The Ceremony

Jul 2011

It’s July, which means full-blown wedding season is officially upon us. And that means one thing: a lot of you are scrambling to write your own vows. So, reader and professional writer Jen Girdish is here to share her vows and how she wrote them (and her hot wedding outfit…achem.) And in the words of the first ever Wedding Graduate East Side Bride, “The vows are more important than any of the crafty sh*t. And because we memorized them and practiced saying them to aloud each other, they are imbedded in my brain. I love that.”

It was never a question that Michael and I were going to write our own vows. We started our relationship by wooing each other over Gchat and long email chains about how much Friday Night Lights made us cry. We love to talk about how we feel about each other. We love to compare it, categorize it, and Tweet about it. Deciding to write our own wedding vows was a no-brainer.

I also have an MFA in creative nonfiction; writing about relationships is the closest thing I have to a skill. Vow writing should’ve been up my alley.

But it wasn’t. Vow writing was the hardest thing about the wedding planning process. I often made myself sit down at the computer to really, I mean really, start writing my vows this time, and nothing came out. I felt pressure because I was a writer. I felt pressure because whatever I wrote, I’d have to remember for a very long time. Nothing I wrote seemed important enough. I felt pressure for other, incredibly dumb but seemingly big-deal reasons. I kept thinking, What if my vows aren’t cute enough?

Another dumb reason: I didn’t have any great examples to work from. My favorite stories, essays, songs, films—the stuff that feels so true—are all about love that doesn’t last. That makes it incredibly hard to write about promising to love someone forever. Even if you really, really, really mean it.

I went through all most every book in my library for inspiration. Then, one day we decided on a reading from a Ruth Krauss/Maurice Sendak children’s book called “I’ll Be You and You Be Me.” I realized that everything I love about children’s books—the ability to communicate complicated emotions in simple sentences—was perfect. No need for perfect, overly-articulate compound sentences.

Obviously, that’s just what worked for me. There is no right way to do this—what you promise to your partner is personal and unique. However, when it’s the night before the wedding, and you’re obsessing over whether or not your fiancé’s grandmother is going to boo your promises to her grandson because you referenced backgammon, it’s nice to have a few suggestions and reassurances. So here they are: some ideas for the nuts and bolts of writing your own “non-traditional” vows. I’ve also included our vows, because there aren’t many examples around, and I also like oversharing.

Decide if you want to write them together. Either way you decide is the right way. My husband and I like to surprise each other—we’re also a little too competitive—so the surprise element was fun. It felt like wrapping a gift for him. However, a friend of mine got upset because he didn’t think his vows were as good as his wife’s. It’s a good idea to consider what kind of people you and your partner are and whether or not the element of surprise would actually be fun, or another stress point.

If you don’t write them together, consider picking a structure that you both can use as a jumping off point. It’s not a bad idea to make sure that you and your partner are going to be vowing somewhat similar things. Michael and I decided to use the phrase “I promise to” as an overall structure, and to end with “thank you for marrying me.” It gave us a good place to start, and still let us write from our own voices.

Decide on a word-count maximum. It’s nice to have a constraint sometimes, especially if your husband-elect is threatening to put on a scuba suit and perform the vows as an hour-long, aquatic-love-metaphor themed rap. We settled on a 150-word maximum. It gave me peace of mind that we weren’t going to make our guests to sit through thirty minutes of vowing.

Details, details. Every creative writing workshop will tell you that good writing is in the details—specifics that speak to a larger, universal truth. It’s not a crazy idea to apply this to your vows. Continue reading How To: Write Wedding Vows

Posted in: How To, The Ceremony | 107 Comments »

Jun 2011

Honoring Marriage Equality In Your Wedding Service

So, for APW Pride week, we’re brainstorming ways to honor marriage equality at our weddings. Some of us want to be really loud about it, sometimes we want to be slightly more subtle about it… and sometimes (us, cough, cough) we think we want to be subtle and then when push comes to shove, we decide f*ck subtle.

So this is an open thread for sharing ideas – from white knots, to statements in programs, to readings during the service, to giving your bouquet to your lesbian aunts. If you did, or are planning to do, something to honor marriage equality in your ceremony, share what you did! We’ll post a round up post of ideas in a week or so.

(And, please stay away from the should-you-do-something-or-not debate on this thread. That decision should be left up to each individual couple. This is *just* a thread to brainstorm ideas of what to do, if you’re choosing to do something.)

Picture: White Knots at Rachelle‘s wedding, shot by Elissa R Photography in Austin, TX

Posted in: Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, The Ceremony, Thoughts & Action | 128 Comments »

Jun 2011

Wedding Graduates: Cindy & Julia

Today, after sharing some of her wedding service yesterday, we get wedding grad Cindy (she’s the one in the strapless dress)! Cindy hosts APW meet-ups in Chicago, leaves awesome comments, and is in general, awesome. So I was pretty excited for her post from the get-go. But then I started reading it, and she talks about my favorite things: marriage equality (it’s Pride month, y’all!), writing words for a ceremony that mean something to you (with examples), and wedding stage managing (you can’t do it all! But you should be organized). So needless to say, I’m delighted. Let’s do this thing!

Here’s how we planned our wedding: one hot summer afternoon, we were chilling on the beach, five blocks from our condo, talking about what we might want our wedding to be like. I can’t remember which one of us noticed the pier to our left, but we decided to go check it out. And it was perfect. The pier was V-shaped, which meant we could each have our own aisle, with guests on both sides, and meet in the middle to get married with the Chicago skyline in the background. Hello? This is the stuff that fantasy (lesbian) weddings are made of.

Next, we needed a reception spot, so we kept our eyes peeled as we started to walk home. Half a block from the beach was a restaurant we’d never been to, offering a 3-course prix fixe menu for $18 everyday. So we ate there that night, loved the food and the wine selections, and pretty much decided on the spot that it was the right spot. This is pretty much how all of our planning went – something or someone seemed perfect for us, and it was. From an awesome photographer who specializes in LGBT events/theatre/weddings (um, we were lesbian stage managers getting married, so he was pretty much perfect) to an eco-friendly florist willing to work with our tiny budget to the shocking ease of Chicago Park District permits, everything just fell right into place. And we all lived happily ever after. The End.

(Just kidding.)

While the paragraph above is totally true, not everything was quite so simple. Here are my biggest takeaways:

You will be joyfully overwhelmed and surprised. We knew that our friends and families were excited about us getting married, but we never imagined the magnitude of love we’d feel from them on our wedding day. It was indescribably awesome to have so many people we love in one place celebrating with us.

When I think back to how I felt on the day, the morning seems twice as long as the afternoon and evening combined. We actually had a lot of down time in the morning before we needed to get ready, which you’d think would help get the wedding zen going, but I got antsy and nervous. Once I started actually getting dressed and doing my makeup, that’s when I got really calm and just felt READY. After that, the rest of the day flew by in a whirlwind. I was so excited that I sped down the aisle, and then had to awkwardly wait for my bride to meet me in the middle. The ceremony seemed to end almost as soon as it started. Before we knew it, we were cutting the cake and dancing and toasting and falling into (our own bed at home – woot!) exhausted.

On (the lack of) marriage equality. When we became engaged in 2007, our plan was to wait until we could legally marry each other in the state where we lived before throwing a wedding. When the Prop 8 fight started and gay marriage politics heated up across the nation, we dared to hope it might even be pretty soon. But after nearly three years of engagement, we were tired of waiting (and extremely sick of correcting people who assumed our fiances were male) and we really, really just wanted to be married! Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Cindy & Julia

Posted in: LGBTQ Weddings, The Ceremony, Wedding Graduates | 90 Comments »

Oct 2010

Secular Ceremony Round-Up

In the past few weeks, I wrote a piece about finding a way to make a traditional wedding service personal, and Rachel (DDay, in the comments) wrote a piece about crafting a non-traditional service. After that post, we asked you to contribute your best tips and tricks on secular and/or non-traditional services. Today Rachel is back, summing at all up, and trying to create a Secular Wedding Resource for all of us.

After those posts, Kristina of Lovely Morning and 100 Layer Cake wrote me a really lovely and spontaneous email about their secular wedding service. She called it, “one of my very favorite parts of the entire day, complete with hummingbirds chasing each other in the flowers as the sun was going down,” and expressed her wish that everyone get to have that experience. So today we take a shot at that. Because when we collectively pull up our chairs around you before you say your vows, we’re there for you. We want the purest expression of who you are: religious, non-religious, traditional, non-traditional. We want to “one of the lucky ones who stood in the middle of nowhere, right next to neverland, and witnessed the declaration of real love.” So let us join you there. And with that, I bring you Rachel (with some notes from me):

A little while back, Meg wrote about “traditional” ceremonies, and then I wrote about “non-traditional” ceremonies. I think we could just call them religious and secular, because traditional doesn’t really cover it, since we all may define the term differently. My wedding was secular, but was not without tradition. But I think if we can get away from semantics, we can get down to what’s important – creating meaningful wedding ceremonies, no matter what your background is. With that, the following is my attempt to sum up all the great advice offered in the comments, for a proper Secular Wedding Resource.

THE best piece of advice I saw in the comments was from Caitlin, who said, among other smart things, “Before you write a ceremony from scratch, I think you need to figure out what you believe about marriage fundamentally. That has to be your foundation…” And that really resonated with me because honestly, I think we sort of figured that out as we went along, and some of our struggle with finding the right pieces to put together might have been avoided if we had sat down first and really thought about how we define marriage and what it means to us. We did that, sort of, but maybe not with exactly that sense of purpose.

Once you have that foundation, I think we can all agree that the main thing is to find a great officiant. And “great officiant” can mean many things – if you’re a great writer, you don’t need an officiant to be a great writer, you need an officiant who is a good public speaker and will let you write the ceremony yourself. If writing is not your bag and you have no clue what to do, that’s when you need an experienced officiant to guide you. Something I think is universally applicable: the person who performs your ceremony should be a person you trust to do what you’ve asked them to do (whether they are a hired officiant or a friend/family member); someone who is fully on board with the type of ceremony you want, who will guide you and help you stay present through the service; and someone who will not take this opportunity to promote their own agenda to your captive audience.

And in that spirit, here is my list of the very best tips and tricks given in the comments: Continue reading Secular Ceremony Round-Up

Posted in: Ask Meg, The Ceremony, Tradition | 146 Comments »

Oct 2010

Writing a Non-Traditional Wedding Ceremony

In the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about how hard it can be to make your wedding service feel meaningful. Last week I wrote about how to take a traditional service and make it something that feels really personal for the two of you. Today I wanted to tackle the same problem from the opposite direction – how do you create a meaningful and truly secular service? Because let’s be realistic: it can be effing hard to create a secular service from scratch.

Many of the options for secular services run the gamut from bizarre to generic, with fake wedding industry ‘tradition’ lurking in the background. You’ve got the rent-an-officiants that will sing your service like opera (um, maybe you could just say it?). You’ve got the re-written religious texts that often sound like essays written by a third grader (David and I have a secular version of the Jewish wedding blessings that we like to read out loud for hilarity, that starts with something like, “Nature is good. Everyone loves nature!” Um. Thanks.) And then you’ve got the Apache Wedding blessing, which was, you know, written by white Hollywood screen writers. (Oops.)

So I decided that it was high time to come up with a bunch of secular wedding resources that don’t suck, and that APW-ers were just the people to tackle the project. To start things off, I asked Rachel (DDay in the comments, and you can read her full wedding graduate post right here) to write about creating a totally secular wedding service. (Side note: the picture above is the AMAZING moment of her husband looking at the officiant when she referred to their wedding as a fairytale. Apparently the service ended up being great, but I feel like it’s such a great pictorial sum up of how disappointing secular wedding resources can be. And it totally slays me. Also.) Then, I wanted us all to pitch in, in the comments, with the best secular wedding resources we had. I’ll cull through them, and we’ll put together an APW Secular Wedding Resource. So let’s do this thing!

I am always surprised when Meg talks about being accused of being anti-tradition, because of how umm, traditional, her own wedding was. Even though there are aspects of her advice I can relate to, it’s still a wedding I could never have had. And what is her response when we ask for diversified content? “Write it your [damn] self.” So this is meant to balance her recent post about making a traditional ceremony your own. This post is about how we made our ceremony our own, when we didn’t really have a tradition that felt 100% right to us. There are aspects I might tweak if I had it to do over, but it married us, so it was perfect in its way.

Our Context

First of all, I’d like to clarify where we were coming from. We come from families with varying degrees of adherence to Catholic and Presbyterian faiths, but my husband and I are not religious. And by that I don’t mean, “well we’re sort of [insert denomination] but don’t go to church or anything.” We don’t believe in god, period. I don’t even like the words atheist or non-believer, because it makes me feel like I’m deficient in some way. But this is just to provide some context; nothing in what I’ve said or am about to say is intended to be any kind of judgment on those who do have faith and follow a religion, or have faith but don’t necessarily follow a religion, or don’t have faith but still plan to include biblical or other religious aspects in their ceremonies.

I’d also like to say that YES, the obvious has been pointed out to me, that as far from religious as we tried to make our ceremony, the shell of it comes directly from Christian roots. Yes, you can groom a dog to look like a panda, but it’s still a dog. (I’m not sure if that metaphor works but I’m excited about the excuse to share that link) Continue reading Writing a Non-Traditional Wedding Ceremony

Posted in: How To, The Ceremony | 153 Comments »

Sep 2010

Making A Traditional Service Your Own

Periodically on APW, someone accuses me of being anti-tradition, and I get really sad. I talk about how we have a church weddings section. I talk about how we have a lot of brides wearing white. I talk about how I make sure there are posts supporting whatever choices you want to make, wherever they are on the spectrum.

Then I always point out that no matter how indie our wedding looked (the hip look was partially just good photographers, partially the fact that I wore a short dress), our wedding service was very traditional. We had *the* traditional Jewish service, with lots of Hebrew, lots of God-talk, the seven blessings in their original form, the traditional vows in Hebrew, the works. When you ask our wedding guests, they will describe the service as “very traditional,” but most of them also describe it as “very emotional.” People seem to see those things as diametrically opposed, so what gives?

I started to see the real answer when I was talking about this with Danae in the comments. She said:

“You think APW is pro-tradition because your definition of “traditional” is something along the lines of “we thought a lot about it and decided that we wanted to echo the centuries-old tradition of our cultures and beliefs,” and when someone else defines “traditional,” they mean, “we did what everyone expected us to do.”

And I was like, “OH! Right! Of course that’s what I think traditional means! Of course!” and then “Oh my god, that’s not what everyone else means when they say traditional? I didn’t get that.”

So. I thought maybe it was time to have a chat about having a really traditional ceremony (because that feels right to you) and rocking the hell out of it (because, of course!)

So first of all: traditional ceremonies do not have to be boring. Period. We need to just wipe that idea off of the face of the earth. I’ve seen so many brides approach planning their service by saying, “Well, it’s traditional, so you know it’s going to be boring and there is nothing I can do.” Whenever I hear that I want to grab said bride’s shoulders and shake her, and say something like, “You want a traditional service because that’s part of who you are, right? So stop belittling yourself, and start seeing your amazing self-worth. Who you are is awesome. And if having a traditional ceremony is part of who you are, your traditional ceremony is going to be AWESOME.” Or, in short, there is no quicker way to make a ceremony boring than to have the bride and groom think it’s boring. That sort of prophecy is always self-fulfilling.

So, how do you approach a traditional wedding service and make it something that you feel like you can live inside? Continue reading Making A Traditional Service Your Own

Posted in: Ask Meg, Manifestos, Meg's Thoughts, The Ceremony, Tradition, Weddings | 169 Comments »