Invites to Wedding Insights Blog

#1 — You must keep dating By the time your wedding rolls around, you will have a pile of memories to build on.  A good Officiant will draw from those memories you’ve shared and set them out as a gift to your guests for them to draw on.  Over time, this pool of memories gets used and worn.  You must keep replacing these memories by making new ones.  Dating gave you the way to make memories.  Remember the date you went on that led to the first kiss? The first time you made love? The time you left each other… Read More »

Commandment #2  Don’t pick your battles, pick the way you’ll work through them. When you live with someone, you learn what not to talk about and what subjects are safe to bring up. Don’t talk about sex with your parents, keep away from politics with your mother’s brother. If you comment to your best friend that she was late again for your lunch meeting, she might give you the cold shoulder for a week or so. Not the best communicator, is she? Or IS she? When you live with anyone for a long period of time, disagreements are bound to… Read More »

 Create A Unique Relationship Contest So everyone loves to win a contest. This week’s Commandment #5 is Thou shalt create a unique relationship contest. The #5 Commandment as a contest is simple: See who can surprise the other with unexpected gifts the most. You and yours get to compete day after day after day for the fun of it! Showing up for this contest can make your marriage 100’s of times more alive and supportive. When I was in school, a mentor who was easily 25 years older than his wife told me about the relationship contest he and his… Read More »

Your Relationship Partnership Developing a relationship partnership is Commandment #10. Expand your understanding of what a relationship and your partnership in marriage is. This video by Dhar Mann on Facebook says it all. This marks the end of the 10-part series on relationships I’ve been doing weekly. To see the other nine commandments, go to the Blog Link above, or click here. Please leave a comment below what your favorite relationship commandment is.  Love is why we’re here. To learn and grow and enjoy. This happens when we’re in a relationship partnership between equals, not one better than the other.… Read More »

Listen to the blog: Relationship Commandment #9 —  Let Your Name Signify Your Goals How many of you traveled with your family as a kid? If you did your parents probably came quipped with name games or word games to keep you and your siblings and fur babies (hahaha) occupied between launch pad and destination. My folks and I loved name games. I vaguely remember a game about the last letter in a word meant you had to find a word that started with that letter. Matrix was a bingo, yahoo I win word most of the time. (I still… Read More »

I love leading wedding rehearsals. One reason is I always encourage the couple to practice their first kiss as a married couple. Having them practice kissing can help them relax – even conservative couples. After all, every one of us at the rehearsal knows they’ve done it a million times already. So let’s do it officially for the I DO! Personal History and Maybe some TMI As a total aside, when I was a teenager, I used to call myself a kissing addict because that’s what I wanted to do with my boyfriends all the time. Nothing else, honestly, just… Read More »

Who in the world would prefer conditional love over unconditional love? Yet most of us live by conditional love and think what we’re experiencing is unconditional love. Do you know what the definition of conditional love is? Care to take a poke at it? It’s giving approval and support to someone in exchange for prescribed behavior. In other words, if you say, do or act the way I want you to, I’ll love you. Here’s how you may have experienced conditional love growing up: “You’ve made me very upset.” “You make me so happy.” “When you do ______ you make me… Read More »

Most couples get married as they’re building their career. The kids are little. Bodies are changing. So you can get into a habit of passing each other by and not REALLY know what’s going on with each other. So Commandment  #4 is about setting up a weekly relationship check in with each other. Somewhat like dating, this is a time together that you guard with your life. It could be a ½ hour time period before you go to bed on a Friday night. Or over coffee on Sunday morning. There’s 4 questions to ask of each other What was the… Read More »

Lately I’ve been thinking about some of the over 5,000 big and small weddings either  my husband, Ken, or I officiated during the nine years we lived on Maui. (October, 1991 to March, 2000) Yes, we have stories about the gorgeous, unusual sites to the most interesting things that happened. Friends suggest we should write a book. Maybe some day. The Best Part But the best part of these weddings was the couples we got to know and the intimacy established between them and us. We knew their stories, often the high and some of the low moments.  These special… Read More »