CHAPTER 8. THE SERIOUS STUFF

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Stating Intentions and Exchanging Vows

Whenever anyone sits in an exit row on an airplane, the flight attendants need to get a verbal “yes” confirmation that they are willing to help in an emergency. Even though they know everyone is just in that row for the extra legroom, they still need those passengers to state their intentions to be a good person, to help rip out the emergency door and direct people onto the raft that will glide them smoothly off the plane and into the ocean, hopefully not straight into the mouth of a shark.

In this metaphorical flight, the couple are the passengers, and the officiant is the flight attendant. And, in a way, a marriage is a wonderful journey from point A to points, B, C, and beyond, complete with dramatic scenery and the occasional emergency. The flight attendant and officiant are in charge of making sure the passengers and the couple are aware of the potentially serious consequences of joining together in air travel and in life. If the couple is getting married on the airplane during a flight, in an exit row, getting the couple to state their intentions is extra important. And, as always, if the seatbelt sign is lit, please do not get married.

Intentions

Within every wedding ceremony, at some point, you’re required to reassure everyone present that you are serious about being married; you need to state your intentions. Not all your intentions—nobody cares if you intend to fund an organic fair-trade coffee plantation in Venezuela (except the Venezuelans)—all we care about that day are your intentions to love each other, to be faithful and honest with each other until death do you part. We want to know that you are entering into this never-ending live-action documentary of your love life of your own free will and that you are not doing this because you lost a bet to a guy at an all-night laundromat during a drunken night on the town, and now you have to get married to this drifter whom nobody seems to know just because a bet’s a bet. Facts like that really put a damper on celebrations. The guests want to hear that you genuinely want to get married.

Sometimes this is accomplished using something called a “charge to the couple.” (Also, how I refer to my fee.) The officiant lays out for the couple what being married means. By extension, all the guests get to learn what being married means too. Couple-charging can be a separate, brief moment in the ceremony or it can be elicited during the exchange of vows. Here is one way a “charge to the couple” can sound:

[Spouse A] and [Spouse B], until now, you have followed the unique paths of your lives, and those two paths have led you towards each other. Today, you will officially begin following a new path together. Many adventures await you. Years of happiness await you. Both of you are strong individuals, but together you will be unstoppable. Marriage gives you an advantage because a spouse is many things: a spouse is a guide, a teacher, a sounding wall, a consigliere, a court jester, a financial analyst, a personal trainer, a nutritionist, a travel planner, a dreamer, and a friend. According to several trusted medical journals, marriage is good for your heart, your cholesterol, your mood levels, your sleep patterns, and your skin. Marriage is a good choice. It is a deeply personal choice. It is a life-changing choice. It is a choice you make together, with a steady mind and a true heart. By marrying each other, you are committing your lives to each other today, tomorrow, right through the weekend, all next week, and forever. This is a choice to be made with all the seriousness in the world until there is no seriousness left.

You may have heard a rumor that there is something specific that must be said during a wedding to make it legal. This is a myth. As much as I would love to spread the rumor that the specific sentence “I promise from the bottom of my heart that I will buy Best. Ceremony. Ever. for at least five people in my social circle” must be uttered at every wedding to make the marriage legal, it’s just not true. I hate to disappoint purists, but the only thing that makes the wedding legal is the signatures on the marriage license. The rest is for show. The thing is, your officiant should not sign your marriage license if they don’t believe you should be married; the wedding ceremony, therefore, is a great way to convince the person who needs to sign your license that they should actually sign it.

Exchange of Vows

Most of the vows should be expressions of serious intentions, but there are ways to make this section surprising while keeping it truthful. The truth is that humor comes from truth, and truth can come from specificity. (And specificity comes from one exact place.) Vows that are broad, cliché-driven, and non-specific to the couple may sound serious, but without making a specific connection to the two actual human beings getting married, they can ring hollow. I push my couples to personalize their vows, thus creating gravitas from truthful specificity. The contrast of gravity and humor is where entertainment lives.

Some couples write their own vows that they read to each other. Other couples like to repeat often-heard vows to each other, whether they are the same ones their parents said to each other when they got married, or their favorite movie stars said to each other when their characters got married in a movie. Others prefer to do something called The Asking so that all they have to do is say “I do” in response to their officiant’s questions. Others choose to do a combination of these choices. No matter what couples choose to do, this is a good time for the bride to hand her bouquet of flowers over to her maid of honor if she has not already. If the bride is going to be holding on to anything at this point, it ought to be the groom’s hands. (Some brides hand their bouquet off as soon as they arrive in the ceremonial space. Other brides don’t know what to do with their hands during the ceremony, so they choose to hold onto the bouquet a while longer—and why not? The florist put a lot of work into that bouquet.)

Personal Vows

I am one-hundred percent in favor of couples writing and saying their own personal, unique vows to each other. To me, it is in keeping with the entire ceremony to hear the specific things you have decided to promise your life- and afterlife-long partner. If you’ve made the effort to tend to every other detail of your wedding to ensure that it is unique to you, why stop at the vows?

My couples and I always end up talking about vows because part of my service is helping couples write their own. (See also Wedding Vow Workshop on page 147.) I explain the importance of this exercise even if they never intend to say them at the wedding. Some people are not public speakers by any stretch of the imagination and are afraid that the emotions of the day will overwhelm them. For these people, I explain that the very act of writing their vows is an important one for them in their relationship. It’s difficult to think of what you would promise another human being. (I promise to think about what I would think about promising you.) It’s really difficult to state these things efficiently. I maintain that it should be difficult, and it should be tried.

Even if couples are adamant about not saying personal vows in the ceremony, I encourage them to write them anyway, then to share them with each other privately, maybe after the ceremony or on the honeymoon. This is as close as I come to engaging in premarital counseling, something I am so totally not at all qualified legally to do. I mean, I can offer advice all day long (and I would love to charge money for doing so), but I wouldn’t call it premarital counseling because I don’t want to go to jail. (Wedding jail: endless “Canon in D.”)

Many couples share my belief that personal vows are the way to go. I help these couples write them separately, so they don’t hear each other’s before the big day. As the only person who knows what each set of promises is, I am the arbiter of tone and length. I help smooth out the writing, brainstorm, rearrange, and balance humorous parts and serious parts. It’s a pleasure to work with couples this way, an honor to assist them with the most personal moment of the entire enterprise. (Unless they wait until the night before to ask me to help.)

Some couples don’t want to say personal vows because they are afraid that they will cry in front of all their people. I get this—vulnerability requires bravery, and a lot of people don’t have the emotional armor to pull this off. I choked up while saying my own vows, but I persevered. It was worth it. My wife and I personalized our ceremony down to the last inch, and both of us are writers, so there was no way we were going to generalize our vows. It’s true that couples may cry when they read their vows, but I maintain that crying is good. Real emotions are powerful things to share because they are genuine, and it is rare in life to witness anything genuine.

Still, this is too scary a prospect for many couples. There is probably a psychological term for the fear of speaking in public (menotalkaphobia?). If it is something so horrifying that it is going to ruin your wedding experience, then skip it.

Repeating Standard Vows That Somebody Else Wrote a Long Time Ago for a Wedding Far, Far Away

There are many options for this, easily found on the internet. Phrases like “till death do us part,” “to have and to hold,” “for richer, for poorer,” “lawfully wedded wife,” etc. are forever embedded in the wedding lexicon, and that’s fine. In fact, sometimes, no matter how personal the ceremony, standard vows are a great choice—which I learned in 2017 during what I refer to as my personal Super Bowl of Weddings. (Halftime show: Adele hummed the “Bridal March.”)

The bride and groom were both professional writers, so I was intimidated to write a ceremony for them and flattered beyond belief that they’d asked me to. It was wonderful working for this couple. The ceremony and entire wedding night were loaded with personal touches. I also MC’d the reception, so I got to participate in the whole event, (and witness the funniest best man speech EVER). It was a dream gig, and I have never been so sad when a wedding was over.

The ceremony was intensely personal, but the couple decided to repeat often-used vows. This was unusual for me on two counts: one, I do not like doing the repeat-after-me thing for vows—I feel like I should be separate from this section unless I am doing The Asking, and with that choice, I am asking questions, and nobody is repeating anything. Two, the vows they were repeating were very traditional vows. Here’s the thing: this was the perfect choice for them. This was their way of acknowledging the gravitas of the occasion by having something universally recognizable to anchor the personal touches surrounding it. And they still found a way to personalize it by adding exactly one killer line.

Here’s what we had in place for their vows: “I, [Groom] / take thee, [Bride] / to be my wedded wife / to have and to hold / from this day forward / for better, for worse / for richer, for poorer / in sickness and in health / to love and to cherish / till death do us part . . .”

And here is the one line they added that brought the whole thing back to them: “. . . and also as ghosts / just in case that’s a thing.”

That last bit about the ghosts, plus the colloquial “in case that’s a thing,” planted them in their generation, alluded to the humorous and unknowable prospect of life as ghosts (no matter what Ebenezer Scrooge, Hamlet, or Casper say), and kept within an established serious linguistic rhythm.

I love that couple so much. I loved this line, so I stole it, and now I’m giving it to you. You’re welcome.

The Asking

Some couples do not want to speak out loud, at their wedding or anywhere, any more than they absolutely have to. For these people, we do The Asking.

The Asking sounds like a horror film about a little girl cursed to murder every person who asks her what her name is, featuring a tortured Liam Neeson as her dad, a tortured Nicole Kidman as her mom, and a world-weary Morgan Freeman as an exhausted town priest. But The Asking is actually just the officiant/celebrant/imam/priest/rabbi asking a series of questions to which the couple answers, individually, “I do.”

The questions asked represent the vows and intentions that the couple does not want to say out loud. So, these questions need to be mostly serious, though the pattern can be mixed up with specific and humorous questions. As long as there are more serious questions than humorous questions, it’ll be fine. A teaspoon of humor helps the gravitas go down (Marry Poppins). I give an example of a good balance of questions in Sample Ceremony: Kathryn and Iggy on page 118.

This is also a great opportunity to involve the guests, to ask them questions which will allow them to publicly vow their support for the couple. The officiant can ask the guests if they support the couple. The guests will yell “We do!” as loud as they can. Here’s the thing about groups of people: people will yell out loud with no inhibitions if they know that everyone else is yelling the same thing at the same time. (This is why it’s easy for even the shiest wallflower to yell “Let’s go Red Sox!!!” in unison with a hundred other die-hard Red Sox fans at Yankee Stadium. If they yelled alone, they’d be taken out to Monument Park and buried alive.) Involving the guests is a great way to get them to participate, to remind them that they are part of a live event, that they can have an effect on the proceedings, and that they are not just watching something on TV.

It’s fine to do combinations of all these things. It is very common for couples to say their own personal vows, then answer a series of “I do” questions. Some choose this just because they love the idea of saying “I do” (It’s so wedding-y!). Couples can even combine alternate narrative approaches and ask themselves questions (best when done by imitating Cher’s accent in Moonstruck):

•Do I choose to love you each and every day, to the best of my ability, as one nation, under God, for the land of the free and the home of the brave? I do.

•Do I promise to be your lawfully wedded wife today, tomorrow, all through next week, forever, and on holidays? As a matter of fact, I do.

•Do I promise to keep the details of my paleo diet to myself? That’s a great question; I’m glad I asked it. Now that I mention it, I do.

Couples can devise a series of questions to ask each other, and have their partner answer the questions:

•Do you promise to support my love of wildlife no matter where in the world this passion of mine takes us?

•I do.

•Do you promise to try to quit drinking coffee with me for two days every five years?

•I do.

•Do you promise to continue doing that thing you do for me every Thursday? You know the one.

•I do. And, I do.

I don’t get that last one.

Don’t worry about it. It’s an oblique Family Guy reference, and I’m not going to explain it because you’re too pure.

Blended Families

If The Brady Bunch taught us nothing else, it taught us that sometimes people who are getting married or remarried have children from previous relationships. No other part of a wedding ceremony is more deserving of personalized recognition than when the couple acknowledges their responsibilities to the children who will now refer to them as their stepmom or stepdad.

The gesture need not be belabored, but it is worth mentioning, at the very least. Marriages are a blending of two families into one and children make this immediately apparent. These human beings, who will be affected by the new marriage as much (or almost as much) as the couple themselves, heighten the magnitude of the decision to become married. All weddings should illustrate the importance of blending a family through their ceremonies. When the mighty rhetoric of fidelity, trust, hard work, communication, love, sensitivity, reliability, selflessness, and unity is cast not just upon the starry-eyed couple, but upon them and the innocent eyes of their children, the full reality of the event is much more powerful—like experiencing fireworks in person instead of on TV.

In some ceremonies I’ve officiated for blended families, the couple made vows to the children as well as their new spouse. The children have stood with the couple, for all to see, embodying the seriousness of joining together forever. Even one child on each side can make the ceremony seem a part of something much bigger. The children in these weddings are living symbols of unity unto themselves.

Beyond acknowledging the children with vows, it can be symbolic to offer them a gift. The gift can be a key, symbolizing that wherever the children go to stay, they are home. It can be a necklace containing a version of the wedding band; it can be some kind of framed promissory document for the children to display in their room, a reminder of the seriousness with which the new spouse is approaching their role as stepdad or stepmom.

Just as couples should commit to their decision to get married long before the wedding day, couples with blended families should prepare their kids for this momentous change in their lives well before the ceremony. The pomp and circumstance of a wedding is an opportunity to make the adjustment real, but it is better to ease the kids into this transformation every single day, for a significant stretch of time before the wedding, to lessen the shock of the wedding day’s transformative transitional effect. In other words, the blending of a family should begin way before the wedding, not at the wedding.

Ultimately, wedding ceremonies are guided by love. A ceremony designed with love, to showcase love, to explain love, to celebrate love, to delight in love and give thanks for love will have a loving effect on anyone lucky enough to observe or be a part of it—including the children.