Last week, I wrote about the first wedding I officiated. I’ve received a lot of good feedback about it, with my favorite comment being “Reading this changed me from being confused and stand-offish about weddings as a practice, to whole heartedly supporting them.”

I wanted to talk in more detail about my design principles. This will include some of my personal beliefs about what weddings are for. It may not all resonate with you, but I think it’s more helpful for me to describe my beliefs unapologetically than to try and water them down into something universally applicable (but bland).

Primary Goal: Create a meaningful transformation for the couple.

With any ritual, there is one primary goal to be achieved. In a wedding, the couple must transition from a non-married-state to a married-state. What does “married-state” mean, exactly? Good question. This will vary from couple to couple, and from community to community. But it’s important to note that being married is a state of mind.

From the transcript of Thomas and Allison’s wedding.

Rituals move mountains. But they are *only* powerful insofar as human beings assent to them. Humans who understand the symbolism, draw strength from it, and then pour their own emotional energy back into it. Magnifying and allowing themselves to be transformed.

In some ways, love is a private affair. Allison and Thomas could have chosen somewhere secluded. They could have found an abandoned temple under the stars and, with only those stars and each other as witness, dedicated their love and their lives to each other.

Instead they chose to have a wedding. A wedding isn’t private. A wedding has human witnesses. The witnesses are not an audience, they are participants.

This point is really important – a wedding changes the relationship between a couple, but it also changes the relationship between that couple and a community. When creating a ceremony, you need to guide both the couple and the witnesses towards a new way of thinking, feeling and being. The process might be silly or solemn, but it should invoke things that the ritual participants care about and get them emotionally invested.

Oftentimes at other weddings I’ve attended over the years, I’ve felt a bit bored, or out of place. I used to think that I wanted (as an “audience member”) for the wedding to be more entertaining. What I realized as I was working on Thomas and Allison’s wedding was that what I wanted, and needed, was to feel engaged and transformed.

Secondary Goal: Create a meaningful transformation for the community

One reason I often haven’t felt transformed at other weddings was their religious nature. The ceremony was designed to transform the couple within a particular framework of values, which I didn’t buy into. The problem was not the religion. I think a well crafted ceremony could have helped me to feel for the couple, and understand that they cared about their religious framework. It was important to how they were going to grow as adults. And even if I disagreed with their ideology or didn’t like their aesthetics, I could have accepted the wedding on their terms, assented to the symbolism and experienced an emotional arc.

A key element that I think is missing from most weddings is taking whatever worldview the bride and groom care about, and helping the witnesses to care about it, even if they don’t share the bride and groom’s community. (Or if they come from multiple communities). Examples of wedding styles where this might be relevant:

• Religious weddings
• Humanist weddings, where the bride and groom care strongly about the future of humanity
• Humanist weddings, where the bride and groom care strongly about humanity’s role within nature
• Weddings that prominently feature a shared pastime (video games, literature, etc) of the bride and groom.

In Thomas and Allison’s case, one thing they cared strongly about was the institution of marriage as a whole. In many ways they wanted the wedding very traditional, connected to the gravitas of one of the oldest pieces of human culture. There were other particular ways they wanted the ceremony to feel modern and to meet their particular needs, but whenever they deviated from tradition, they wanted to preserve a sense that “this is how it’s been done for hundreds of years, and we are a part of it.”

Within the audience was a range of people – older people and younger, religious and non. People from the rationality community who have some shared ideas about humanity’s future, and people from a variety of other memespaces.

It’s fairly common among secular people to actively dislike prescribed roles and traditions-for-the-sake-of-traditions, so communicating why the institution of marriage was important to all of the people present, in a language they would understand, was an interesting challenge.

Actively Involve the Community

For ritual to transform people, there needs to be a symbolic action for them to take, and they need to willingly, enthusiastically participate in that action. Weddings have an array of common actions people can take – throwing flower petals, catching the bouquet toss, rolling out a carpet. But people aren’t connecting with the symbolism, it’s just a hollow action. It might be fun, but not meaningful.

What I tried to do here was involve the audience with the three breaths. I’ve found deep breathing to be a reliable way to bring myself and others into focus. It helps give structure to a moment of silence. In this case, it specifically came with a request for the participants to bring their own thoughts into focus about Allison and Thomas’s past, present and future – highlighting the transformation that was taking place before them and inviting them to take part it in.

As it turned out, the breaths ended up playing into an elemental subtheme of the ceremony that was completely unplanned. By the time the ceremony happened, the attendees had experienced extreme heat, torrential downpours, and a few us were barefoot and feeling the earth beneath us. Breathing in air together brought those things together. I’m not sure that that’s something I’d have attempted to plan in on purpose, even if I’d thought about it (neither Thomas nor Allison had a special affinity for the elements, apart from a general appreciation for the aesthetic), but I was intrigued by how it played out.

I think there was room for improvement, in the area of community involvement. The breathing and moments of silence were a late addition to the ceremony. I’ve recently heard about a ceremony where the two rings were passed among the attendees, with the instruction to hold each ring for a moment and think about the person who’ll be wearing it. This served a similar purpose to the breathing – giving people a moment to connect personally with the bride and groom’s transformation. In that case, it also lent greater symbolic weight to the rings (at some expense of logistical complication. I ended up not pursuing this as a possibility because I didn’t have time to plan for how long it’d take, and make sure nobody got bored waiting for their turn with the rings. I did include a moment for Thomas and Allison to hold their rings and appreciate their meaning for themselves).

We had considered giving attendees flowers or seeds to throw in the air. This also had potential, but for it to work best, it’d have needed a specific symbolism attached to it that I could guide people through. (Had I realized there was going to end up being an elemental subtheme, I might have explored a connection with the air and the earth)

In the end, I think we found a good mix of symbolic choices that involved the audience without creating logistical issues that took people out of the moment. But as other couples read this and plan their weddings for the future, perhaps they will spark some ideas.

By the Power Invested in Me…

The last thing I discovered was that, if done properly, the “by the power invested in me” section of a wedding can have a genuine, palpable power. Ritual is only powerful insofar as people invest their emotion and understanding into it. By the time we reached the end of the ceremony, I could see in the faces of the audience attendees that there was a genuine investment of power into the moment, which I was acting as the conduit. I think this was made stronger, by acknowledging and naming the very real places that this emotional power was coming from.

Thomas and Allison, by the symbolic and emotional power you and this community have chosen to invest in me; by the power this community has invested in you, and that you have invested in each other.

By the power of every young couple in love who have ever walked upon this pale blue dot; by the power of every husband and wife who ever stayed together until death did them part; by the power of the very first couple who thought to take their love and dedication and swear it before their tribe — and by the power of every couple who ever will:

Thomas and Allison, I now pronounce you husband and wife.