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Wedding Reading

48 replies

WotgunShedding · 13/02/2022 18:47

I’ve been asked to read at a friend’s wedding and I’m completely lost as to where to start!

Does anyone have any suggestions for a not-too-twee, non-religious reading?

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StarStarTeachMe · 13/02/2022 18:50

We had this.

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.

Because this is what love is.

Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion.That is just being in love, which any fool can do.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.

– Louis de Bernieres

countrylifer · 13/02/2022 18:52

Just don't do the blooming velveteen rabbit! Try and find something original (hard I know)

jadew88 · 13/02/2022 18:54

We had a friend read this from the novel "In Five Years" (which I would highly recommend by the way):

“We are like constellations passing each other, seeing each other’s light but in the distance. It feels impossible how much space there can be in this intimacy, how much privacy. And I think that maybe that is what love is. Not the absence of space but the acknowledgment of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the thing that makes it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two.”

Interested in this thread?

Then you might like threads about this subject:

LemonViolet · 13/02/2022 18:55

And please not that “love is patient; love is kind” one. Every. Bloody. Time. I always think - no, that’s your primary school teacher, not love!

@StarStarTeachMe that one is great!

IggyAce · 13/02/2022 19:00

We had the same as @StarStarTeachMe, I’ve assisted my wedding photographer dh and only heard it at one other wedding.

Nopetryagain · 13/02/2022 19:00

I quite like the Blessing of the Hands:

These are the hands of your best friend, young and strong and full of love for you, that are holding yours on your wedding day, as you promise to love each other today, tomorrow, and forever.

These are the hands that will work alongside yours, as together you build your future.

These are the hands that will passionately love you and cherish you through the years, and with the slightest touch, will comfort you like no other.

These are the hands that will hold you when fear or grief fills your mind.

These are the hands that will countless times wipe the tears from your eyes; tears of sorrow, and tears of joy.

These are the hands that will tenderly hold your children.

These are the hands that will help you to hold your family as one.

These are the hands that will give you strength when you need it.

And lastly, these are the hands that even when wrinkled and aged, will still be reaching for yours, still giving you the same unspoken tenderness with just a touch.

KitBot · 13/02/2022 19:13

WB Yeats
He wishes for the cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Dragonsandunicorns · 13/02/2022 19:19

I love 'The life that I have' by Leo Marks

DownWhichOfLate · 13/02/2022 19:44

Having worked in the wedding industry I would avoid the Louis de Bernieres reading. And the “love is patient” one mentioned upthread. Also a reading called A Lovely Love Story. All very much overdone! The one posted by @jadew88 is quite different and interesting.

RedMozzieYellowMozzie · 13/02/2022 19:48

People are like cities: We all have alleys and gardens and secret rooftops and places where daisies sprout between the sidewalk cracks, but most of the time all we let each other see is is a postcard glimpse of a skyline or a polished square. Love lets you find those hidden places in another person, even the ones they didn't know were there, even the ones they wouldn't have thought to call beautiful themselves.
Hilary T. Smith, Wild Awake

WotgunShedding · 13/02/2022 19:51

So much food for thought! Thank you, there are some lovely excerpts here. I’m off to google the suggestions!

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Butterflystar76 · 13/02/2022 19:54

Lemn Sissay invisible kisses is lovely

onefabday.com/ceremony-reading-invisible-kisses-by-lemn-sissay/

ItsDisneyBitch · 13/02/2022 19:59

I will love you forever; whatever happens.
Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead,
I'll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again.
I'll be looking for you, every moment, every single moment.
And when we do find each other again,
we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one will ever tear us apart.
Every atom of me and every atom of you.
We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams. And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won't just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight

Whatelsecouldibecalled · 13/02/2022 20:00

We had this

Union by Robert Fulghum
You have known each other from the first glance of acquaintance to this point of commitment. At some point, you decided to marry. From that moment of yes to this moment of yes, indeed, you have been making promises and agreements in an informal way. All those conversations that were held riding in a car or over a meal or during long walks - all those sentences that began with "When we're married" and continued with "I will and you will and we will" - those late night talks that included "someday" and "somehow" and "maybe" - and all those promises that are unspoken matters of the heart. All these common things, and more, are the real process of a wedding.
The symbolic vows that you are about to make are a way of saying to one another, "You know all those things we've promised and hoped and dreamed—well, I meant it all, every word."
Look at one another and remember this moment in time. Before this moment you have been many things to one another - acquaintance, friend, companion, lover, dancing partner, and even teacher, for you have learned much from one another in these last few years. Now you shall say a few words that take you across a threshold of life, and things will never quite be the same between you. For after these vows, you shall say to the world, this - is my husband, this - is my wife.

Crunched · 13/02/2022 20:16

These are lovely. Really getting me in a romantic mood for Valentines Day!

UncomfortableBadger · 13/02/2022 20:21

We also had the Robert Fulghum reading that @Whatelsecouldibecalled mentioned Smile

Had I seen it beforehand, I’d also have chosen this one by Dolly Alderton from Everything I Know About Love:

“I know that love can be loud and jubilant…It can be dancing in the swampy mud and the pouring rain at a festival and shouting “YOU ARE AMAZING” over the band. It’s introducing them to your colleagues at a work event and basking in pride as they make people laugh and make you look lovable just by dint of being loved by them.

It’s laughing until you wheeze.

It’s waking up in a country neither of you have been in before.

It’s skinny-dipping at dawn. It’s walking along the street together on a Saturday night and feeling an entire city is yours.

It’s a big, beautiful, ebullient force of nature.

I also know that love is a pretty quiet thing.

It’s lying on the sofa together drinking coffee, talking about where you’re going to go that morning to drink more coffee. It’s folding down pages of books you think they’d find interesting.

It’s hanging up their laundry when they leave the house having moronically forgotten to take it out of the washing machine.

It’s saying ‘You’re safer here than in a car’ as they hyperventilate on an EasyJet flight to Dublin.

It’s the texts: ‘Hope your day goes well’, ‘How did today go?’, ‘Thinking of you today’ and ‘Picked up loo roll’.

I know that love happens under the splendour of moon and stars and fireworks and sunsets but it also happens when you’re lying on blow-up airbeds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in A&E or in the queue for a passport, or in a traffic jam.

Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.”

ThanksItHasPockets · 13/02/2022 20:38

It felt like every wedding I went to in my twenties had the extract from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

You can’t go wrong with a Shakespearean sonnet. I like #116, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds…’

Gensola · 13/02/2022 20:40

Following this with interest!

WotgunShedding · 13/02/2022 21:54

What do we think of this one? I like it but am worried it has too many “negative images” for want of a better phrase! I fear it’s not weddingy enough

Touched by an angel - Maya Angelou

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.
We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love’s light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

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ThanksItHasPockets · 13/02/2022 21:59

@WotgunShedding

What do we think of this one? I like it but am worried it has too many “negative images” for want of a better phrase! I fear it’s not weddingy enough

Touched by an angel - Maya Angelou

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.
We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love’s light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

Will there be a lot of single guests at the wedding? I don't love the 'coiled in shells of loneliness' image.
ThanksItHasPockets · 13/02/2022 22:07

Do you like Neruda? I've always loved his Sonnet XVII:

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
BY PABLO NERUDA
TRANSLATED BY MARK EISNER
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,

and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose

from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,

I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,

so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,

so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

Otherwise can you tell us anything non-outing about the couple? First wedding or subsequent for one or both? Any children? Approx age? It might help to narrow down the choices.

BobMortimersTrout · 13/02/2022 22:13

'On marriage' from Kahlil Gibran (although we edited it a bit), and 'Yes I'll marry you' by Pam Ayres.

I like the excerpt from The Amber Spyglass that a PP wrote above, but we're not that romantic!

Benjaminsniddlegrass · 13/02/2022 22:24

This is what we had, I love it.

onefabday.com/ceremony-reading-all-i-know-about-love-by-neil-gaiman/

Benjaminsniddlegrass · 13/02/2022 22:28

Ceremony Reading: All I Know About Love by Neil Gaiman
Heartfelt, real and romantic...

By
CLAIRE
This week's wedding reading is a beautiful choice for any kind of ceremony; All I Know About Love by Neil Gaiman. Written by the acclaimed novelist and comic writer for his friends' wedding, it's heartfelt, real and romantic. If you're stumped on your search for the perfect alternative wedding reading, this might just be The One...

All I Know About Love by Neil Gaiman
This is everything I have to tell you about love: nothing.
This is everything I've learned about marriage: nothing.

Only that the world out there is complicated,
and there are beasts in the night, and delight and pain,
and the only thing that makes it okay, sometimes,
is to reach out a hand in the darkness and find another hand to squeeze,
and not to be alone.

It's not the kisses, or never just the kisses: it's what they mean.
Somebody's got your back.
Somebody knows your worst self and somehow doesn't want to rescue you
or send for the army to rescue them
It's not two broken halves becoming one.
It's the light from a distant lighthouse bringing you both safely home
because home is wherever you are both together.

So this is everything I have to tell you about love and marriage: nothing,
like a book without pages or a forest without trees.

Because there are things you cannot know before you experience them.
Because no study can prepare you for the joys or the trials.
Because nobody else's love, nobody else's marriage, is like yours,
and it's a road you can only learn by walking it,
a dance you cannot be taught,
a song that did not exist before you began, together, to sing.
And because in the darkness you will reach out a hand,
not knowing for certain if someone else is even there.
And your hands will meet,
and then neither of you will ever need to be alone again.

And that's all I know about love.

WotgunShedding · 13/02/2022 22:30

@ThanksItHasPockets yes I think you’re right - I’d rather not inadvertently insult people!

I love Neruda (one of the few books of poetry I own) and that’s a lovely poem but it feels a bit personal, as though one of the married couple should be saying it to the other. I know lots of people opt for readings that are similar but I’m a bit uptight Blush

They’re in their late twenties/early thirties, have been together for 6 ish years, first marriage for both, no children but a sweet little dog whom they adore. They’re having quite a outdoorsy, folksy, camping-adjacent type wedding. In the spirit of not being too outing though, I won’t share their hobbies Grin

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