The March 21, 2020, wedding of Julie Samuels and Joe Hillyer in Montclair, New Jersey, ushered in an unparalleled time for weddings. Because of the coronavirus pandemic and its crowd-size and social-distancing mandates, couples had to get creative about how to pull off weddings.

Samuels and Hillyer had their nuptials on the front porch of their home as a honking convoy of friends and family drove in circles around the block cheering them on.

A couple who met at the Dunkin’ drive-thru window in Edmond, Oklahoma — she as an employee, he as a customer — said their vows through that same window with guests watching from the parking lot. Fashion model and labor activist Sara Ziff married photographer Reed Young at a train station in Philipstown, New York. And some couples married with no one else in the room, their officiant beaming in over Zoom.

Their reasons for not wanting to wait varied: to honor a long-awaited wedding date, to secure health insurance or to follow their dream of starting a family.

If weddings looked different five years ago, the permutations of romance that led to them held steady. Canceling weddings became commonplace. Love endured. Here is a look at three couples who married during COVID-19 despite the difficulties involved, and their reflections on how saying “I do” at such a fraught time shaped the relationships they’re in now.

Julie Samuels and Joe Hillyer

“The day of our wedding, we raised a glass with Brian and Andy across the driveway,” said Samuels, referring to Brian Juergens and Andy Swist, neighbors who decorated their own porch with bright crepe paper balls to help the couple celebrate. “Then we went inside and stayed there for two years.”

Samuels, now 58, is an intellectual property and commercial transactions lawyer in Manhattan. Hillyer, 63, is the director of logistics and postal affairs at Scholastic and works remotely from the house in Connecticut the couple moved into in 2024.

The spaciousness of their rented home in Montclair helped them weather the first few years of marriage, which might have been more challenging in closer quarters. Not every newlywed couple, they agree, benefits from so much togetherness.

“I don’t recommend being locked inside with your new husband 24/7 under stressful circumstances,” Samuels said. “There were moments, I think, of ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’ ”

Both learned to let those moments dissolve behind closed doors. By day, they retreated to separate home offices, checking in with each other to coordinate a dinner plan.

Hillyer, whose love of cooking helped him win Samuels’ heart when they started dating in 2007, became an even more accomplished cook during lockdown, both said. By night, “we hunkered down and took care of each other,” Hillyer said.

They hesitate to say they’re glad they started their marriage with the world in crisis. But “having weathered all that and come out the other side still wanting to be married to each other — ultimately it’s a testament to this relationship,” Samuels said.

Now that the pandemic emergency is over, she said, “we’re both really good at expressing appreciation for what the other one is doing — and whenever one of us faces something, the other one is 1,000% in that person’s corner.”

Helen Kim and Peter Moon

Health wasn’t top of mind for Helen Kim and Peter Moon when they married on Sept. 12, 2020, in the Moon family’s backyard in Wilmette, Illinois. They were too busy trying to keep Kim’s Chicago coffee shop afloat while helping other cafes and restaurants avoid succumbing to the pandemic death spiral.

“The thing to do during COVID was order a lot of takeout to support small businesses,” Moon said. “That meant eating a lot of food that wasn’t great for us.”

Kim and Moon, who are now both 33, have since sold Coffee Lab & Roasters, where Moon took on barista duties when things were looking particularly dire. After that, their mental health improved, too, they said.

“We were working seven days a week,” said Kim, who sold the shop to an employee in 2023. “We were stressed all the time.”

She is now a tea production manager at Spirit Tea, a local company. Moon is a server at Jinsei Motto, a Chicago sushi restaurant.

“It’s nice to be an employee,” Kim said.

The couple hosted a second wedding celebration, for 140 people, in December 2021 at Greenhouse Loft in Chicago. Only 20 masked guests had attended the 2020 backyard wedding. Friends who couldn’t be there were represented by life-size face photos.

At the second wedding, Kim and Moon lived out their fantasy of dancing until dawn.

“It felt like we were finally able to close our wedding chapter,” Moon said.

Sasha Jackson and Stephen Small-Warner II

“Looking back, the pandemic washed away what didn’t matter,” said Stephen Small-Warner II, who married Sasha Jackson on Feb. 7, 2021, at his family’s brownstone in Brooklyn. “I was able to focus on what I wanted to hold on to in the waves.”

The couple, who met in 2008 as undergraduates at Howard University and fell in love while collaborating on a film project, now have two daughters: Sailah, 2, and Siya, 6 months.

When they married, they were living in Los Angeles and working as independent filmmakers.

In 2023, Jackson and Small-Warner, who are now both 37, moved back to Brooklyn to raise their daughters near family.

Now, between writing long entries in a shared journal and figuring out whose turn it is to give the girls a bath, they’re working together on a feature film about their love story.

Like other couples who held tight to each other when the world got quiet in 2020, they emerged from a fog of pandemic uncertainty feeling grateful.

“It was a scary, tragic time,” Jackson said. But now, “we can see the foundation we built for our family more clearly,” Small-Warner II said. “We’re stronger than ever.”