Choosing a wedding celebrant is a strange thing to do. Having never been married before, it’s one of those new experiences that you find yourself faced with and unsure how to approach. There are so many people out there, but you have no idea who they are – how do you know if they are the ‘right’ person to marry you? Aside from judging a photograph and a brief blurb on their website – you’re given little indication whether you will ‘click’ with them and if they’ll understand who you are as a couple.
Feel slightly embarrassed, I decided to go down the track of sending out a few e-mails with a few questions to suss out who these people were. My fiancé is still hassling me that I ‘screened’ potential celebrants, but I think he now admits it was a smart way of going about it. Sure, it felt a bit weird doing it, but we don’t have time to meet loads of people – we needed some way of ruling out the ‘weirdos’. The first cut was ruling out anyone with a giant fascinator in their hair. We’ve seen some shockers over the past couple of years; the best, I swear was an oversized Christmas decoration from the 1980s. We also decided we wanted someone a bit younger than the average aged celebrant. While I’m sure there are some lovely ladies in their sixties who are very experienced at marrying couples – I’ve seen too many of them put on ‘easy listening love songs til midnight fm’ voices and slip into autopilot, spilling out clichés every 20 seconds. We wanted someone with a bit of a fresher approach, someone who had a more contemporary attitude and understanding of a relationship in 2011.
I e-mailed five younger looking celebrants, two of whom came back saying they weren’t available on our date (which was helpful to at least start cutting people out), one came back with some strange answers to the questions (which proved the questionnaire worked a treat – screening out someone who thought ‘Te Radar’ was funny), and two lovely women took the time to answer the questionnaire in a way that made us think that we’d like to meet up with them to find out more.
The first lady was nice. My fiancé thought she felt like she was being interviewed, but honestly – we just wanted to have a laid back conversation, a few laughs and get to know her. She seemed quite business-like and had a competitive edge to her that didn’t sit overly well with me. It wasn’t as if we didn’t like her – we just didn’t ‘click’ with her the way we were hoping to with someone.
So we had one more lady to meet. Goodness knows if she’d be any better than the first lady – maybe we were going to have to settle for the first celebrant, maybe we’d have to find some others to meet with.....
We arrived at the second celebrant’s house and both fell in love with her cat. Apart from him attacking my hand at one point – he was incredibly cute. Aside from the feisty feline, it didn’t take us too long to realise that the conversation was flowing freely and we were laughing heaps, sharing stories and thoroughly enjoying ourselves. My fiancé and I snuck a look to each other at one point and agreed that she was the one. She was just lovely – funny, laid back, intelligent.... I knew we’d been there for a while, but after we left, I realised we’d spent two hours there. Oops! Poor lady, but how lovely of her to spend the time with us. We were both so excited that we clicked with her and actually just wanted to continue hanging out with her because she was so nice and easy to be around.
She loves the fact that we are going to personalise the ceremony and that we are both so involved. I think we will really enjoy the process with her, and I know she’ll be a calming influence on us both on the day. She helped us get excited about our wedding planning again and has allowed us to tick another big thing off our ‘to-do’ list.
We just can’t wait to see her again!
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