My friend,

A couple emails ago I shared about why I tell sad stories on wedding days. Essentially, if you dare to tell the true story of how and why your relationship evolved into this place of getting married, then you will have a Soulful Wedding—a day of profound joy and deepened understanding + connection that lasts decades after the wedding day.

Phew—that is a big claim. And, after 15 years in the wedding industry, 11 years of marriage, and being a close witness to hundreds of marriages (both professionally and personally), I stand behind it.

In the first email I talked about why to do this. So now the question is how to do this.

First, an example of this in action. Here’s an excerpt from a ceremony last year, shared with permission and the couple’s names changed:

From there, we were set up to explore how and why their relationship grew to be so deep so quickly (a truly beautiful and inspiring story).

I sit here with my hand on my heart as I reread this. As I remember the complete silence of 160 people captivated by this story, with their awe for the couple growing by the moment.

I’ve been struggling with whether I can offer a “how to” on this kind of storytelling, because for me this is all very natural. My personal and professional experiences have always integrated pain and joy, life and death. I can think of a time when I spent the morning companioning a family through a loved one's death and the afternoon photographing a newborn baby

I can’t teach this in a single email or afternoon, but I’ve created beginning questions and considerations to help you decide if you and your officiant have the desire, capacity, and skill to take on this layered storytelling.

Consider...

1. Does it serve your intention? My Create Your Ceremony course begins with couples setting an intention for marriage, then an intention for the wedding. This can be put to use to make hundreds of wedding planning decisions! Including this one. When you come up against a painful or tricky moment in your Love Story, ask yourself if telling the story will serve your ultimate intention for the wedding day experience.

(If your intention included something like wanting your community to understand or be part of the depth of your love, then the answer is likely to be yes.)

2. Is it a wound or a scar? Progressive Lutheran priest Nadia Bolz-Weber famously said (about vulnerability from the pulpit) that it’s important to preach from her scars not her wounds. Meaning, not speaking from an unhealed place that doesn’t yet have understanding.

If you bump into a painful or tricky situation that is still open and ongoing and you haven’t yet been able to make sense of it, it may be a wound and it may not be right to speak about it publicly yet. But a scar is different. While it doesn’t have to be solved or resolved or even gone from sight, it is something that has become part of your history. Ask yourself: do you have a little perspective on this moment or incident yet?

3. Can the officiant hold the complexity of the story? This is one I can’t answer for you. I think the first question is simply whether or not this person is someone who is comfortable with difficult emotional truths. Often, friend-officiants lean on a lot of humor in delivering a ceremony to make it enjoyable. Some humor is fine, of course, but a wedding is ultimately not a funny moment.

Can you picture them with some reverence or gravity in their delivery? (Participants in my CYC course or my 1:1 ceremony design can always add a 1:1 coaching session between their officiant and me, and this is something we can work on.)

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Honoring the spectrum of life experiences and emotions creates joy and connection (the true point of wedding, am I right?). The difficult or painful memory is the “set up,” so to speak. What you’re going for is the aftermath—the healing, the compassion, the wisdom, the understanding, the support, the growth, the joy that flows on the heels of trying times in our lives.

I wish you a weekend full of love, my friends,

Maureen