion of the wedding. At first, I was hesitant to see if it was actually necessary and on edge considering bringing one more person to the wedding. Terms were that the videographer get a COVID test prior to the wedding and that no more than one person was to come for the job. Therefore, we hired them because it will not only be one less thing to think about during the wedding, but it will also allow my father to take in the whole wedding day as his number one and now ONLY role – the father of the bride. So, hopefully the video production will be of great quality for the viewers as well.

Other aspects that we thought of to heighten the virtual wedding was to:

1. Ask all guests to dress up! hy not? Just because you cannot be there in person doesn’t mean you cannot be celebrating.A nd how many times do you get all dolled up during COVID anyways?! Plus, look good, feel good. 
2. Send the wedding playlist to the guests – which you can find here so they could have their own dance party in the comfort of their own homes.
3. Encouraged guests to utilize the text chat room to connect with other attendees.

Brandon is not huge on social media or oversharing his life, so this was a HUGE step. I was considering interacting with the virtual guests, but for us, it didn’t make sense as we feel like our attention would be pulled away too much to fully soak in the evening and enjoy the physical  event we worked so hard for. It will always be tough to balance both guests, but you just need to remember to do what is right for the both of you. Until next time, always thankful, grateful, and blessed for you to be a part of my journey!