Rebels' Guide

The weirdest wedding moment in my 12 year career as a celebrant so far would have been the wedding where I met with the couple getting married a number of times before the wedding, we even did a rehearsal (and I hate rehearsals), so when I arrived 60 minutes before their ceremony and this happened, I was so surprised. The groom hands me a 10 page printout of a wedding ceremony template they had found online. “Last night we started Googling and found this and we’d like you to read it at our wedding ceremony,” he said. Mind blown, for three reasons: there’s almost definitely nothing personal, special, or unique for your wedding on Google. By definition Google is giving you the top 10 web pages in the world, the most average results for “wedding ceremony,” we have literally met and talked at length about how your ceremony would feel, what did they think I was going to read if they didn’t give me a printout. After that experience I vowed to always make sure that my couples felt like they h...

“I now pronounce you woman and husband” A Facebook page – which is probably a totally fine and lovely Facebook page, I really don’t know it – has raised the thought of how some people in the past use these words: I now pronounce you woman and husband” and here’s the thing. I’ve never said “I now pronounce you woman and husband” I marry people every week, sometimes multiple times a week, if it’s 2021, about five couples a week after last year’s disaster of a year, and I have never said those words. There’s this bullshit thing people get in their head about weddings about all these things you “have to do” and they think it’s either law, or it’s luck, or it’s tradition like there’s only one tradition and you’ll be haunted by your Great Great Grandma if you don’t follow the traditions. It’s all bullshit. What’s not bullshit? In Australia to get legally m...

I wanted to share a little bit into the process of being a celebrant, but also in creating your marriage ceremony, and of course, your marriage. The thing is, your marriage matters, your marriage ceremony matters, and I put all of my heart, mind, body, and soul into it. I believe that the two of you merely existing is a beautiful miracle – it’s a one in 400 trillion chance that you are even here. Then if you make it through to adulthood and you’re single, and actively looking for someone who you don’t hate, that’s a daily 1 in 562 chance of meeting someone. For the two of you to be standing in a marriage ceremony is a miracle. Something worth celebrating. Here’s where things get interesting. I’m not the first person to believe that your marriage – and your marriage ceremony – matters. You obviously do as well because you’re reading this. Now it’s about aligning worldviews. Some celebrants think it should happen certain wa...

2020. What a traumatic year. It’s a miracle that Britt and I are here standing together, holding each other, smiling, at the end of this year. Someone acutely described our situation like this: this year all of us need more than any one of us can give. That’s literally how I feel. That our clients needed more from us than we could give, our business partners and industry friends needed more than we could give, and within the four walls of our home the three – almost four – of us needed more than we could give. I’ve just run our numbers for the year and that’s the story I can read in the spreadsheet. Only 59% of my weddings went ahead as planned, but only 28% of our elopements went ahead as planned. More than 20% of our couples are still without a new wedding or elopement date. Our inboxes were about 20% busier this year than 2019 and normally our client relationships have become about 60% longer. The simplified story is that we’re doing a lot more for less with less to give....

As the guy standing up the front of your marriage ceremony, I often see your wedding from a completely different point of view than your guests do – and often differently from how you do. I’ve been at weddings where the cake was destroyed by a toddler and replaced without anyone noticing. I’ve been to destination weddings where flights were cancelled so replacement photographers were literally called on at 10pm to start at 5pm and they had a four hour drive ahead of them from a different country in Europe! I can now comfortably say I’ve also experienced a pandemic which completely tore apart the fabric of our society and made getting married hard. I’ve heard the battle stories and the seen the scars. In the last 11 years as a marriage celebrant and almost 20 years in events, I have some stories to tell. If you want to hear them, bring a bottle of Japanese whisky round to my place one time and we’ll get messy. But the real advantage for you here is tha...

Here’s a pro wedding planning tip that no-one’s going to publish in a pretty wedding magazine or talk about in a wedding planning Facebook group. All wedding vendors, venues, creatives, artists, charge reasonably. They are all affordable. There’s no such thing as cheap or expensive. Those words are descriptors that just don’t exist in any creative industry where individuals are sweating it out to create meaningful and beautiful work for people getting married. What differentiates wedding creators isn’t whether they are cheap or affordable – or not – but it’s what you expect from them, what they can create for you, and if they have the capacity to create it for you. It’s about you knowing your expectations, and you being wise enough to communicate them, then for the wedding creator to be able to fulfil them. It’s about the work they are amazing at creating, and is that the kind of work you appreciate. Is it to your liking, does ...