Host: How can we be sure that our wedding ceremony is personal and about us?

Rev. Bill Cochran: Make sure you find an officiant who is really interested in getting to know you. Someone who is interested in your story like how you met? Who was it that introduced you? Or what was that you found in each other that instantly attracted you to each other? Those types of things. If an officiant is interested in that and invites you to give a lot of that input and promises to put it in your ceremony then you are assured of course that, that's going to be a very important part of it.

But also it's good for people to know that the officiant at least knows you, appreciates you and really honors you. One thing I like to do is ask the bride and groom separately to sit down and write a few paragraphs about their relationship, like how they met and finally how they got engaged and generally from the women I get sometimes ten or twelve pages and from the guys I get a paragraph. It's not often it happens that way, but what happens is I get their perspectives on the whole relationship and most of the time it's pretty close to the same story, but has different insights and that gives me as an officiant just some natural human interactions that I can work with, that gives the guest at the wedding something to chuckle about because they know you well and they know what's being going on with you or occasionally grandma will come up and say, I didn't know that about them. Well it helps others who are there to get to know you better and to appreciate you better as a married couple.