Welcome to Viral Stories, a living history about the deadliest pandemic outbreak of the last century.
In today’s edition, I speak with… myself.
If you have a story you want to share, email me at JordanZakarin@gmail.com.
I was supposed to get married on Friday night. My fiancé and I got engaged this time last year and began planning the wedding soon after — venues get booked up real fast here in New York, so we had to jump on it ASAP. We’re not fussy or flashy people, but because she’s got such a huge family, we were expecting 125 or so guests — not a blowout by any means, but a big enough event that it took a lot of coordination to get organized.
The pandemic obviously put our wedding plans on ice, which was a minor inconvenience compared to the horrors that so many people are going through. Still, it was a pretty significant bummer after a year of anticipation — we were really excited to get married, so much so that we got our marriage license a solid month before our wedding date and already met with my friend Bryan, who got ordained so that he could perform our ceremony.
Fortunately, our eagerness wound up paying off.
All along, we’d been planning on doing the actual ceremony the night before the party during a small get-together with a few family members and friends. And at some point over the last five weeks of quarantined tedium, Zoom conversations with friends and co-workers, and endless conversations about our indefinite uncertainty, we realized that we didn’t want to wait and really didn’t have to, either.
We had the marriage license. We had the officiant, who was generously willing to come up to our roof. We had family members willing to watch over Zoom. And we even had a venue: our building’s roof, which we could access through our fire escape. So we said fuck it, let’s get married.
The last week was fraught with anxiety. Even a ceremony this small has uncertainties. The chaos around New York was only getting scarier. The forecast called for rain. The roof is unfinished. And we had to get a bunch of family members who aren’t necessarily technologically gifted all on the same video call. But we were resolute (and privileged enough) that we weren’t going to let coronavirus get in the way of us getting married…. even if Bryan had to stand six feet away to respect social distancing.
Was it what we initially planned? Definitely not; a worldwide death virus wasn’t something we discussed with the party venue or the bakery we’d commissioned to make a dessert table. But when we were standing there, listening to Bryan give his homily and reciting the vows we’d written for one another — she quoted Springsteen and I mentioned her favorite reality TV show, while Godzilla got several name drops — it felt natural and something like destiny.
It got even more surreal later in the evening, when I tweeted about our ceremony and it took off like a rocketship. A few media people I know retweeted it, and because everyone is so starved for anything resembling good news or a happy story, it began racking up endless retweets and faves, its reach expanding exponentially by the minute until I made my Twitter private for the rest of the night.
We got a ton of sweet messages from strangers on the internet, a blue moon event that made the whole thing that much more special. The BBC even got in touch, asking us to do an interview, a wild opportunity that we graciously declined. In the end, it was a bigger party than we’d ever expected. And I got two Edible Arrangements, so it was a real win-win-win.