“When you love someone a lot, they just look like love.”
how to pick a reading for your wedding
One of my favorite aspects of designing a wedding ceremony is identifying and integrating texts. There’s no rule that a couple has to include any readings, but they can enhance the experience of a ceremony by providing a glimpse into a couple’s relationship, their values, and the world they want to live in. It’s also an easy way to manipulate the emotions of participants…er, rather, to calibrate the emotional engagement of a ceremony. Some readings inspire deep reflection, some just make people weep, and some add a welcome dose of levity and even laughter.
Unfortunately, most online sites that recommend readings for weddings rely on a narrow range of cliché texts about love and romance instead of offering tools for discernment. I can’t blame those sites or their contributors — as a society, we generally lack a capacity for reflection because we’re taught that reflection is basically quiet opinionating. I tend to approach reflection with guidance from the great John Dewey. As Carol Rodgers summarizes, for Dewey, there are four criteria for authentic reflection: reflection is a meaning-making process that moves us between and helps us see the connections between different experiences; it is a systematic, rigorous, disciplined way of thinking; it happens best in community and in interaction with others; and it requires attitudes that value holistic growth, including whole-heartedness, directness, open-mindedness, and responsibility.
It’s a little much to expect a couple to dive into Deweyan reflection as part of their preparation for marriage, so I’ve distilled and translated that approach into four criteria for couples to discern texts that will contribute to a ceremony that both reflects them, not just what the Wedding Industrial Complex has made available, and that will function well in a ceremony.
- Criterion 1: The reading is accessible. It’s not too long, it doesn’t invoke too many big ideas or images, and it doesn’t mix metaphors. It relies on words that you understand, and it sounds good when read aloud.
- Criterion 2: The reading is meaningful to you. Whether it’s a text you’ve pored over for decades or something you stumbled across last week, it speaks to you in a powerful way, helps you understand an experience, or motivates you to go deeper with an idea. It evokes feelings and ideas that you want to associate with your wedding.
- Criterion 3: The reading reflects your experiences, identities, and values. It affirms your life and expands your worldview. Its author and original context resonate with your experiences. It projects a world you want to live in.
- Criterion 3.1: The reading reflects your experiences, identities, and values. It comes from a cultural context with which you are affiliated and isn’t borrowed inappropriately or unknowingly from a cultural or religious source to which you have no claim.
- Criterion 4: The reading opens your eyes to a different way of understanding yourselves. It’s both a mirror and a window to see yourselves and your relationship in a new light or from a different angle and to imagine the directions that you could grow together.
With these criteria in mind, here are 11 readings you probably haven’t heard at a wedding. Each offers something new to how we can construct and think about wedding ceremonies. There are thousands more readings that meet these criteria for every couple, and as more couples (and officiants, and wedding planners, and anyone involved in wedding ceremonies) discern and adopt new elements, we’ll all benefit from a richer, more diverse, more authentic, and evolving canon of traditions and practices from which to draw.
“Relationships are scary and complicated…”
Alexandra Rowland
Relationships are scary and complicated ONLY when you start thinking of your partner as some kind of adversary.
You know how to stop being scared of relationships? Remember that it’s got a goddamn buddy system *built in*. That’s all a relationship IS: “Let’s approach life with the buddy system.”
Check on your buddy. Make sure your buddy doesn’t forget their lunch box on the schoolbus. Hold hands with your buddy so you don’t get lost. If your buddy wants to look at the monkey cage, look at the goddamn monkey cage with them. If you are the one looking at the monkey cage, ask your buddy what they want to do next, and when they want to feed the giraffe, help them find a quarter for the little food dispenser. Be a good buddy, and if your buddy isn’t a good one, too, tell the teacher and ask for a new one.
This isn’t fucking rocket science, people.
I stumbled across this on a Reddit thread and kept returning to it for three days. In one brief rant, Rowland brings down the temperature that often rises with commitment and dismantles myths about the complexity of relationships.
I’d recommend this to a couple who want to bring a little bit of levity and candor to their ceremony, who don’t want to hide behind traditional and flowery language. The specific instructions, drawing on childhood friendships and responsibilities, is fodder for a couple who want to highlight mutual care and awareness as they build their marriage.
“Love Poem Without a Drop of Hyperbole In It”
Traci Brimhall
I love you like ladybugs love windowsills, love you
like sperm whales love squid. There’s no depth
I wouldn’t follow you through. I love you like
the pawns in chess love aristocratic horses.
I’ll throw myself in front of a bishop of a queen
for you. Even a sentient castle. My love is crazy
like that. I like that sweet little hothouse mouth
you have. I like to kiss you with tongue, with gusto,
with socks still on. I love you like a vulture loves
the careless deer at the roadside. I want to get
all up in you. I love you like Isis loved Osiris
but her devotion came up a few inches short.
I’d train my breath and learn to read sonar until
I retrieved every lost blood vessel of you. I swear
this love is ungodly, not an ounce of suffering in it.
Like salmon and its upstream itch, I’ll dodge grizzlies
for you. Like hawks and skyscraper rooftops,
I’ll keep coming back. Maddened. A little hopeless.
Embarrassingly in love. And that’s why I’m on
the couch kissing pictures on my phone instead of
calling you in from the kitchen where you are
undoubtedly making dinner too spicy, but when
you hold the spoon to my lips and ask if it’s ready
I’ll say it is, always, but never, there is never enough.
I know — this immediately violates my criterion about too many images and mixing metaphors…but all of these really point to one overriding idea, that their shared love “is never enough.” The poem blends melodrama and cheesy gushing into a sweet text that captures those discrete moments when love unexpectedly swells in our hearts. Despite all the cheese, Brimhall’s tongue-in-cheek voice avoids both cliché and cynicism and delivers a relatable and joyful text.
This is a great selection for a couple who blend humor and sentiment and who want to continually stoke — and celebrate — those moments when all the overwhelming feels rise up.
from Spirit of the Earth
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ,
Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mystical of cosmic forces.
Love is the primal and universal psychic energy.
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.
Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world.
Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
Leave it to a mid-20th century Jesuit paleontologist to connect human love to the evolution of the universe. I’ve reformatted this excerpt to treat this prose paragraph as a litany, both to make it more accessible and to highlight the path to his ultimate insight, that love is “the agent of universal synthesis.” Ok, that might be a phrase that goes over the heads of folx present at the ceremony, but if delivered deliberately all of the phrases leading up to it, the discrete aspects of the transformative and meaning-enhancing power of love, it delivers a profound and powerful message that applies to the couple at the center and to every other person in the room.
I’d recommend this for philosophically inclined couples, especially those who see not just complementarity but unity in science and spirituality.
“Love is a place”
Love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all placesyes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds
For all his sparseness and lack of punctuation, cummings sure packs a lot into his poems. This one is less popular for weddings than “i carry your heart,” but this one makes love and our commitments to each other tangible. It also frames the experience of the ceremony — all places and all worlds are present in the place where a community gathers around a couple, when they say “yes” to each other and to moving through life together.
If the poem resonates with a couple, it might also provide an interesting structure that can be extrapolated for the whole ceremony. The first half might be inspired by the first stanza, framing the gathering and highlighting what exactly is happening, and the second stanza might inspire the rites of marriage and the vows that all boil down to a shared “yes,” for the couple and for everyone around them.
Shir haShirim, Poem 7
tr. Marcia Falk
In sandy earth or deep
In valley soil
I grow, a wildflower thriving
On your love.Narcissus in the brambles,
Brightest flower -
I choose you from all others
For my love.Sweet fruit tree growing wild
Within the thickets -
I blossom in your shade
And taste your love.
Shir haShirim, Poem 28
tr. Marcia Falk
Stamp me in your heart,
Upon your limbs,
Sear my emblem deep
Into your skin.For love is strong as death,
Harsh as the grave.
Its tongues are flames, a fierce
And holy blaze.Endless seas and floods,
Torrents and rivers
Never put out love’s
Infinite fires.Those who think that wealth
Can buy them love
Only play the fool
And meet with scorn.
Among Jewish and Christian scripture, The Song of Songs, or Shir ha’Shirim, is an outlier. Despite its specifically religious context, there’s no mention of God, which prompted centuries of theological gymnastics to justify its place in the canon. Some suggested that it’s a collection of fragments of an ancient wedding ceremony; others that it’s a metaphor for God’s love for the world or for humanity. Marcia Falk bucked that trend and delivered a collection that is distinct in a few important ways. First, she approached it as a collection of discrete love poems, not a single, unified text. Second, she eschewed commitment to literal, word-for-word translation, which most biblical editions adopt. Those translations, like the famous King James version, might be more familiar to modern audiences, but they miss the texture and nuance that are embedded in the original text. Third, she identifies and uplifts the very real possibility that The Song was originally composed, at least in part, by women.
Both of these selections resonate with a ceremony. Poem 7highlights the role of choice in commitment, and Poem 28, whose more traditional translations are already popular for weddings, speaks to the transformative power of love. Though ancient in origin, Falk’s translation highlights their timelessness and near-universal relevance to human relationships.
“And I Have You”
Nikki Giovanni
Rain has drops
Sun has shine
Moon has beams
That makes you mineRivers have banks
Sands for shores
Hearts have heartbeats
That make me yoursNeedles have eyes
Though pins may prick
Elmer has glue
To make things stickWinter has Spring
Stockings feet
Pepper has mint
To make it sweetTeachers have lessons
Soup du jour
Lawyers sue bad folks
Doctors cureAll and all
This much is true
You have me
And I have you
“You Came Too”
Nikki Giovanni
I came to the crowd seeking friends
I came to the crowd seeking love
I came to the crowd for understandingI found you
I came to the crowd to weep
I came to the crowd to laughYou dried my tears
You shared my happinessI went from the crowd seeking you
I went from the crowd seeking me
I went from the crowd foreverYou came, too
Nikki Giovanni is, for many poetry fans, a living legend. As a prominent Black and queer poet, she’s been a trailblazer since she emerged in the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. “And I Have You” demonstrates the distinctness and unity of pairs — a great metaphor for a couple celebrating a couple that will preserve, not dilute, the individuality of each partner. The series of relationships she invokes deftly highlights the beauty of complementarity without diluting each’s unique and autonomous identities. “You Came Too” celebrates the discovery of love in the bigger context of friendships and community. Thinking about it in the context of a wedding, it almost reads like a series of vows.
“One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII”
Pablo Neruda, tr. 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.
All of the sonnets that Neruda wrote for his spouse drip with passion, but this one stands out by distinguishing the couple’s love from other loves and provides a roadmap for a life together: loving without problems or pride, staying so close that your eyes close with each other’s dreams. The words seem to leap off the page (or screen) and offer themselves up as language for vows. In fact, that’s exactly what it did for me and my husband — we included this as a reading in our ceremony and integrated the language of the third stanza into the vows we crafted.
from “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence
Adrienne Rich
An honorable human relationship -
that is, one in which two people
have the right to use the word “love” -
is a process,
delicate, violent,
often terrifying to both persons involved,
a process of refining
the truths they can tell each other.It is important to do this
because it breaks down
human self-delusion and isolation.It is important to do this
because in doing so
we do justice to our own complexity.It is important to do this
because we can count on so few people
to go that hard way with us.
Adrienne Rich is remembered as a feminist theorist and as a prolific and trailblazing author, and for queer folx her words captured the sensuousness of queer love that hadn’t made it to wider audiences before. Her insights blended the political, erotic, and personal, and her words still reverberate…and titillate…and enrage (sorry, couldn’t think of another ‘-ate’). This excerpt from a 1975 essay, reformatted to open up the prose for a public reading, is an original meditation on love that recognizes its dark side as part of the process of loving, a process that worlds toward breaking down “human self-delusion and isolation.”
I’d recommend this reading for queer couples or any couples with feminist conviction — maybe as a preamble to the ceremony to be clear about the goal of the ceremony. It’s not just a chance to get mushy (though that happens); an authentic wedding ceremony does “justice to our own complexity” and makes space to celebrate the “delicate, violent, often terrifying” process that the marriage ceremony crystallizes.
from Cinderella Liberator
Rebecca Solnit
[T]here isn’t actually a most beautiful person in the world, because there are so many kinds of beauty.
Some people love roundness and softness,
and other people love sharp edges and strong muscles.
Some people like thick hair like a lion’s mane,
and other people like thin hair that pours down like an inky waterfall,
and some people love someone so much they forget what they look like.
Some people think the night sky full of stars at midnight is the most beautiful thing imaginable,
some people think it’s a forest in snow,
and some people…Well, there are a lot of people with a lot of ideas about beauty.
And love.
When you love someone a lot,
they just look like love.
There are many things to love about Rebecca Solnit’s novella, Cinderella Liberator. In Solnit’s reimagination of the classic fairy tale, Cinderella is more hero than damsel-in-distress or maiden-in-waiting. She saves others not with great feats — she speaks the truth. Solnit incorporates all the characters from the original — the abusive step-mother, the vain step-sisters, the prince seeking love — but it’s Cinderella who helps them all to see options to live authentically.
Just before this excerpt, Cinderella’s step-sisters are competing to be the most beautiful — one believes the trick is having the highest and most fabulous hair, the other obsesses over the number of ribbons and frills on her dress. As a kind of an inner monologue, Cinderella sidesteps the debate and reflects on the relationship between love and beauty
