Our Courthouse Wedding

New-to-me things for the wedding, both past season items I bought secondhand, but in new condition. The pictured shoes are not the exact style I wore. My pair is the same color, but was originally from Nordstrom, so it has a slightly different horsebit detail.

As of late last month, K and I are officially married! We are absolutely thrilled. Though to be honest, married life also doesn't feel all that different from what came before. After all, we'd already been living together for quite a few years.

Like all couples getting married since March 2020, K and I made the best of things as much as we could, taking into account international COVID travel restrictions; local public health and safety; and our loved ones' preferences and comfort levels as to COVID caution and risk. Given all that, the best solution was obvious: an immediate family-only courthouse wedding now, with the big event and celebration - hopefully including close friends scattered across the US and some family members living abroad as guests - to occur... someday... when things are better from Delta, or from any other future COVID variant to come. Said big party would almost certainly not be happening any earlier than a year from now, and I think it might be even longer than that, maybe a lot longer. 

K and I put together our courthouse wedding in a very low-key and low-stress way, exactly as we preferred. My mom and sister were able to fly in, which was the most important thing. (His parents are local to the NYC area, so their attendance wasn't as much of a challenge.) The judge I clerked for was kind enough to perform our ceremony, for which I am deeply grateful. Thanks to Kristy's recommendation for Snappr, we were also able to line up a photographer, even though K and I - being utterly clueless about reasonable and appropriate timelines for anything to do with wedding planning - had waited far too late to start trying to book one, in the last three weeks before the ceremony (oops!).

In keeping with the low-key and highly informal event we had in mind, I wore a casual J.Crew dress and pale blue croc-embossed Sam Edelman loafers. Both were from past seasons, and I purchased them secondhand in new condition, from eBay and Mercari respectively. (These items did not go into a monthly shopping reflections posts because I bought them solely for the wedding.) I also wore my gold J.Hannah Duet earrings. 

I swear I looked at practically every single white dress with the right level of formality from Nordstrom (after filtering out super high-end designer ones that were out of budget), Rent the Runway, Shopbop, and J.Crew and I didn't see a single thing I liked that was currently available for purchase or rent. So off to the secondhand market it was! 

Please note that this portion of the post contains affiliate links that could result in my earning a small commission - at no extra cost to you - if you click and make a purchase. Thank you for your support!

For shoes, my feet still haven't fully adjusted to wearing anything but sneakers or my trusty Fitflops - even though my COVID work from home days ended months ago, and I've intermittently tried to get back to wearing "real" shoes in the time since - so I definitely couldn't push it by trying to wear heels. I was only able to find a size 8 pair of the Sam Edelman loafers in my desired color on the secondhand market, not my usual size 7.5. But the size 8s were comfortable, and I'm starting to think it may be that my feet are actually an 8 now, and that's why so many of my old shoes from before the pandemic aren't comfortable anymore?

As with so many things these past two years, our wedding didn't look like what we would originally have wanted, were it not for the pandemic. But that's alright. We got all the most important things out of our day: we're legally married; our immediate family living in the USA could attend; we minimized the COVID risk associated with the event as much as we could; and we also have photographs of all of us together to commemorate the occasion. It was a good day and we got all that we really needed.