Kent Donald and Alyssa Cox were to be married on September 18 - but uncertainty over Covid-19 lockdown levels has forced them to postpone. Photo / Supplied
Kent Donald and Alyssa Cox were to be married on September 18 - but uncertainty over Covid-19 lockdown levels has forced them to postpone. Photo / Supplied
Covid-19 cost one of them their job at Air New Zealand, did its best to derail their long-awaited engagement, hit their new business and has now forced an Auckland couple to postpone their wedding.
But North Shore lovebirds Alyssa Cox and Kent Donald are still smiling, albeit - in Cox's case at least - sometimes through tears.
"No amount of crying or whingeing is going to change this situation - that's been my mantra," 26-year-old Cox said.
"They've definitely still come out, but I'm trying to be positive."
The couple, who've been together more than eight years and became engaged on the eve of last year's level 4 lockdown, originally planned to marry in front of 75 guests at The Boat House in the northwest Auckland suburb of Riverhead on September 18.
But first the closure of the transtasman bubble in July knocked a dozen of Donald's Australia-based family members off the guest list.
Then came last week's news that New Zealand would be going into a level 4 lockdown to squash a feared - and realised - outbreak of the Covid-19 Delta variant.
The earlier disappointment, when a dozen guests had to cancel plans to attend the couple's wedding after quarantine-free travel from Australia was suspended, wound up making it easier to temporarily call off their big day, Cox said.
"We were like, 'well that's super annoying, but maybe this time around if we postpone it his family might be able to come?'
"We kind of made that call last week before we even knew [the outbreak's size]. A wedding's always been my dream, not necessarily Kent's, so he's been very patient, but I'm not really willing to compromise on just having 10 people [under level 3 wedding rules].
"We definitely need to be in level 2 to have all our guests."
Cox hit the phones to lock in a new wedding date of February 4, with the same venue and almost all the same sub-contractors.
When Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Friday Auckland faced at least two more weeks from Tuesday on in level 4, the couple felt immediate relief at their big call.
"We were like, 'yuss, we made the right decision'. As we've all been saying [with lockdown], 'what can we do about it?' "
It's not the first pandemic-related challenge Cox and her fiance, 30, have faced.
After Covid-19 decimated air travel worldwide, she was made redundant from the job she'd had since leaving school - international flight attendant for Air New Zealand.
Cox and her sister-in-law then started their own business together, opening baked goods shop Whipped Cakery in July last year.
Government support was covering the rent for their North Shore shopfront, but they can't operate the business under level 4, she said.
"The bills go on [for the business] so that's probably been occupying my mind probably more so than the wedding.
"God, it's been a whirlwind [18 months], hasn't it?"
Alyssa Cox and fiance Kent Donald have been together eight years and engaged 18 months. Photo / Supplied
Covid-19 even loomed over the couple's engagement, which Donald had been planning well before he popped the question hours before the first level 4 lockdown in March last year.
She didn't know till later, but Donald originally planned to propose while they were on holiday in Fiji in March last year - but the trip was cancelled amid the growing Covid-19 crisis.
The couple then decided to go to Queenstown, but that was also cancelled and they headed to Coromandel Peninsula for a week instead.
"We got there on Monday and on the Tuesday afternoon we got a call from Kent's mum saying that we needed to be home by midnight on Wednesday because we were going into lockdown.
On the drive home Donald, to Cox's surprise, insisted on stopping at Hot Water Beach.
"We were sat out in the rain and I'm like, 'What the hell are we doing? Can we just go home?', and Kent proposed. So we went into like six weeks of lockdown with each other in our little happy bubble."
As they continued their drive home to Auckland, Donald confessed he'd been planning the proposal for a long time and decided "I'm just gonna do it, because God knows when we're going to go away again", Cox said.
"It was a little bit of happiness amongst the crazy, I guess."
They never imagined their wedding - organised for 18 months later - wouldn't go ahead as planned because of the then-new pandemic.
September 18 would now be marked by popping a bottle of bubbles and having a special dinner - "depending on what alert level we're in", Cox said.
"I read something on Instagram, I can't remember it word for word, but in a nutshell it said something like '[postponing] doesn't mean that you're not supposed to get married, it just means that there's another plan'.
"And I just hope that it rains really heavily on the 18th of September."
