How coronavirus forced us to postpone our weddings after months of planning –March couples

Jesusegun Alagbe

Today was supposed to be his big day. His hair had been fitly shaved, beard well-trimmed. His properly ironed emerald green tuxedo and white shirt, combined with a gold tie, had been hanging in the closet for some days now. A new pair of black Oxford shoes, with accompanying socks, had also been bought, well polished. A wristwatch, as well as the rings, lay in their cases, waiting to be worn on the occasion.

The caterer had been paid to provide food of all sorts for the invited guests. The hall for the reception also paid for. The disc jockey, or simply DJ, including the master of ceremonies, had also collected fees in advance. Invitation cards had been printed and distributed to family and friends several weeks ago.

The groomsmen had rehearsed their dance steps, waiting to wow the hundreds of guests particularly at the reception. They were well prepared to compete with the bridal train, even though no crown awaited whoever won. It was all going to be for fun, anyway.

However, on Wednesday, Donald Itsuokor and his fiancée, Mercy Chinukwue, made one of the toughest decisions of their lives. They postponed their wedding indefinitely due to the coronavirus outbreak in Nigeria. They had no choice but to do so.

“The thing is, it was not an easy decision. The wedding postponement is one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever taken in my life,” Itsuokor, a civil servant with the Edo State Government, told our correspondent via the telephone.

As with many tribes in Nigeria, he and her fiancée planned to hold their traditional marriage first. They fixed that for Thursday while the white or church wedding would have held on Saturday (today) in Lagos.

But they were forced to cancel the events amid the ban on public gatherings in Lagos and many parts of the country to check the spread of the virus.

Itsuokor said, “On Wednesday when we decided to postpone the wedding, I didn’t eat until Thursday afternoon. Definitely, it’s not easy for me and my fiancée, especially for her. But I’m trying to make her understand it’s not our fault. We have to save lives right now.

“We don’t know where people we had invited had travelled to and we don’t want to put other guests at risk. Ultimately, we don’t want to run afoul of the state government’s directive because even if we went ahead with the wedding, the Lagos State Government has set up a task force to enforce the ban on public gatherings and it’s going to be embarrassing if they chased us out of the wedding venue. We have sent out the postponement notice to family and friends.”

But as much as he tried to hide it, Itsuokor sounded somehow downhearted, for he and his fiancée had lost much money due to the wedding postponement.

“We’ve spent a lot of money, we’ve made full preparations. We have bought many wedding items. We’ve even got the cake. Everything! I don’t know what to do now,” he said.

“It’s not easy. Where are we going to get money again to buy again all the things we had initially bought?” he asked rhetorically.

As for the cake, Itsuokor said it would be shared among family members who wanted it, while awaiting an end to the pandemic and the government to ease restriction on public gathering.

“We have not fixed another date yet because we don’t know when this situation will end,” he added.

Itsuokor’s fiancée, Chinukwue, an indigene of Delta State, had yet to grasp with the reality of the postponement.

Her shaking, perplexed but soft-spoken voice surely revealed her unhappy emotional state when our correspondent spoke to her on the phone.

“I don’t know what to do because everything, including perishable items, has been bought and we can’t even get back our funds. It’s really depressing because we don’t know when Nigeria would be free of the coronavirus,” she said.

But realising that the wedding postponement was beyond their control, Chinukwue said she had accepted her fate and that the family had gradually started eating some of the perishable food items so everything wouldn’t go to waste.

“The cake, a four-step one, can’t last for more than a week before it would get spoilt because of the type of preservatives added to it,” she said.

Left to her and her fiancé, Chinukwue said they would have loved to have a low-key wedding so they could move on with their lives, but for culture and respect for their family members.

“Despite the public gathering restriction, many family members still called that they would come. But we have to put their safety and others into consideration and to also obey the government. So the best thing was to postpone the wedding,” she said.

“I’m praying for the situation to end so we can hold the wedding and move on with our lives. I still look forward to the glamour of the day,” she added.

Ban on social gatherings

For the world right now, it has been a difficult time as the battle against coronavirus, codenamed COVID-19 by the World Health Organisation, rages on.

Source: Punch

Email: elora.akpotosevbe@yahoo.com