One of the resource documents we give to every couple we work with is simply titled “Rituals”. Over the years, this has steadily grown to include rituals from various cultures. The idea is that this is a unique way to pull in to a ceremony traditions that symbolize the unity of marriage.

Many couple ask if it is something they have to include in their ceremony. The answer of course to that is “No”. But if you decide to feature a ritual in your ceremony, here are a few tips:

One of the oldest traditions is the lighting of the unity candle. We could write a book about Unity Candle disasters when conducting outdoor weddings. If your wedding is outdoors, realize that there are no guarantees that the candle lighting can actually be done when the wind is blowing. Several times we’ve had to take it inside and have it done during the reception. Then there is the superstition of what it means if the candle blows out.

Consider some of the other options. One that is quickly replacing the unity candle is the blending of sand. I recently had a wedding where the grooms family brought sand from Washington State to be mixed with the bride’s sand from the Atlantic shore.

Another one we use a lot, particularly with weddings in a vineyard is the variations on either the mixing of wine, the wine ceremony or the German inspired wine sharing ritual.

When it comes to traditions from other cultures, we are always inspired and appreciative of how different cultures symbolize the significance of marriage. I have had the privilege this past month of celebrating two weddings where the ancient Persian custom of the Sofreh Aghd (Wedding spread) is featured.

Whatever your background, be assured that there is a tradition or ritual that can be included to make your ceremony unique and fun. We’ll gladly help you figure out how to include it in your own special ceremony.

Falling in Love is Like Owning a Dog

by Taylor Mali

First of all, it’s a big responsibility,
So think long and hard before deciding on love.
On the other hand, love gives you a sense of security: when you’re walking down the street late at night and you have a leash on love ain’t no one going to mess with you.
On cold winter nights, love is warm.
It lies between you and lives and breaths
and makes funny noises.
Love wakes you up all hours of the night with its needs.
It needs to be fed so it will grow and stay healthy.
Love doesn’t like being left alone for long.
But come home and love is always happy to see you.
Is love good all the time? No! No! Love can be bad. Bad, love, bad! Very bad love.
Love makes messes. Love leaves you little surprises here and there. Love needs lots of cleaning up after.
But most of all, love needs love, lots of it.
And in return, love loves you and never stops.

In a recent article in PsychCentral, clinical psychologist Suzanne B. Phillips of Long Island University explores what our relationships with pets can teach us about our relationship with a spouse or romantic partner.

Do you greet each other with excitement, overlook each other’s flaws and easily forgive bad behavior? If it’s your pet, the answer is probably yes, But your spouse? Probably not!

Dr. Phillips suggests we can all learn how to improve our human relationships by focusing on how we interact with our pets. For instance:

GREETINGS: Even on bad days, we greet our pet with a happy, animated hello, and usually a pat on the head or a hug. Do you greet your spouse that way?

HOLDING GRUDGES: Even when our pets annoy us by wrecking the furniture or soiling the floor, we don’t stay mad at them.

ASSUMING THE BEST: When our pets make mistakes, we don’t take it personally and are quick to forgive. We give them the benefit of the doubt. Yet when our spouse does something wrong, we often react with anger and blame.

We really do “Get what we Give”. While it is usually so easy to give something very positive to our pets that invites the unconditional love and connection that makes us feel so good, we would do well to treat our spouse with the same kind of understanding and unconditional support we give our beloved pets.

We are entering our eighth year of officiating weddings and working with couples to prepare for marriage and are still having so much fun!

One thing has been constantly changing for us over the years and that is how we communicate and keep in touch with all of you. We committed to sending you a quarterly newsletter with a relationship tip and a wedding idea/tip. But this past year we have been so overwhelmed with our busy schedule that we haven’t kept that up.

We also worry that many of you may not want to have another newsletter dumped into your inbox. The last thing we want is to annoy you after we’ve had such a great time working with you.

Therefore, we are doing our best to try and keep up with the times. This will be the last newsletter we send out. From here on out, we will work much harder to keep up a meaningful blog and will post our weddings on Facebook within 24 hours of the event. That will hopefully be much better for you. You can choose to follow or ignore and we’ll still continue to appreciate you and that special time in your life when we were privileged to be there with you.

Thank you for allowing us to be there on your wedding day and we hope you will keep in touch over the years. We will do our best to watch the development of your family in the years ahead by your postings on Facebook.

We wish you a Merry Christmas from the bottom of our hearts. Oh yes, we realize that so many of you come from various backgrounds of religious and non-religious thought but we claim this perspective from Dave Barry that allows us to do our thing this time of year:

“In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it ‘Christmas’ and went to church; the Jews called it ‘Hanukkah’ and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy Hanukkah!’ or (to the atheists) ‘Look out for the wall!’”

- Dave Barry, Christmas Shopping: A Survivor’s Guide

Whatever your perspective, we do want to thank you again for allowing us to be a part of your significant lives this past year. And, we want to wish for you a great season of celebration!

Our hope is that 2012 will be a year of excitement, fun and a time to build some great memories.

Amy Harris, Director of Marketing was the host for the evening and she and her staff really did a great job of showcasing their fabulous food and venue.  This hotel has just undergone extensive renovation utilizing “Green” construction practices and incorporated some of the most advanced environmental systems in hospitality into it’s design.

We also had the opportunity to visit with experts from government and private “Green” organizations and walked away with a great understanding and appreciation for what it means to really work towards being green.  They even sent us home with a booklet – Greening Your Office that we have put to use.

If you’re looking for a great location that incorporates the very latest in green technology, then the Courtyard by Marriott is well worth your checking out.  They have great indoor space, as well as a balcony area for outdoor wedding ceremonies.

We are trying to build a list of Green Certified wedding venues.  Besides the Chevy Chase Courtyard by Marriott, we are aware of two others where we happen to be on their preferred vendors list, they are: Airlee Center in Warrenton, VA and Herrington on the Bay in Rose Haven, MD.

Please feel free to add information you have about green wedding venues.

Wedding In A Week

Friday, January 28, at 9:00 am, I had the privilege of officiating the wedding of Megan and Alex who were a part of the Wedding In A Week Competition hosted by FM 107.3 on the Jack Diamond Morning Show.  Megan and Alex just discovered the previous Friday that they were the winners.  In meeting with them the following Monday, it was fun to see the excitement in their eyes.  They are a really great couple who brought a great amount of energy to not just the hurried details of the wedding, but to their entire relationship.

They walked away from our planning session breathing easier, feeling that the day was going to turn out great!

And it did!  The wedding took place at Top of the Town in Arlington which has a spectacular view across the river and down the National Mall.  As the guests gathered, snow was lightly falling, casting a wintery touch to the whole day.

Their wedding planner was Shelby Tuck-Horton, owner of Exquisite Expressions and Events, Inc.  Shelby kept everyone and everything moving along in an organized way.

Both Megan and Alex were nervous when I checked in with them in their respective holding rooms.  But they were also anxious to make their marriage official.

Their ceremony was made so much fun because of the guests they had invited.  Besides family, they had so many of their former college friends and present work associates with them.  These guests were right there as I shared the details of how they met, fell in love, got engaged, entered the contest and came to be standing right there at 9:00 am on a snowy winter morning, ready to share their vows.

Megan has the most beautiful deep green eyes that I have ever seen and looked spectacular in the dress that the radio listeners had chosen for her – which was the one she really wanted!  Alex has an infectious smile that pierces through everything around him and in his pre-ceremony on-air interview with Jack Diamond, he sounded like a natural, on-air personality himself.

I love being a part of a team that provides a wedding that the couple have won as part of a competition or promotional event and was delighted to have had the opportunity to help Alex and Megan begin their married life together.

The photographer for the wedding was YB Yong.  I have worked with him and his crew a number of times these past years and find his work to be very creative and excellent.  View his photographs and Video here.

This event is organized and sponsored by the Bridal Showcase.

And, they lived happily ever after!

1. You are the one getting married. Therefore, you have the right to make it reflect who you are. Focus on the kind of celebration you want, not the one other people expect you to have. Don’t include things that don’t matter to you.
2. Decide early on who will be in your wedding party. Then stick to it! If you change your mind after they’ve said yes, you deserve the resulting anger and frequent loss of friendship.
3. Children involved in the ceremony are the “cute” factor. Whatever they decide to do at the last minute will be cute – even if they lay down in the aisle and kick and scream. Determine that it’s ok with you – whatever happens. If you will be upset by their antics then perhaps you don’t want children involved.
4. You may be nervous as the ceremony time approaches, but stick to non-alcoholic drinks prior to the ceremony. You want to be able to walk straight and speak clearly!
5. Don’t forget to eat something, even if you don’t feel like it on your wedding day. Famished, fainting brides and grooms are more frequent than you’d guess. We’ve seen our share!

But this time to slow down, gives us the opportunity to sit back and remember the great weddings we have had the privilege of being a part of in 2010 and realize how very fortunate we are to have so much fun in what we do!

Once the holidays are finished, we will once again be busy with pre-marriage counseling, dozens of appointments to meet newly engaged couples and a new wedding season will begin.

So we take this time to wish you “best wishes” for the holiday season and hope you survive another DC winter!

Relationship Tip

The whole health care debate has generated the attention of all of us this past year. The reason for so much debate is because we all care greatly about our health care. We know we need our routine physicals and dental checkups; they are essential to our ongoing good health and we want to make sure we have the ability to receive good service for our health care.

I’ve seen the cars that many of you drive and realize that it is equally important that you get those in for their regular check-up.

BUT, what about your relationship? Married couples rarely, if ever, do a checkup on their relationship,. But the sooner you identify problems and find ways to resolve them, the easier it will be to create a strong future. And the sooner you discover your relationship strengths and build on them, the deeper and more intimate your relationship will be.

A tool we have been using in our counseling for years is the PREPARE/ENRICH Couples inventory. There is now a new tool you could access that will guide you through the process of evaluating your relationship. You can process this yourself with easy to follow instructions. However, if you’d like some input, we’d be willing to work with you on it, though it’s not necessary.

Checkout this link for further information: couple checkup

Preparing for or Enhancing your Marriage

For those of you with weddings in 2011, you probably have most of your wedding plans all figured out, but have you spent as much time preparing for your married life together? January and February is typically the time when we spend a lot of time helping couples prepare for their marriage. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you prepare for or enhance your marriage, please call us. You can also take a free couples quiz on the PREPARE/ENRICH web site by clicking on the couples quiz link.

For those of you who have already taken advantage of the PREPARE/ENRICH program, this is a great time to do a couples checkup.

Refer a friend and receive a free Couples Checkup Book

When you refer a friend or family member to Say “I Do” Your way and they sign a contract with one of our officiants for Wedding services or Marriage Preparation, we will give you a free Couples Checkup book. Click the link for more details about the book.

The appeal we find in working with couples to prepare for their wedding and marriage has to do with your stories. Everyone as one and all of them are unique unto themselves. Even those who say to us that they don’t have such an interesting story, are always surprised when they sit back and think about it, that there were indeed some fascinating circumstances that played in to them finding each other.

There is one common theme we seem to hear that we have always found interesting – that is, Boy meets girl. They fall in love, marry and live happily ever after. Soul mates forever.

A couple of the readings we provide in our handouts have a theme of finding your soul mate. My favorite is how Richard Bach states it: “A soul mate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks.”

Fully two-thirds of Americans believe in the concept of soul mates, where “two people are destined to be together,” according to a recent Marist Poll.

But a new study offers an important reality check about unions formed in a whirlwind of passion.
“‘Soul mate’ couples are often happy at first, because they have intense emotional and personal connections,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, lead author of the article in the Sept. 1 issue of Social Science Research.

“But their unions are at high risk for disenchantment and divorce because it’s hard to sustain such intensity in a long-term relationship,” he said.

You can check out the article here.

But let me give my conclusion by sharing another of my favorite wedding readings that, I believe give a great answer to the question, how do we sustain and grow our love after the “volcanic” passion has subsided? Here’s a great answer by C.S. Lewis:

“Being in Love”
From A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

If the old fairy-tale ending “They lived happily ever after” is taken to mean “They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,” then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were.

Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be “in love” need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense-love as distinct from “being in love”-is not merely a feeling.

It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself.

They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be “in love” with someone else. “Being in love” first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.”

It’s alright to be soul mates. But the important thing for the long health of your marriage is to work diligently on having the “Quieter love” working in the background.

Our counseling work involves helping couples to realize the great strengths they bring to their relationship so they can continue building that quiet, understanding love throughout the rest of their lives.