Wedding Inspiration

After COVID-19 postponed their celebration, the bride and groom were married by their planner at his parents’ home. Photo by Lynne Reznick Photography After nearly two years of wedding planning, Lauren Cohen and Sam Andler couldn’t have been more excited for their big day—May 24, 2020. “We were so close to the dream wedding. We had the best wedding planning experience ever and we just worked so well together with our planner and our parents. It was really just going to be so perfect,” the bride recalls. Then COVID-19 happened, and their plans for a 275 person Memorial Day weekend wedding at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem suddenly went out the door. Despite the disappointment from postponing their wedding to September 2021, the two decided they’d seal the deal on their original date anyway, in a petite celebration in front of their parents at Sam’s parents’ home in Swampscott. Here, the bride and groom share their story in their own words.

Lauren: It all kind of started to change with the honeymoon. In February or early March, we decided we definitely had to cancel it. We were going to go to Italy on a cruise which seemed like about the worst thing you could do. Sam booked a honeymoon to St. Thomas instead, and that seemed like it was going to be fine. We’d still get the bridal shower and the wedding and this and that.

Then, my bridal shower was supposed to be on March 22 at Davio’s in the Seaport, and in the two weeks leading up to it, some of our older relatives started to question whether they could come or not . More and more people started texting asking if the shower was still on. I tried to stay as positive as I could, and then about five days before, I just started getting too nervous and I told the restaurant that I didn’t feel comfortable. My bachelorette party was also supposed to be the next weekend in Austin, and when we canceled the shower, we canceled that trip. Sam’s bachelor party was the weekend after that in Arizona, and he canceled too. But we still were hopeful about the wedding because it was only March, and we kind of thought this thing was going to come and go. And then that didn’t happen. We tried to wait it out as long as we could, and I was such a mess, crying all the time. But we eventually knew the wedding wasn’t going to happen. Our first postponement date was New Year’s Eve and we thought that was far out enough. We would have time to do the shower again, and the bachelor and bachelorette parties, and we got in touch with all of our vendors and everyone was a go. We were really excited, and then the virus just seemed to get worse and worse. We went from being really relieved to just waking up stressed every day again.

Sam: It […]