An Intimate Apartment Elopement in Missouri During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Despite their wedding plans being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, Lindsay and Clifton's wedding day was so full of joy that they even ended the elopement by jumping on the bed. Lindsay shares that her wedding to Clifton was "officiated by Clifton's best friend, Christopher Allen, and attended by our mothers and our stepfathers and Chris's wife (our friend) Mary. Including ourselves and our photographer and videographer, there were exactly 10 people in the room. Clifton made our wooden wedding arbor by hand and I designed and assembled our arbor florals. We wanted our fingerprints all over this wedding! (Our wedding bands actually have each other’s fingerprints engraved inside of them)." 

Lindsay and Clifton wanted an intimate wedding from the start, so adjusting to COVID wasn't quite as difficult for them as it may have been had they been planning a larger affair. However, they did still have to "make some adjustments. We made sure to have no more than 10 people in the room during our ceremony (per our city’s guidelines) and opted for an intimate reception with just the two of us afterwards. As the pandemic changed the world around us, it become more important than ever for the focus of our day to be about us and our love for each other. I was really concerned that we would not be able to go through with it and that our vendors would have to cancel, or our venue might close down before our wedding day. I remember one day when I was particularly worried, Clifton said to me: 'The universe wants this to happen, Lindsay. Even in the middle of a pandemic, it wants this to happen.' And apparently it did, because we couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day! Our small village of vendors came through for us and showed us so much support & love. We had the entire hotel to ourselves on our wedding day, which was kind of surreal, but it also added to the intimacy of the day. We wrote our own vows, did a traditional ring ceremony, and a handfasting. The entire day was beautiful, and we feel so fortunate to have been able to get married exactly a week before our city went into shelter in place," Lindsay says. 

Lindsay goes on to share that her and Clifton's advice "for other couples whose wedding planning is being affected by the pandemic would be this: When we were standing up there together, neither of us saw anything in the room but the other person. Something could have literally caught on fire and we wouldn’t have noticed it. The details are beautiful, but the heart of your union is YOU. And that’s the piece that you get to carry with you every day of your life."