an idiot

This is me. I am an idiot.

Since when have I ever cared about 'properly'?

Lovely commenters, twitter people et al: you are right. A friend is the answer. I am half nuts to have even blogged about it.

Sometimes I am so glad that we've got over a year to go. Seriously, some things require a lot of thinking about.

I'm going to keep mulling on this, but I'm sure this is the right decision. Unless they legalise humanist weddings in England and open up a whole other can of worms...

a dilemma

It dawned on me the other day that so much about planning a wedding is trying to anticipate how you will feel, after the event, if you do - or don't - do things a certain way. Hence the emphasis on perfection, on spending money to do things 'right' so that you don't feel retrospectively disappointed a decade on from now.

What's brought this revelation on? The meeting with the Humanist. The bit that I thought was a formality has turned out to be actually a trigger to think about how exactly we want to do the 'i do' bit of the wedding, with an essential disagreement between BF and myself.

We know that we both want the same things: a nice ceremony, out in the open, up on the farm. Something personal and different. We'll have already done the legal bit in the register office that morning but we wanted something more meaningful to go alongside that.

So we met the Humanist, and she was lovely. I was convinced: BF remains un-so. The nub of our disagreement runs thus:

Me: the Humanist will do a proper job; run a beautiful ceremony and properly declare us married. A proper ceremony is important.

BF: the Humanist doesn't know us from Adam, and in the eyes of the law, she isn't really marrying us at all. We could get a friend to run us a ceremony up on the hill; he would do a sterling job and it wouldn't cost 500 quid for half an hour (Humanist weddings cost £400 this year, plus travelling expenses, and the cost will probably rise next year.) This would be more meaningful.

And this is pretty much where we still stand. I don't doubt that said friend would do an amazing job. He would completely. But I can't shake this sense of 'doing it properly'; worrying that in 10 years' time, I'll feel that something was missing. But at the same time, I recognise the essential truth in BF's feelings: in the eyes of the law, we're not more married by a Humanist than we are in the register office, and the Humanist ceremony is expensive.

I agree entirely with the Humanist principles and think they are a noble and lovely organisation. But when we're trying to keep things on a budget, £500 is a considerable cost. But is it a cost that's worth it?

So that leaves me, trying to second guess my future feelings on the issue and not making much progress right now.

humanist

So today, we're going to meet a humanist called who might well be the one to marry us next year. She's a retired schoolteacher who likes gardening.

At the moment bf is sort of neutral on the whole humanist ceremony bit so hopefully he'll feel a bit more decided either way after we've met her (because if it's a definite 'no' we need to get our thinking caps on again.)

I really hope we click with her. Wish us luck!

walking down a sort of aisle

(Thanks to Anna, for inspiring me to write this post. I've been mulling it over for days.)

I'd always known I didn't want a church wedding. Like many a modern gal, I'm a happy atheist/agnostic (though I wish the words didn't sound so harsh). I love a visit to old English church as much as the next person, and I'm not anti-religion, but it's just not for me.

What I hadn't realised, before getting engaged, was that if you're not religious, your options are basically a boxy room in a stale council office, finding a hotel or other venue with a roof that is willing to register to marry people, or eloping.

One of my friends is getting married in New York, in Central Park. Imagine getting married on the top of Richmond Hill in London, or even in your local neighbourhood park or pub garden in this country. Lovely. But outdoor is out of the question, if you want to get hitched legally.

Register office type weddings can be a bit 'bish bash bosh' - in and out and over in minutes. While I don't want religion, it's a shame that the other trappings of a beautiful service are denied to those wishing to marry in a civil ceremony. When I've been to family weddings (every single one in a church, every single one with a non-religious bride and groom), the services have always been incredibly moving, religion or no.

I don't want to make a vow before a God, but I would like lovely music, readings, vows that are more than perfunctory. And it turns out that my Dad, bless him, is very excited at the thought of walking me down the aisle. So there needs to be an aisle.

But it turns out there is one option for those of us in this limbo: Humanist weddings. The humanists are a lovely bunch of people that will do nice, non-religious ceremonies for the likes of me and bf. They also do naming ceremonies and other things.

Ok, they're not legally binding in England (though they are in Scotland), so we'll need to do a register office jobby first.

But we can get married outside - in fact, we are going to have this service on the edge of a forest, where the aisle is through the trees and under a willow arch, up to an alter consising of a giant rock, with beautiful music (see post below) and with readings and vows that mean something more than legally defined proximity. The picture above is of the spot.

So hurray for the Humanists. But roll on the day when British (and indeed worldwide) wedding laws leap into the 21st century and let anyone marry anyone wherever they like.