1 star
My husband…read moreand I had a small, casual wedding back in 2022-- a handful of family, one photographer, and us, in the woods. We deliberately chose not to be bridezilla/groomzilla about any of it. That wasn't because the details don't matter -- they clearly matter enormously to a lot of couples, and for good reason -- it was just how we chose to approach our particular day. And thank goodness for that, because it turns out even a low-key wedding wasn't low-stakes enough to get through him unscathed.
He arrived 40 minutes late, despite being emailed explicit directions -- location, cross streets, confirmed by him in writing hours earlier. We paid our photographer extra out of pocket to cover the lost time. Mid-conversation about how pretty the trees were, he segued into officiating without telling us he'd started -- we found out afterward that our wedding video is incomplete because he never signaled we were live. My father, my only living parent, and who would have been my only guest at our wedding, was too sick to attend and was counting on that video to see the ceremony. He didn't get to see all of it.
We wrote our own vows in advance, and he showed us that he'd pasted them into his nice-looking book..... and then he read none of them, later explaining he'd left the notebook on a rock behind him -- then pronounced us married anyway. He also offers handfasting on his site, with several named knot options; we corresponded with him in detail about which one we wanted. When it came to it he seemed to not really understand what to do with our handfasting cords- and kind of laid it over our hands, and wrapped it once or twice, and declared it good. There was no knot tied in the "tying the knot" bit. For some couples, and for some belief systems, that knot is the actual marriage act, not a nice extra -- so this isn't a small thing to skip.
Then there was the paperwork, which was explicitly part of his service. Our marriage certificate went to the wrong county, delaying our certified copy by two weeks and jeopardizing my window to get on my husband's health insurance -- a real cost, not a hypothetical one. When we raised it, he told us we must have submitted it ourselves, despite us handing him a pre-addressed envelope for the correct county. For his version to be true, he'd have had to actively create a different envelope himself. He never once considered the possibility that any part of this was on him.
We've decided as a couple to laugh at the absurdity of the incompetence of our "official" who brags so much about himself on his website, and we celebrate having a photographer who took our handfasting cords after the ceremony, looked us in the eyes and said "We're gonna fix this", and took us to a beautiful meadow, where she stood at the edge of the meadow to give us privacy while still getting pictures of us reading our vows to each other. The knot was truly tied, physically and emotionally, and we felt respected by the person celebrating with us. It turned out to be one of the most beautiful parts of our wedding, but it wasn't part of the official recorded ceremony.
We're genuinely fine, and rolling our eyes about it now... But if you're a couple who's spent months or years planning a ceremony that means everything to you, I don't think "roll with it" would be an option, and I'd hate for anyone to find that out the hard way. Proceed with real caution.