Embarking on the journey of planning your wedding ceremony is an exciting time filled with dreams, visions, and endless possibilities. However, amidst the whirlwind of decisions and logistics, it’s crucial not to lose sight of what truly matters – the connection between you and your partner. As a celebrant deeply passionate about creating meaningful wedding experiences, Celebrant Kate firmly believes that wedding planning can be a beautiful opportunity to strengthen the bond with your beloved. In this article, I will guide you through insightful tips and heartwarming strategies that will help you infuse your wedding planning process with togetherness, ensuring that your ceremony becomes a true reflection of your love and unity in “Connecting With Your Partner While Planning Your Wedding Ceremony.”

Images: Love and Other Photography

Wedding planning is an area of life that’s ripe for a whole lot of stereotyped gender roles to come creeping in, for easily getting lost in other people’s expectations and experiencing a whole lot of overwhelm! Queue that disconnected feeling!! But it doesn’t have to be like that! In fact with some conscious conversations, perfect for a date night, it can be a time of absolute connected togetherness!! You’re getting married! You’re a team! You arrived at wedding planning together!! So here are a few ways to keep that connected feeling as you navigate creating your wedding day!

Image: Courtney Laura Photography

As a celebrant, I find our ceremony planning time together is a great time for my couples to relax together, ground into what’s important to them and have a really connected experience creating their ceremony. Through a series of video sessions and our ceremony planning chats, I ask you a whole lot of questions to help you start thinking about your people, your love, your vows, your story, and how you’d like your ceremony to feel. Throughout your wedding planning, making some time together to chat about these things will feel great in that moment and even better when you arrive at your wedding day as loved up as ever, relaxed, and excited for this awesome thing you’re doing – getting married.

Image: Smith + Archer

So amongst those chats, you’re having about logistics and budgets schedule in some couch time, date nights, kitchen chats, coffee mornings, or whatever you do to relax together, to talk about these four things…

Your Vibe

Some of the first questions I ask my couples is what they’ve liked or disliked about wedding ceremonies, what they want to experience and feel during their ceremony, and what they want their guests to experience and feel too. It gives me a really good insight into what they value about their ceremony and I make sure that what we create hits the vibe they’re looking for! Getting clear on what’s important to you both is also helpful when there’s a decision to be made, together you can come back to what you value, and check in with that. Ask yourself does this align with what I really value about my wedding day and what’s truly important to us. Whatever decision you’re making will suddenly become very clear to you.

Your People

Your ceremony welcome is when I’ll be getting everyone feeling connected to each other, to you and to your celebration. It lets the people you’ve gathered know how much they mean to you and makes them feel appreciated and special. Your ‘welcome’ sets the vibe for your whole celebration, so it’s really important that we get everyone feeling relaxed, loved up and ready to celebrate with you! During our ceremony planning chats we’ll talk about who your people are, how much they mean to you, how they’ve supported you, and what you love about them being in your life. It’s a really special time together to reflect on your community (whether it’s 2 or 200) and express all the gratitude for them being in your lives. It’s also a lovely reminder of how much you are loved and how much you love your people.

Your Story

Your story is the part of your ceremony where we celebrate your relationship, what’s important to you, what you love about each other, how you make the most of your differences and everything and anything that’s relevant to you! Talking about this together in our ceremony planning chats is a pretty special experience, because it’s not every day that we take the time to reflect, share stories and put words to the things we really value about our relationship. As we’re chatting I can’t help but highlight all the wonderfulness in the things you’re telling me. I think that’s why when we finish those ceremony planning chats I often have couples describe the whole experience as ‘grounding’, ‘exciting’, and they say things like ‘it’s reminded us why we’re doing this.’

Your Vows

Writing your vows can feel daunting, it’s not something you have to do every day, it involves public speaking and it’s a once in a lifetime moment!  Whether you want to write your vows separately and share them with each other for the first time during your ceremony, or you want to collaborate together to write your vows, you can definitely bring a whole lot of togetherness to this part of wedding planning!! I’ve created a whole lot of vow writing resources including ‘The Vow Date’! This is an online session you can do together where I guide you through different vow formats, different approaches to writing and sharing them, thought starter questions, and examples too. Imagine sitting on the couch together with your favourite drink and talking about your future together, chatting about what you want to promise to each other and envisaging how your relationship will grow and support you through all that lies ahead! That is a whole lot of togetherness!!

Image: Sarah Godenzi Photography

I truly believe that the planning of your wedding should be just as enjoyable as the actual day itself! I once had a couple describe the ceremony planning process as ‘positive therapy.’ For me to write a ceremony that is authentically you I need to get to know you, and as a result of all my questions you have some amazing conversations, all the loved up connected feels and a ceremony that you LOVE!

Image: Kyra Boyer Photography

About Celebrant Kate: I don’t believe in doing anything because that’s the way it’s always been done, or because someone somewhere said that’s what you ‘should’ do. I became a celebrant to inspire couples to see what’s possible, to help them find their story, and to create a ceremony that is true to who they are and what’s important to them. I really see it as an honour and a privilege to be part of such an important celebration and to help make memorable moments happen. I love what I do and I do it because I genuinely want you to have the most amazing ceremony ever!

Header Image: Smith + Archer