A bride welcomed couples who got married during the pandemic to have their first dance at her wedding

• Marika Sévigny and Shahnoor Ullah celebrated their wedding in Ontario, Canada, in October 2022.
• Sévigny invited couples who'd gotten married during the pandemic to join their first dance.

When Marika Sévigny's twin sister, Danica, got married at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in October 2020, the newlyweds were forced to have their first dance in a parking lot, using music playing from Sévigny's iPhone.

So when it came time for Sévigny's own wedding to Shahnoor Ullah in October 2022, she knew she wanted to give pandemic brides and grooms the chance to have a key wedding memory they'd missed out on.

A TikTok video shared by their videographer, Henjo Films, shows the heartwarming moment Sévigny invited couples who'd gotten married during the pandemic to have their first dance at her and Ullah's wedding.

"Let's all please take a moment for our newlyweds," Sévigny says in the video, which has been liked 1 million times as of Wednesday.

Inviting pandemic couples to share their first dance was a no-brainer for Sévigny and Ullah

"It was so important for us to celebrate our friends and family and to do it together," Sévigny told Insider. "Everyone really suffered and missed out on something during the pandemic. We wanted [our wedding] to be a celebration of the love and support, and for other people to come together and say, 'Look, we made it to the other side.'"

As well as her sister and brother-in-law, at least five other couples who attended their wedding had gotten married during the pandemic. She attended some of those weddings on Zoom, and others not at all.

"It was really sad not to celebrate with them and soak in that joy that you have during the first dance," she said. "As soon as I knew I was having a wedding, that was one of the No. 1 things I wanted to do."

The couples — none of whom knew about the first dance beforehand — danced to "Lover" by Taylor Swift. The bride and groom waited a minute before joining their friends on the dance floor to give them some time to themselves.

"It was important to show them that love that they were showing me and Sha that day," she said. "It was a giving back to them of a moment they had probably dreamt of and didn't get to have."

Videographer Henry Shephard told Insider he had never seen anything like it at a wedding.

"It pulled on everyone's heartstrings at the time and it really was a beautiful moment that you could tell the couples appreciated," he said.

The bride and groom's wedding was also impacted by the pandemic

The couple, who met in 2015 when Sévigny was a medical student and Ullah was a senior resident in Toronto, got engaged in March 2019. A few months later, they legally married in a nikkah, a Muslim ceremony, with a dozen loved ones at their home, but they planned to have a larger celebration in 2020. Then COVID-19 hit.

Both are surgeons so, with the pressures of their jobs during the pandemic, they didn't start planning again until spring 2022.

"We didn't care which day or which flowers we had, we just wanted somewhere we could celebrate with everyone," Sévigny said.

Finally, on October 6, 2022, 100 guests and their dog, Moose, joined them at Elora Mill Hotel in Ontario, Canada, for the celebration. Sévigny said she is touched that their wedding video is resonating with so many more people online, but she also understands why.

"You realize all the things you may have missed out on in those years — a prom, a trip, seeing your family," she said. "Everybody lost something over those years, and we all got to realize that we're on the other side of that. Love persists."