Why Your Wedding Doesn’t Matter
On Christmas Eve at my parents’ house this year, as we all gathered together to eat brunch (because you fit Christmas celebrations in when you can when you’re a pastor), my niece had an important announcement to make.
T was born when I was in high school. Of all our nieces and nephews, I probably have the closest relationship with her and her brother D because they were both born while I was still living at home and my mom watched them while my sister worked, so I got to spend a lot of time with them.
As hard as it is to believe, T is 22 now. She just graduated college last spring, started teaching this fall and is planning on getting married next summer. Well, she WAS planning on getting married next summer. Her big announcement: they decided to move up the wedding… to next week on New year’s Eve.
Enter the denial phase for Uncle Matt…
Weddings are something with which I have a little more familiarity than the average person. Not only have I attended several (which, undoubtedly, many of you have as well), but as a pastor, I have presided over many others. However, in full transparency, I have a little secret to share with you: I don’t love doing weddings.
Look, it’s not that I hate them; I really don’t. It’s just that, for the most part, people have these major expectations in their minds about what their wedding is “supposed” to be, and have rarely even thought about what they want the actual ceremony to look like. And again, as a pastor, I will get the occasional call or message saying, “I need somebody to do our wedding, are you available on…?”
The real kicker is: when you get these phone calls, usually, the person on the other end of the line has absolutely no connection with the church. They just need to use somebody — anybody — that has the legal standing to do the ceremony and sign the paperwork. And, sure, they say they want to come to worship at your church, but what they really mean is they think it’s important I think they want to come to worship. I had one couple promise through several months of premarital counseling that they were going to come to church “soon”. They came to the church for the rehearsal and the wedding, and then I never saw them again.
Now, to be fair, not every story is like that. I had one young couple find our church online, come visit on a weekend that I was off, come back a couple weeks later and ask me to do their wedding after worship that morning. They became, and still are, active members in that congregation.
Many times, I’ll do a wedding for a son or daughter of an active church member that lives out of town. Those weddings are always enjoyable, as are the weddings for church members. But, with some regularity, you still get the calls from the random people who never step foot in a church, but for whom it is very important that a pastor do their wedding.
Weddings have become big business in today’s American society. The average wedding in 2018, according to WeddingWire.com’s 2018 Wedding Report cost about $36,000 ($5k engagement ring + $27k ceremony/reception + $4k honeymoon), and in major markets like NYC, one can expect to spend significantly more. The wedding industry has become a major player in dollars received.
And yet, at the same time we live in a society where it is not uncommon to hear about a divorce rate hovering around 50%. Now, there seems to be some indication that the 50% is a gross over-generalization, and that the divorce rate is actually on its way down over previous decades. This is good news; however, it still points to a significant problem that I have seen through the years when it comes to weddings.
For some, the focus is so much on the wedding that the marriage is put on the back burner.
I think some of what we have seen in a society with a booming wedding industry, and the proliferation of Pinterest-inspired insanity, is that for some, the focus is so much on the wedding that the marriage is put on the back burner.
And here’s where I come back to the title of this post, and this is something that I want to emphasis to the couples that I walk with during this time in their lives, your wedding is a great occasion.
It is a beautiful day. It will be memorable, and it will be a ton of fun.
But… it’s only one day.
It’s an important day. But it’s only the start to your marriage. The wedding is not the endgame; it’s the beginning of something more. In the grand scheme of life, your wedding doesn’t matter… not nearly as much as your marriage.
As I work with couples and we plan the ceremony, one thing I tell them is that something will probably go wrong. You may stutter when you speak. You may feel like you are shaking from the nerves. You may say the wrong words, or forget what you were supposed to say. The reception hall may burn down (or, as happened before one wedding a few years ago, a giant tree may fall down on the outside of the reception hall). But…
At the end of the day, no matter what goes wrong, when everybody goes home (or stumbles to their hotel room), when all the decorations are down, when all the food and drink are consumed, no matter what went wrong, at the end of the day, the couple will still be married. Husband and wife, embarking together on one of life’s greatest adventures. And that’s what is really important.
When I meet with couples about their wedding, we only spend a couple of hours planning the ceremony itself. We spend a lot of time talking about their history, handling conflicts, managing finances, hopes and dreams for the future because those are the important things. Those are the details that make or break a marriage.
The dress rehearsal is where we can end up running into the biggest problems. This is where Bridezilla rears her ugly head (thankfully, that’s only happened once, and it was actually the day of the ceremony, not during the rehearsal), or where the mother of the bride wants to assert her dominance (I once had a MoB eye me prior to the rehearsal and ask how many weddings I had done before. I said, with a smile that said I’m kidding right now, but don’t mess with me tonight, “More than you.”), or where the ass clown… excuse me, class clown… groomsman wants to be the funnyman that gets a date with one of the bridesmaids.
When it comes time for the dress rehearsal, I have three rules for the wedding party:
- Anybody that is under the influence of anything — drugs or alcohol — may not take part in the ceremony. They do, however, get to tell the bride why they thought the drugs or alcohol were more important than her on her wedding day. If somebody can’t hold off on drinking for a few hours before the wedding, then they have a problem that needs to be addressed. Also, if it’s the bride or groom, there’s no wedding. I can’t legally marry a couple when one or both are under the influence.
- If anybody besides the bride or groom has an idea of how the ceremony can be better, they should write it down and come talk to me about it on the following Monday in my office. You may be surprised to hear that I haven’t had a lot of well-meaning, meddling people disrupt the flow of a ceremony that has already been planned with the bride and groom.
- From this point forward, what the bride and groom need more than anything is support from their family and friends. Marriage is hard enough as it is. There need not be any outside forces making the relationship more difficult. If you have a problem with their relationship, keep it to yourself. Nobody cares what you think, especially not now.
That third rule is really the most important one. The wedding is one day. The marriage is for the rest of their life.
What if we paid as much attention to detail in our marriages as we did to the wedding plans? What would the landscape of marriage in the United States look like? What if we emphasized the relationship more than the event? Because at the end of the day, one is far more important than the other.
It could be, if we were to focus on the relationship and not the event, that some people would discover they only wanted the big party, and not the work that comes with the relationship. That’s fine. Throw a big, expensive party. Don’t get married.
It could be, when they really think about it, that marriage isn’t the right next step in the relationship. And that’s okay as well. Don’t marry somebody because you feel stuck in a relationship, or because you are too scared to go out on your own once again, or because you think that’s what you should do. Some relationships go as far as they can, and it becomes clear that marriage isn’t necessarily the next right thing to do. If that’s the case, don’t get married because you don’t want to feel like you’ve wasted years of your life. You’re already not getting those years back; don’t waste your future years on a terrible relationship as well.
In order to make a wedding work, people will pour hours and hours into the details of the wedding over a certain period of time. In order to make a marriage work, people need to put that same kind of focus and attention to detail into everyday life with their spouse.
Your wedding doesn’t matter as much as your marriage. So put the time, effort and resources into what really matters.
Also… running the risk of sounding a little selfish on this one, but I’m going to say it anyway: pay the pastor. The wedding is not part of his/her regular duties (especially if you aren’t a member of his/her church), and it takes a lot of time and work to meet with the couple, plan the ceremony, run the rehearsal and perform the ceremony. That’s time away from family (because weddings don’t usually happen during the work week), and that’s work away from the congregation (because, let’s face it, you weren’t planning on attending that church anyway). There’s nothing more frustrating than to be the officiant at a $20,000 wedding and walk away without getting paid for your time and efforts. It literally could not happen without the officiant. Everything else can still take place, but your wedding isn’t official without the officiant.
