With Cayman’s borders still closed to visitors, local marriage registrar Joy Basdeo’s destination wedding business may have taken a hit, but she says her enterprise is still flourishing, thanks to a spike in local nuptials.
“Our borders are closed in 2021 [but] we are seeing a lot more resident weddings and the couples tell me ‘we had planned a wedding overseas. Our family can’t get here we want to do a simple wedding and get the legal part done’,” Basdeo, owner of Simply Weddings told the Cayman Compass in a recent interview.
More locals tying the knot
She said in 2019, she officiated 260 local weddings; that number climbed to 349 ceremonies for Cayman residents last year “despite being locked down for six weeks during March and April.”
“Up until the end of July 2021, we will have officiated 206 local weddings,” she added.
“For 2020 and 2021, we’ve had a lot of Zoom weddings [where family and friends can view the nuptials online.] We’ve had a lot of weddings in our wedding room as people sort of do a very, very simple ceremony to get the legal requirements,” she said.
Over at the Cayman Islands General Registry, the data shows that at the end of 2020, 714 marriages were registered here. These would include the 349 conducted by Basdeo, who is a Civil Registrar of Marriages and a Civil Registrar of Civil Unions.
It stands to reason that most of these would have been local weddings, after borders closed to visitors in March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold.
In 2019, the overall number of marriages was higher, with 821 unions registered in Cayman, however, this number also includes visitor weddings.
As for this year, from 1 Jan through to 20 July, 358 marriages were registered according to the numbers provided by the registrar, most of which were done through Simply Weddings.
Couples say ‘I do’ in small ceremonies
Basdeo said there are a number of reasons for the surge in numbers of locals tying the knot. She said she believes some residents on work permits want to leave the island and take their significant other with them, while in other cases, some want their spouse to be able to remain in Cayman.
Outside of this, some couples who decided to get hitched, Basdeo said, have told her “if we can survive a pandemic together we can survive anything”.
“When we first reopened, after the initial lock down in May, June and July [2020], we had a lot of weddings because people were getting ready to leave the island and they wanted to take their significant other, their partner with them and most other countries were locked down as well and so the only way they could do that was to take them as their wife or their husband. So we had like a flurry of resident weddings,” she said.
That trend continued into this year, which Basdeo said has helped stave off some of the adverse impacts of the border closures, as Cayman is a popular choice for destination weddings.
“I think our business has been impacted the same way everybody else’s has, but so far, we have been able to stay open. I think it sort of helps that Sam and I are both retired, so the wedding business is not a primary source of income,” she said, adding that the uptick in local wedding numbers has also helped.
She said clients are opting to do simple ceremonies to complete the legal formalities because their families are not with them to share in the celebrations and so they plan other festivities to mark the milestone, instead.
One such couple is Eddie and Jenneth Powell.
The couple, who have been together for eight years, tied the knot recently in a small ceremony and plan to do a wedding celebration in the Philippines next year.
Powell said, having been married previously, he was not “gung-ho” to do it again, but he knew it was Jenneth’s dream to get married and he felt it was the right time.
“We’re starting a new life and we’re moving to the Philippines. I thought it’s only fitting that we’d be married and we get together and live as husband and wife now,” he said.
He said, for him, the pandemic did not impact their marriage plans in terms of accelerating their decision-making or planning.
However, it did impact the way they got married, as Jenneth said she would have liked to have had her family with her for the special occasion.
This was not possible, but she said she was still very happy to get married to her longtime partner.
“Every woman’s dream [is to have a wedding] that’s their dream. It’s my dream too, but having to marry the person you love is one thing. I’m so happy that I would be spending the rest of my life with Eddie,” she said.
Jenneth said she would have liked a church wedding when they said “I do”, but they are planning to do that when they go to the Philippines in 2022.
She said her wedding did not turn out the way she dreamed it would, but her relatives were still part of the life-changing event.
“They’ve been constantly communicating with me. So during the wedding too, we talked on video call,” she said.
The couple said they are looking forward to their new journey and are excited to return to the Philippines, where they first met and fell in love.
“I am so happy I met Jen. I had to go to the Philippines to find her and we have been having a real good time together. It’s really an exciting time of my life,” he said.
As for advice to couples planning to take the leap, Powell suggested they not take that decision lightly.
“Jen and I get along very well. We are soulmates. First, you’ve got to know the person, if you don’t know that person well enough, then I would suggest you don’t get married, but if it’s your soul mate and you share a lot in common I think it’s right to be married,” he said.
Jenneth advised that you should only married when you are ready and you really love the person.
“Make sure that you have God between you, so that you will be on a good path,” she said.
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