Every wedding is a gamble of a kind, against time, health and circumstances unforeseen or unknown. Finding ways through this – to declare sincerely a commitment, yet not appear overconfident in the face of fortune — requires consideration. This is not without its own challenges when, as a friend of Megan puts it, one operates in other things from a platform of irony.
Tradition offers a way around this, by doing things in a certain way because that is how they are done, and religion offers the further guard rail that this is how they should be done. Our initial response to this, which is to side with the counterculture, to shun tradition, is only helpful to a small extent, since what is a wedding but a more-or-less direct product of tradition in itself? The understanding that you can’t have a wedding ironically, without it ceasing to be a wedding, is obvious to most people but has taken some learning for us.
By this path have we come up with vows drafted for us by our celebrant and edited by us, combining in some degrees what is traditionally said — in which the ceremony, in effect, speaks in our place — with some slender textual shapings of our own. The two are more or less indistinguishable. The idea of a public commitment has not given us much too much pause, but the idea of framing that commitment in a manner direct, conventional and sincere has been more of a challenge. We take comfort from the fact that, for most wedding guests, the ceremony is a brief route to the heartier celebrations that follow.
