Kane Quilos and Patryck Kowalick met on Tinder, and are not ashamed to admit it. They had a low-key proposal filled with lots of giggles at their favorite Mexican restaurant. When planning the wedding, the hardest part was trying to whittle down the guest list to fit their budget. Other than that, the lead-up to their May 16 wedding date was fun and easy. But as gatherings of a certain size started to be discouraged and restrictions on travel threatened a large portion of guests flying in from the Philippines and from other cities across the U.S., they realized they needed to postpone the wedding. “We have been engaged for over a year, a year and a half by our original date,” Quilos says. “We just want to be married already!”
The same can’t be said for the vendors making those offers. Wedding photographer AJ Abelman runs her own one-woman business, and a majority of her income comes from weddings booked between April and October. (Full disclosure: she is a close friend.) This year, eight of her clients have weddings that have been postponed or canceled because of COVID concerns so far, and if those couples don’t rebook she anticipates losing at least $30,000.
Hutches and Horigan are glad to be isolated together rather than apart, spending their days doing new things like making pasta from scratch and playing lots of board games. Mostly, Hutches says, this time has been a preview of what awaits on the other side of the COVID crisis. “I think the isolation has really just confirmed for both of us that we’ve made the right choice of who to spend the rest of our life with.” v
