Читать книгу Weddings from the Heart - Daphne Rose Kingma - Страница 11

THERE ARE ONLY TWO ELEMENTS ESSENTIAL TO a legally binding wedding: the vows or promises you make to one another and the proclamation by the officiant that you are now married. All other elements are optional. Therefore, in planning your wedding and deciding what you want to include, you have tremendous freedom to create a ceremony that is totally expressive of the two of you.

A wedding is the social portal to married life, a turning point, a marker on the path of your own development that denotes the moment at which you cease to be a solitary person pursuing an individual life and begin taking up the joys and responsibilities of sharing your life with another person. So as you plan the wedding that will stand forever in your memory as the emblem of the moment that delivered you to your new life, you may want to contemplate the meanings of marriage itself. In this way you can discover exactly what you would like to include in your ceremony so it will carry the unique and beautiful meanings that you want to express and hold in memory.

Creating a wedding ceremony is a time-consuming undertaking. It requires careful planning, lots of energy, and, above all, an awareness of exactly what you want to reflect in the precious moments of your wedding. In choosing to create your own ceremony, you have indicated from the very start that you are willing to explore the possibilities—and possible pitfalls—of creating a tailor-made, unique masterpiece with the person you love.

For as you plan your wedding together, you'll come face-to-face with what you really mean to each other, what your values are, what your vision of marriage is, what you expect from and are willing to promise each other, both now and in the future. You'll have a chance to look at the depths of your love, to reaffirm all the wonderful feelings that brought you here in the first place. You'll also have an opportunity to encounter your individual preferences and differences and resolve them. The task of planning a wedding is a little like marriage itself—a process of discovery, an opportunity to grown in love.

If you're wise, you'll use this process as an occasion to deepen your relationship, to work through whatever conflicts may arise, to appreciate each other for the various talents you bring to the project, to have a first experience of creating something that is a reflection of your union.