Why Wedding Ceremonies And Wedding Officiants Are Being Disappeared

nonreligious wedding ceremony — Photo credit: Vanessa Lain Photo

This is one of my all-time favorite photos. The joy yes, but also I think it illustrates the power of ceremony. How colorful and vibrant and intricate and spectacular and life-affirming ceremony can be. And I love it. So, so much. ⁣

⁣Here’s what the couple wrote me a year later, on their first wedding anniversary: “We couldn’t be happier with the ceremony, it is both of our highlights to our wedding and to our life. We truly appreciate you and feel so blessed to have our paths connected. Thank you for pouring your energy into ceremony. It is a blessing to the world.” ⁣

⁣But when I try to explain to people what officiants in the wedding industry are up against, very few people really understand, or take it in. Here is a recent example example…⁣

⁣Zola is a pretty big name in the wedding industry. Lots of couples utilize Zola to find vendors, resources and information when they are planning their wedding.

⁣Well, I went on Zola yesterday to create a listing for my business. But there was no officiant category, and I couldn’t go forward in the sign up process until I put in a business category. So I sent them an email and asked them what that was about and they simply said, “We do not have a category for officiants yet.”⁣ ⁣That’s it.

From Zola’s Instagram page March 2022. Notice that there is no ceremony or officiant category whatsoever.

Zola began in 2013. That’s eight years ago! And still no officiant category. I promise you this is more common than you might think. Ceremonies and wedding officiants are the bottom feeders in the wedding industry. We are left out of the conversation. Search most wedding blogs and you will find information about every last little thing, literal minutiae, but the conversation about the ceremony and the importance of finding the right wedding officiant will be mostly missing.⁣ Just something to pay attention to.

It’s almost as if ceremonies and officiants have been disappeared from the wedding planning conversation and the wedding industry at large…

Engaged couples, brand new to wedding planning, follow the big name wedding planning websites and wedding influencers lead. They may believe that they are thinking for themselves, but in truth, the industry tells them what to do. They read wedding blogs and listen to wedding podcasts and learn about what’s important, what to prioritize, which vendors to book first, how and where to allocate their wedding budget. If the wedding industry big guns say that something is not important (or deemphasize it or don’t mention it) then it’s going to be an afterthought for engaged couples. And the ceremony usually is.

Case in point: the majority of engaged couples book some if not all of their wedding vendors before choosing their officiant. Couples regularly reach out to me mere weeks before their wedding, assuming that I will be available on short notice, versus being booked out a year or more in advance like their other wedding vendors. (Again, I am not alone in this. It happens to wedding officiants across the board.)

If the industry says to allocate one percent of your budget for your wedding officiant (which The Knot does) and the average wedding budget is $25000 - $40,000 then that’s $250-$400 per wedding for your wedding officiant. Personally, there is no way I could do the quality of work that I do if that was what I was earning. I would have to be transactional, it would have to be a numbers game, I would get burnt out and resentful because I would have to do 200 weddings a year to make ends meet.

Couples often tell me that I am out of their budget. Sometime that is true. But often it’s not true. How do I know this? Because some of those very same couples spend $20,000 for one day for their venue alone. It’s not a budget issue, it’s just that they didn’t create an ample budget for their officiant. Because no one told them that a good officiant was worth investing in.

Okay but why?

One possibility is that if the wedding industry focuses on the emotional substance, the consumer machine holds less sway. In a culture, and frankly, an industry, that is all about stuff, and consumption, and bigger and more and better… a culture in which what you can see visually versus feel emotionally and energetically rules, then ceremony - the heart of the wedding - has no place.

Of course so many people are bored to tears of ceremonies past. We have shit models for what good ceremonies are in this culture. But look to the shamanic ceremonies of the Amazon, to the pipe and tipi and sweat lodge ceremonies of the Native Americans, to the elaborate, sensual, bell ringing, incense burning pujas of the East, to the drumming and dancing and keening and ancestor honoring ceremonies in Africa, and you will see that ceremonies are vital and beautiful and life giving and enriching in ways that quite honestly defy description.

When I first came to Santa Cruz and began officiating in 2015 I was introduced to a popular local wedding magazine called Coastal Wedding. In each issue they’d have a two page ads free spread called “She said yes! Now what?” (How every heteronormative!) The pages had lists and lists, broken up into immediate action steps, then 12 months out, then 6 months, then 3. Rings, photographer, dress, hair, invites, honeymoon, alcohol… and on and on. Marriage license maybe, but no officiant, and no ceremony. Not ask your friend or your aunt, and nothing about finding an officiant.

I wrote them letters and met with one of their reps in person, and I think maybe this has since changed then, but I don’t know for sure since I haven’t opened their magazine in a while. But this kind of thing is emblematic of the wedding industry at large.

At the mercy of a machine.

Engaged couples it is not your fault. Once you get on the wedding planning bandwagon you really are at the mercy of a machine. You get shuffled along an assembly line and it has its own momentum! So it really is up to you to decide what’s important for you, and to question the industry that’s been controlling the wedding planning narrative… until now!