Houston Southard

melissa and adam’s wedding ceremony

PROCESSIONAL

We’re going to get started and before we do, I’d like to remind everyone this is a ringtone free ceremony. I can’t in good conscience tell you to turn your phones off because I don’t want everyone panicking about being off the grid, but Melissa and Adam paid a lot to make this happen, so if you could, text and snap with discretion. After we’re done, we’ll have an hour for cocktails while we ready the reception.

INTRODUCTION

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “flibbertigibbet” as a silly and excessively talkative person. I just thought you might find that interesting.

People say marriage has become too untraditional. They say we’re taking something sacred and treating it like a joke. They say, “Houston, you’re a flibbertigibbet. I didn’t ask for a novel.” We can all relate to fear of change, but how often do we stop and think about what we mean when we’re pining and that ethereal ‘tradition?’

Marriage is only around because when wild humans stayed paired up after getting it on, their mutual rearing gave kin a better chance of living long enough to find another wild human to get it on with. Wild Mom knew not to eat these berries, Wild Dad knew not to hunt predators alone. Evolution fine-tuned us. Evolution self-selected us to favor union. This tradition we see was born of survival.

When we traded the forest for the farm, the function of marriage was about alliance and land. It was about a father handing over his daughter with the words, ‘I pledge you for the purpose of producing legitimate offspring.’ Men were free to satisfy urges while their women stayed home to bake bread and make babies, and if they didn’t, a man could simply take his woman back to the father as I would an appliance to Home Depot and say, “This baby bread multitool is broken. I’ll take my business to Lowe’s good sir, thank you very much.” Families bartered their kids like they traded furs. This was tradition.

When the Roman Catholics finally got their hands on marriage in the 1500s, and then later decided it was a sacrament and only legally recognized when blessed by a priest, it was a kind of golden ticket for women as far as the marriage experience went. The church preached monogamy, a pretty good thing for our naturally jealous temperaments. They preached against abandoning the marriage, another good thing for the hit-and-runners who were convinced the grass was always greener. And they preached for mutual respect. These were all good rules, gender norms notwithstanding, and they were easy ones to follow when you got told breaking them meant you wouldn’t get to play with the cool Catholics in the afterlife. This became tradition.

Marriage didn’t start to resemble the romantic coupling we know it as today until a few hundred years ago, an evolution from this once-pragmatic exchange that again manifested as a golden ticket for women. Sure, the church had given husbands a divine shock collar, but women were still serving them, still surrendering their literal identities to a man’s name. Throwing love in flipped the power around, because now men, these romantic princes, sought to serve the women they loved. This became tradition.

More recently, though, women won the right to vote, then together men and women voted that states couldn’t outlaw interracial marriage or birth control, and then, maybe just a tad behind schedule, men and women finally wrote in that if you sexually force yourself onto a woman, even if she’s your wife, that’s still rape, because woman aren’t, and never were, things, even if the law didn’t reflect that until after I was born. Today, it’s cooler than ever for women to run the money while men take the kitchen, or for them to tag in and out equally, and that about catches us up to today. Still working on that wage gap, but progress is progress. Today, marriage is less than ever about power, and more and more about equality.

The point I’m trying to make is that, obviously, tradition is paradoxically untraditional. When someone says marriage has become untraditional, I wonder which gender-imbalanced era they’re referring to.

Everything has a history, and marriage’s has taught us lessons about humanity that allow it to be what it is today: An act in equality. A bonding of two equal lives, in emotion, finances, and #goals. This has become tradition. But even though it’s modern, that doesn’t mean it’s mended.

The problem we face now is that the expectation for marriage has grown out of its pot. Our partner not only has to be our physical, emotional, intellectual, and financial equal, but more. We look for the ideal partner. A super partner.

And with technology and social media giving us the burden to see how great others paint their relationships, we learn to expect what we think is a given.

But we know real relationships aren’t instagram perfect. We know we can’t expect anyone to be our everything.

Think about it. Pre-marriage, wandering around as independent humans, we never expect one person to be our catch-all.

We maybe have a friend who gives us emotional support here, a colleague who’s intellectually-stimulating there, and a parent with financial advice over here. Today, marriage is harder than ever and why so many potentially good marriages fail is because we let our expectations let us down, because where there used to be a village to fulfill our basket of needs, now we expect one person to, and when they can’t we let them let us down.

It’s far from fair because we’re all far from perfect, and these expectations encourage us to place blame when our partner doesn’t take the high road rather than focusing on how rarely we take it ourselves.

I can tell I’ve built some tension, and I think it’s right where it needs to be because for all rules there are always exceptions. There are always those few who fall through the cracks and instinctively accept before they instinctively blame. There are always those few who somehow juggle being structured and goal-oriented with being carefree and kind. Some of that is grit, and some of it is a product of the environment we put ourselves in.

There’s no doubt we’re a selfish species, but part of what’s helped us survive is our ability to toggle between that selfishness and the opposing selflessness. That feeling we get when chearing alongside thousands of others at Wrigley Field, when a company of soldiers marches together in drill, when we’re at a concert moving in unison to the same beat, it triggers a hive switch in our head that taps into the sense that we are a unified tribe. It floods our brains with oxytocin and allows us to be more kind and trusting when normally our instinct is to judge, to blame, to punish.

A lot of research has shown that the ideal beat to induce this synchrony, this feeling of being part of a whole, is around 130 beats per minute. I like to call it the cohesion clap. It’s a beat often used in Electronic Dance Music, which is an awesome shared passtime of Melissa and Adam’s because it unintentionally serves as empathy therapy. They’ll attend these intense music festivals, moving together for hours at a time with countless strangers, and they come out these love-filled individuals, forgetting themselves in place of the collective. These two already-super-chill humans charge themselves up with the best parts of what makes us us, and it’s part of what helps each of them charge the other, day after day.

Don’t get me wrong. They’re far from perfect. What’s different is, they know it about themselves as much as they do about the other, and it’s what’ll let their marriage take strong root. Their superhuman ability to toggle lets them know to be understanding when others would be harsh. They wear this expression of humanity on their sleeves and it allows them to be realistic and idealistic at the same time, to be concerned with themselves at the same time they appreciate the whole earth and all the people on it. It’s the recipe so few can align to achieve a good partnership.

Because that’s what these romantic, equal unions are supposed to be. Partnerships. You share the load. You support each other. Thick and thin, right? We shouldn’t want a completely rainbow and butterflied marriage because it’s partially the trials that make the good times so good.

These two embody that perfect balance, within and without.

READING

And because I’m only good with the provocative, Melissa and Adam have chosen Adam’s niece, Amelia, to read a poem that put a more amiable spin on the balance I’m talking about. Amelia?

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Thanks Amelia.

EXCHANGE OF VOWS

So now that the ranting is over, you’re about to make promises to each other that you intend to keep. You’re going to vow to take care of each other, to stand up for one another, and find happiness in the other. And there's a simple premise to each of these promises: you're vowing to be there. You’re teaming up and saying to the other, “Every experience I’ll have, I want you to be a part of it.”

You fell in love by chance, but you're here today because you’re making a choice. You’re both choosing each other. You’ve chosen to be with someone who enhances you, who makes you think, makes you smile. Someone who is the sun and water to your thirsty roots. Someone who balances you. You’ve made those choices for years and today you’re saying, yep, I’m going to continue to make this choice from here on out. To really drive this home, you’ve both prepared vows to read each other and chosen us as witnesses. Melissa, would you like to start?

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Now, Adam, if you’d read your vows to Melissa.

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EXCHANGE OF RINGS

Now, you’ve both chosen to wear rings as a reminder of these vows you’ve made to each other. You’ve chosen to wear these physical symbols of your love and commitment, because just like these rings, your love is endless, and just like these rings, your commitment is sturdy.

We like to use rings as a symbol of love because the circular band has no visible beginning or end, the space inside thought of as a metaphorical gateway into your futures together.

But these rings did have a beginning. They were once each just a few ounces of raw metal harvested from the earth, heated and shaped by some smith or another, and then given value according to the market, or, in the case of the engagement ring, according to a mining company’s 90-year-old marketing scheme. Either way, that’s not value, that’s an artifact of merchantry.

Their real value is divined in this moment, because the promises you’ve made give these bands their power, because you name them as pieces of yourself that you give to the other, and as we know, naming something, giving it identity, is one of the most powerful things we can do.

Now, you're going to place these bands on each other’s left ring fingers. We do this as part of the tradition that doesn’t need to die, because those long-ago Romans, they thought the strongest link to the heart was through a vein that ended at the left ring finger.

So Adam, if you’d take the ring from Brooks, and repeat after me.

Melissa, I give you this ring…

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As I give to you all that I am…

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And accept from you all that you are…

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Adam, you may now place Melissa’s gateway to the future on her Roman heartfinger.

And now Melissa, if you’d take the ring from Diane, and repeat after me.

Adam, I give you this ring…

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As I give to you all that I am…

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And accept from you all that you are…

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Melissa, you may now place Adam’s gateway to the future on his Roman heartfinger.

PLANTING CEREMONY/CLOSING REMARKS

Now before I shout this couple’s new name for all the earth to hear, Melissa and Adam have chosen to root their marriage, right here in this moment, by planting a money tree together. They do this to remind themselves that all roots connect to others and that we are all a part of one great big whole, a whole that wishes to survive and thrive, to tap into their oneness with the world, and their oneness with each other.

As witnesses, we have the privilege to galvanize this ritual by helping to induce the synchrony of their marriage’s roots. We're going to power this union using the cohesion clap. Again, it’s a clap in unison at 130 beats per minute, so when I start clapping, just follow along. We’ll start and finish as they do. Just let yourself become part of the whole so we can help bond these roots right.

PRONOUNCEMENT OF MARRIAGE/KISS

Melissa and Adam. Family and friends. Coheart. Anyone tagging along for the open bar. By the power vested in me by the American Marriage Ministry, I pronounce you wife and husband. You may now kiss each other.

And now, for the very first time, I’m tickled to present to you… Mr. Adam Kelly and Mrs. Melissa Ginder-Kelly.

RECESSIONAL