Earlier this spring, Teresa Clayton’s husband got nervous every time the phone rang. “He said, ‘The second you hear a crying bride, it’s all over,’” said Ms. Clayton, an owner, along with her husband Steve, of Glencliff Manor, a 50-acre wedding venue in Rustburg, Va. “And he’s right.”
Ms. Clayton’s weakness for brides’ stories about wedding plans toppled by the coronavirus eventually gave way to what has been the busiest May in Glencliff’s history. After she announced on March 30 that she would host free weddings for couples left in limbo, the Claytons helped orchestrate 45 one-hour weddings on May 1, May 2, May 9 and May 16.
“It was exhausting,” Ms. Clayton said. “But as tiring as it was, we were actually energized by it. We loved seeing the happy couples, the happy tears.”
Those tears trickled from the eyes of fewer than 10 wedding guests at a time, in line with Virginia’s guidelines for safe social gatherings, and did not come with the bells and whistles normally associated with Glencliff’s all-inclusive $10,000 wedding packages.
“Basically I just gave them the time, and one of the photographers I work with said he’d knock his price to $100 for anyone who needed pictures, and I had my two staff ministers jumping in to take care of people who didn’t have a minister already,” Ms. Clayton said. She also played DJ when necessary, set up a cake table for post-wedding nibbles and decorated with flowers.
For the couples who managed to score one of the free slots — a waiting list of 80 had developed by the time she booked the last bride and groom — that was enough. “I was shocked by the response,” she said. “I had no earthly idea so many people needed to be married right away.”
Among them were military couples with deployment issues and couples in which one partner needed access to the other’s employer-provided health insurance. But couples with less urgent needs were also in the mix, and that was OK by Ms. Clayton. “I didn’t set any real criteria,” she said. “I just figured, if they need it, they need it. I’m sure there were a few who weren’t even planning to get married who said, ‘Woo hoo! It’s free! Let’s do it.’”
Here, snapshots of three couples who partook.
The Perfect Small Gathering
Dana Sliva and Paul Alcock
Dana Sliva and Paul Alcock, Jr., of Lynchburg, Va., had originally planned an intimate June ceremony followed by what Ms. Sliva, 36, called “a bash in the back yard.” The Glencliff wedding, with its sharp one-hour turnaround time and peaceful setting, may have worked out better.
“Paul is not much of a talker, and sometimes going out in public can be stressful for him,” Ms. Sliva said. Mr. Alcock, also 36, has autism. Their two-person wedding, officiated by Carol Tyree, a Glencliff staffer who is a marriage celebrant, felt manageable in a world that can often feel otherwise.
“I can’t handle being in big groups,” said Mr. Alcock, a massage therapist. “I’ve had trouble with social dynamics and friend dynamics.” His courtship with Ms. Sliva, a marketing writer who was previously married and has a 6-year-old daughter, Penelope Joy Sliva, happened almost by accident. Ms. Sliva had been on Tinder two days when she saw a profile whose tagline included the words “artistic and tattoos.”
“I was like, Oh my gosh, heck yeah, I’m going to check that out,” said Ms. Sliva, who was divorced after a yearslong separation in 2018. But she had misread the profile description. “It actually said, ‘autistic and tattoos.’” Ms. Sliva had no experience with people on the autism spectrum. But after she realized her mistake, she was still intrigued. “The first thing I said to him was, ‘What’s up, Buttercup?’ He said, ‘Comets.’ I was smitten.”
A monthslong process of getting to know each other via phone and text took place before an in-person date, in February 2018 at Rivermont Pizza in Lynchburg, could be arranged. “Paul needed time to get his pregame together a little bit,” Ms. Sliva said. Sensory issues like competitive noises and changes in light can leave him feeling disoriented.
By late spring, Mr. Alcock had become a fixture in Ms. Sliva’s life, and Penelope’s, too. Ms. Sliva was learning to experience the world from Mr. Alcock’s perspective. “The more questions I asked, the more I understood how he looked at things,” she said. “I can be impulsive, and when I met him I started thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re the one,’ really fast. But what Paul had in his mind was that our relationship should develop in a slow, healthy way. He taught me to value pacing in a relationship.” Rethinking spontaneous displays of affection like hand-holding during movies was part of the learning process. “Like, maybe I reached for his hand and that sense of touch didn’t feel right to him at that moment,” Ms. Sliva said. “I started to understand that he needed space in that moment, not that he doesn’t care.”
In May 2019, they moved in together, a process Mr. Alcock said he needed to be slow and methodical. “Dana took a lot of time listening to me explain things,” he said. “She understood that I needed to have a routine.” By Christmas, they had talked about getting engaged. Mr. Alcock surprised Ms. Sliva with an engagement ring, wrapped in nesting boxes, under the tree.
“I thought I was getting shoes, but then I kept unwrapping and found a jewelry box,” she said. “I began to cry tears of joy. Or of relief. Because it was like, I don’t have to worry anymore about finding my person.”
Their small June wedding was on the books when the pandemic arrived. In early April, they weighed postponement or cancellation. Then they saw Ms. Clayton’s free weddings offer. “I loved the fact that we could do it outside and preserve the intimate feeling we were going for,” Ms. Sliva said.
Mr. Alcock rented a tuxedo online. Ms. Sliva bought a secondhand tea-length wedding dress on Facebook Marketplace. When they arrived at Glencliff on May 16, Penelope and a few dozen other friends and family members were watching on Zoom. Just after Ms. Tyree pronounced them husband and wife in Glencliff’s gazebo, Penelope broke the Zoom gallery silence: “I love you!,” she said.
For Mr. Alcock, the occasion had proved a relief. “For me, the simpler the better,” he said.
Love on Both Sides of the Border
Rachel Robb and Sebastian Vasquez
Rachel Robb and Sebastian Vasquez, of Fredericksburg, Va., met in 2013 in Oaxaca, Mexico, when she was 16 and he was 14. By the time he turned 15, he knew he wanted to marry her. What he didn’t know was that a pandemic would cause them to get married so soon.
Mr. Vasquez, now 20, was in his third year of studying to be a pastor at Rio Grande Bible College in Edinburg, Texas, when the coronavirus hit. As the school shut its doors and switched to online learning in mid-March, he and other international students were given the option to return to their home countries. But that presented two problems for Mr. Vasquez: One, the Mexican border had already closed. And two, though he and Ms. Robb, his fiancée, had gotten used to having a long-distance relationship, he didn’t want to pack up and move somewhere without her again.
“It’s been tough to be long distance for so long,” said Ms. Robb, now 23 and an elementary school ESL teacher in Fredericksburg. “Our whole relationship happened over the phone, and we were ready to be done with that.”
The sturdiness of Ms. Robb and Mr. Vasquez’s teenage romance owes itself to shared passions for faith and art, plus Mr. Vasquez’s determination to never lose touch with the American girl who had captivated him while he was still wearing braces. Ms. Robb’s travel from her childhood home in Richmond to Oaxaca as a 13-year-old was for a mission trip with her church. While there, her group mingled with local Christians, Mr. Vasquez among them.
“The moment I saw her I had this huge smile,” he said. “She blew me away.” After a week, though, she returned to Richmond. He found her on Facebook, through an account his parents had only recently allowed him to open. “I sent her a message and she didn’t respond within five minutes, so I tried to forget the whole thing.” That was a struggle. He was relieved a few hours later when she wrote back and said she remembered him, and that she had even written about him in her travel journal.
It took six months of Skyping and Facebook messaging before Mr. Vasquez revealed his romantic feelings for Ms. Robb. Throughout it, “I was trying to find things she really liked to talk about, and one of those things was art,” he said. He told her about his family’s participation in an annual radish sculpting festival in Oaxaca, the Night of the Radishes. On Dec. 23, 2016, during the Night of the Radishes festival, he worked up his courage and asked her to be his girlfriend. She said yes.
Summer and holiday visits to Oaxaca and Richmond deepened their bond. By the time Mr. Vasquez enrolled in Bible college in 2018, they were talking about marriage. On Dec. 6, 2019, Mr. Vasquez flew to Virginia from Texas to surprise Ms. Robb.
“We were planning to spend Christmas with his parents, and we had talked about getting engaged in Mexico,” she said. Instead, Mr. Vasquez had a friend lure Ms. Robb to a park in Fredericksburg, where he dropped to one knee and asked her to marry him.
“My parents were there, my friends were there, and at first I was so busy with, ‘How did you get here?’ that I forgot to say yes,” she said. “A couple minutes later I said, ‘Oh, yes!’”
They planned a wedding for 150 guests at Spotswood Baptist Church in Fredericksburg on May 31. Then the Mexican border closed, and so did Mr. Vasquez’s school. Mr. Vasquez’s student visa was good through May 8; when Ms. Robb saw an advertisement for free weddings at Glencliff, she called and asked if they could be married there May 9. In the midst of a pandemic, “we were concerned about his transition from a student visa to a green card,” Ms. Robb said. Legal marriage was a way of circumventing potential immigration trouble.
On May 9, the couple dressed for an intimate wedding. Ms. Robb wore a sleeveless white gown with a long veil. Mr. Vasquez wore a blue suit and gray tie. Jared Stacy, a Spotswood’s pastor, officiated a short ceremony for six guests. Because of the virus and the closed border, no one from Mr. Vasquez’s family was able to attend. But the couple that had so much experience sharing love through screens did so again for their missing relatives and friends through a livestream. And both were happy with the result. “As Sebastian always says, ‘It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,” Ms. Robb said.
Their Pocket of Grace
Julyanna Booth and Cedric Collins
Cedric Collins and Julyanna Booth, of Lynchburg, met through a mutual friend in February 2018 and were married May 2, the wedding date they set before the pandemic. They also managed to keep the venue they had booked for their ceremony and reception, Glencliff. “We feel like we found a pocket of grace,” Mr. Collins said. There have been a few such moments since they started dating.
Mr. Collins, 24, first met Ms. Booth, also 24, through a friend of Ms. Booth’s brother, Sidney Booth. “We stopped by Sidney’s house on the way to church, and that’s where I saw Julyanna,” he said. “It was love at first sight. I had no idea who she was, but I had to find out.”
Mr. Collins, a music producer, and Ms. Booth both were frustrated artists at the time. He was working in retail at Pier 1 Imports and New York & Company, and she was working in customer service at a call center. On a first date to a town carnival in April 2018, they talked about their ambitions. “She’s a phenomenal painter and interior designer, and for me it was music,” he said. “We connected over our love of the arts.” Also over a jumbo pink teddy bear.
At the carnival, “I wanted to make her day, so I went out of my way to try and win this giant bear for her through a basketball shooting game.” A handful of unsuccessful attempts could not dissuade him. “He was spending a lot of money, and I felt bad, but I also didn’t want to shoot down his pride,” Ms. Booth said. Two hundred dollars later, the bear was hers.
Mr. Collins showed a similar affinity for grand gestures when he proposed a year later, during an annual Independence Day celebration at Liberty University in Lynchburg. Ms. Booth is enrolled as a graphic design student there; she plans to graduate in 2025. As a fireworks display began, Mr. Collins got down on one knee in front of the dozen friends and family who had joined them.
“I told her I thought she looked so beautiful, and I wanted to marry her,” he said. Ms. Booth said yes. “I said it over and over and over,” she said. “I got lost in the moment.”
The wedding they eventually put on had its guest list reduced by 90. About 100 people were invited to the wedding pre-Covid, and only the couples’ parents and siblings and an officiant, Pastor Marvin St. Macary of the Ramp Church International, in Lynchburg, wound up attending. But both felt that forging ahead was a way of honoring their love.
“A wedding day is about celebrating with everyone else,” Mr. Collins said. “But ultimately we didn’t want to set our marriage aside for everyone else.”
Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.
