If you run a Google search on ‘Wedding Rituals’ you’ll find an endless stream of options, from unity ceremonies using coloured sand, to hand-fasting and rituals from every corner of the globe.
It’s both a blessing and a curse that our modern Western culture has no set rulebook, no prescribed format for how to live or how to organise your life, or how to get married. We enjoy a lot of freedoms. But those freedoms come at the cost of confusion and overwhelming choice. How do you go about crafting a wedding ceremony that feels like ‘you’?
My advice is to get as far away from those overwhelming Google searches as you can. Start with your relationship: what has your relationship been like so far? What are the first words that pop into your mind when you consider what your relationship means to you both? That’s your theme. And with a theme that describes the significance of your relationship to you, it’s easy to craft a ceremony that feels personal and authentic.
Some themes I’ve come across in my work are ‘teamwork’, ‘safety’, ‘trust’, and ‘generosity’. These are words couples have used to describe the essence of their relationship. Once you’ve got a theme like that, you can use it to guide you in choosing a poem or reading, writing your vows, a symbolic ritual or any other element of the ceremony that you care to include.
Once you’ve set up your structure and found your theme, it’s time to craft the contents of the ceremony.
If you’re in Darwin or the NT and you’d like to chat further about my services as an authorised marriage celebrant, get in touch!
Finding your Theme
Tom Allen, Celebrant 
Response
[…] Even spontaneity requires a structure: free time to play and be spontaneous doesn’t happen on its own and jazz musicians who want to freely jam still need to keep to a key and time signature if they’re truly going to create magical moments of synchrony and beauty. Creating a ceremony structure helps you jazz in the moment, because you’ve done the preparatory work in the weeks and months before the ceremony that will enable you and your spouse to be freely present on the big day.Think about most stories that have ever been told. On a structural level they’re all pretty much the same: they have a beginning, middle, and end; they have a peaceful beginning, a tense middle, and a resolved finish. Whether it’s Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Pride and Prejudice or Dragonball Z they all feature a very similar underlying structure.Your wedding ceremony is an embodied story: it’s like a stage play but it’s real life. You’re enacting the story of your relationship together, making a statement about where things are at right now, and making a commitment about where you intend the future to go. There’s a peaceful ‘before’ time: the period when you were getting to know each other, revelling in the beginning and deepening of a beautiful relationship. There’s a ‘tense middle’: as you step into a space of uncertainty and are asked if you will devote yourself to your partner through sickness and health, for richer or poorer. And there’s a resolute end: there are no guarantees, but you’re resolving to make a decision in this moment about how you intend to act from this day forward until death do you part.Next it’s all about finding your theme. […]
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