So you’re getting married.
Congratulations, genuinely. I am a marriage enthusiast, when done right. If I could somehow get extra married, I would. At some point soon, someone is going to ask you to make some promises. Possibly in front of everyone you know. Something to be mindful of is that broad, oft repeated promises can easily mean different things to different people, which is fine in most contexts, but as you might be able to imagine, considerably less fine when two people are making the same promise to each other and assuming it means the same thing to both of them.
Here is what I think a wedding actually is, underneath the party and the paperwork: you are signing up to play a specific and enormous role in another person’s life. And they in yours. Not a supporting role; a load-bearing one. The person you marry will be woven into the fabric of how you handle everything that happens to you, the losses, the windfalls, what to have for dinner on Tuesdays, and the unexpected moments that change everything. A good marriage doesn’t make life harder to navigate. It makes it easier. Even when what life brings you is genuinely difficult, the right partnership adds capacity rather than consuming it. That’s what the promises are for, to make sure that the ones you choose to make to each other are the ones that will build the framework of the life you want to live in together.
Most marriages are built on promises that were never fully examined. The planning fills up with venues and guest lists and whether to have a band or a DJ, and somewhere in there the most important planning question, what are you promising each other, and what kind of life do those promises frame out, doesn’t ever get asked. It tends to get answered anyway, whether you want it to or not, by what each person grew up thinking marriage was. Which works fine until sometimes it doesn’t.
What I know is that the weddings that actually move me, that feel like they mean something rather than simply look really lovely, are the ones where the promises are specific, and convey that the people promising them understand the vulnerability and gravity of the new family they are founding. I’m not generally moved by clever or funny vows, though funny when wielded meaningfully is fine, but irreverence isn’t the same as sincerity, however much it may try.
A note on the tarot and astrology, for the skeptics
I am going to use tarot and astrology as tools in this process. If you are a staunch atheist, and statistically, if you’ve made it this far without a religious tradition to bring to your wedding, there’s a reasonable chance you are, I want to address that directly.
You don’t have to believe in the supernatural in any way for it to work. I personally don’t either.
This is a scientific truth. The research on open-label placebos, placebos that work even when the person taking them knows they’re taking a placebo, has gotten considerably more robust in recent years, and what it demonstrates is that the mechanism doesn’t require belief. It requires willing and open engagement, a suspension of disbelief. The symbolic system has to be rich enough, and personally resonant enough, that your nervous system can use it to generate a real story about your situation. Tarot and astrology have been refined over several thousand years for exactly that purpose. Whatever else they are or aren’t, they are extraordinarily well-developed tools for helping people see patterns in their own lives clearly enough to make decisions about them.
Carl Sagan, who I hold in considerable personal esteem, railed against pop astrology on the grounds that “the light of Mars could not have reached his delivery room.” He was not wrong about that. He was also answering a question that the way I use astrology absolutely doesn’t need answered. The birth chart is not a prediction. It is a tool to frame a story about a person, told in a symbolic language flexible but precise enough to generate essentially unlimited variations and applications. Whether the planets caused anything is beside the point. The story is the part we, as human animals, really need. The clarity a compelling, true feeling story produces is real. The decisions made from that clarity are real. Think of it as creative non-fiction.
If you engage with this process in good faith, it will do some cool, meaningful, long lasting work. That I can promise.
What I actually do
I help you figure out what you’re promising each other before you promise it.
Most of us arrive at the decision to make this kind of commitment carrying a whole set of inherited ideas about what marriage is; from our families, from the culture, from every relationship we watched growing up, and a lot of those ideas are ones we’ve never consciously examined, let alone agreed to. Some of them are genuinely yours. Some of them are just in there, running quietly in the background, waiting to matter, or to throw a wrench in things when you least expect it.
Through this story framing process we surface those. We look at the relational stories you’re each coming into this with, what love looks like to you, who leads and who yields and under what circumstances, what devotion actually means in practice, and we figure out where your stories complement each other and where they’re going to need some conscious negotiation. Not because there’s anything wrong, but because knowing is better than not knowing, and because the ceremony you build from that knowledge will be something completely different from a ceremony built from assumptions.
I am also a certified Prepare & Enrich facilitator, and their programs have been shown to result in a 30% reduced rate of divorce, and a consistently improved satisfaction within the relationship by couples who participate. Their PREPARE pre-martial program offers a grounded, skill building approach to understanding your relationship’s strength, areas for growth, and what those pathways to growth might look like.
Then we build the ceremony. From scratch, from the truth of your relationship, in language that is yours. By the time we finish it should feel like these are the only right words you two could use, and that no one else could use them.
If you have someone you want to officiate, a best friend, a sibling, the person who has known you longest, I’ll prepare them to hold what we’ve built. They show up knowing what they’re carrying and why. Which is the difference between a ceremony that lands and one that floats pleasantly past everyone in the room.
If you’d like me to officiate, if we connect through this process and that feels right to you, I’m ordained (atheist!) clergy in the State of Vermont and glad to do it.
On the baggage
At some point in this process we’re going to talk about everything you think your wedding has to include. The traditions that are assumed rather than chosen. The family expectations that have somehow become your problem to manage. The things that are in every wedding because they’re in every wedding.
Some of those things will turn out to be genuinely yours, things you actually want, that reflect something true about you and your relationship. And so we will keep them.
Some of them won’t be. And this is where a lot of couples quietly suffer through their own wedding planning; trying to honor everyone else’s idea of what this day should look like while also trying to make it feel like theirs. Those two projects are frequently in conflict, and without a clear set of principles about what you’re actually trying to do, the path of least resistance is usually to let everyone else win. It is one of my goals to imbue you with the confidence you need to make choices that align with your priorities, and defend them as necessary.
Once you’re really clear what the ceremony is actually for, what you’re genuinely trying to build and what laying the first few blocks will look like, what you want the people in that room to witness, what you’re promising each other and why, every subsequent decision becomes easier. You have a reason to say yes to things. You have a reason to say no. I can say from experience that’s real power in a moment when family priorities can blow you overboard if you’re not sure of your own stance.
The sessions
Pre-Marital Myth Mapping We start with your individual charts, not to predict anything, but to give us a framework from which to make visible the relational patterns and inherited scripts each of you is carrying. Who are the figures from the stories you love, the history you know, the relationships you watched growing up, that have by osmosis become your templates for what love looks like? This is where your separate internal mythologies become visible before they start writing your story without your explicit consent.
Commitment Archetype Exploration Through synastry (how two or more astrological charts interact) and a commitment-focused tarot spread, we look at what happens when your stories meet. Where they strengthen each other. Where they’re going to create friction. What the particular shape of this partnership is, named clearly enough that you can work with it consciously. Your charts won’t tell you whether your relationship will work, nothing can do that, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. What they will do is give you language for what you’re committing to building together.
What the Wedding Thinks It Must Be This is the session where we go through everything you think is mandatory and find out how much of it actually is. Cultural traditions, family expectations, the things that are simply assumed until you ask yourself why, we will look at what you’re consciously choosing versus unconsciously inheriting. It is remarkable, consistently, how many things clarify immediately once you’ve purposefully examined them. And how many things you thought were non-negotiable turn out to be entirely optional.
Secular Sacred Ceremony Design We build the ceremony from everything we’ve uncovered. The words, the structure, the specific promises, the symbolic containers that will hold this crossing. No madlibs like templates, no borrowed language, wording and ritual that is entirely yours, and that your guests will be able to feel was authored just for you.
Officiant Preparation We bring your chosen person in. I prepare them to hold what we’ve built; the shape of it, the intention behind each element, what the moment actually requires of them. They don’t need experience. They need to understand how to hold the very important container we’re trusting them with.
Optional: Ceremony Timing Consultation For couples still in early planning, we can look at the astrological landscape of potential dates and find one whose story matches the union you’re building. The sky on your wedding day becomes part of the story of your marriage as much as the literal weather. It costs nothing extra to know what it’s saying.
Package Pricing
This package is offered on a sliding scale of $350-750. Wedding planning is expensive and I want this work to be accessible without being weightless.
When you look at these numbers, notice your reaction.
If $350 feels like a genuine stretch you’re willing to make because this work matters to you, that’s your number.
If $350 feels comfortable and $475 feels like an honest reflection of what you’re receiving, that’s your number.
If you’d pay $475 without really feeling it, and you want the price to match the seriousness with which you’re approaching this, $750 is your number.
I’m not looking for a particular price point. I’m looking for couples who are choosing this intentionally. The number you choose is the first small act of that intention.
If I end up being your officiant of choice, we can settle on a travel fee that makes sense for everyone, but I do not charge for the actual officiating; if we’re connected closely enough for me to be the right person to perform that task, it will be my honor and privilege to be that big a part of the founding of your new family unit.
Individual Sessions
Available separately for couples who want some of this work without the full package, and for couples doing vow renewal or anniversary work:
Ceremony Timing Consultation · Pre-Marital Myth Mapping · Secular Sacred Ceremony Design with your chosen officiant
Each individual session is $150 and runs approximately 90-120 minutes. Can be in person or remote.
A Note on Commitment Without a License
In the United States, many people with disabilities face a devastating choice: marry legally and lose the benefits that make independent life possible, or build a life with someone you love outside the legal recognition that most couples take for granted. This is not a loophole or an edge case. It is a systemic injustice that affects a significant number of people, and it means that some of the couples most deserving of a ceremony that honors the full weight of their commitment have the least access to one.
True Names Workshop offers the complete renewal and wedding packages to couples in this situation at a rate of $150-300 on a sliding scale, because the depth of a commitment has nothing to do with whether the state has chosen to recognize it. If this is your situation, please reach out directly. No documentation or explanation is required beyond your telling me so.
The ceremony your commitment deserves exists regardless of what the law allows you to call it.
Reach out here to start a conversation about working together: