Being a single celebrant is something that’s a little different and not something Foreigner lyrics can probably teach me.
I believe in marriage for all. Whatever you identify as, if you both are consenting adults in a relationship built on love, trust and respect, I say knock yourself out. Get married and hopefully, one day very, very soon, someone will do something about making that legal for everyone. But what happens when the person who is joining you both in a state of marriage, knows nothing about it? How can I, as a single person, possibly know what it means to swear your life, holus bolus, to someone else? The answer is, I can’t.
I am single. I am ‘never validly married’, I am a spinster, unattached, bachelorette, old maid, the names get worse people, but the point is I don’t have a significant other. I don’t even have a cat. (I’m not ready to be the crazy cat lady yet.) So what can I possibly bring to a ceremony where I have no knowledge of what it means to love someone that hard? That my friends, is easy.
As a wedding celebrant I meet couples. I meet couples who are in that sickly, sweet stage of love that some days makes me so ill I question my breakfast. However, there is one thing that all of my couples have in common. They love each other. Lots. And watching all of those different kinds of love, does something that nothing else can. It gives me hope.
Hope that love exists and has the possibility to exist in my own world. I’ve seen sickly sweet love, cheeky love, gentlemanly love, chivalrous love, plain outright desire and all things in between. Through all of it, it is you, the married couples of my world and yours that have taught me the most valuable lesson of being a single woman. That love, in all its sometimes strange but glorious forms, is possible.
It is that sense of hope and pure feeling of joy that I get from celebrating the love you have for each other that makes me love this job. Getting married is about two people, swearing on everything they have, are and will be, that they’ll love each other, in one form or another, for a good long while. Getting married for the rest of us is just pure hope and joy that we as humans are loveable.
So being a single celebrant keeps life interesting. It reminds me on those days when the man hunt is beyond slow to non-existent that love and marriage is possible. It reminds me that people, all people, deserve to be loved and that somewhere out there, there might not be a prince, but there could be a man with a dog. So thank you ladies and gentlemen out there about to be hitched or just hitched, it is you who reaffirm my faith in love on a daily basis and every time I pronounce you husband and wife.
