I simply believe that getting married matters

Josh Withers at Steph & Kieran's ceremony at Uluru, photographed by Heart and Colour with The Elopement Collective
Me at Steph & Kieran's ceremony at Uluru, photographed by Heart and Colour with The Elopement Collective

I'm writing my new book, The Rebels Guide to Getting Married, in public and on this blog. Subscribe for free to follow along and comment with any ideas!

This book you are reading is a culmination of my wedding career, counselling and mentoring couples on creating intentional weddings.

What is this book about?

I believe that your entire life is a form of self-expression and you exist as a creative being in a creative universe. You are a work of art.

So from this point forward, at least in this book, you are not allowed to say you’re not creative, because at the very heart of your being is creativity. And now you, the creative, the artist, are getting married.

There are two kinds of weddings you can have, the everyone wedding, or the intentional wedding. Here’s how to tell the difference.

Talk to any stranger, colleague, friend, or family member, and ask them what a wedding is. What happens at a wedding, what are the dealbreakers, what are the must-have inclusions, and you’ll start to see some patterns. There’s an awfully large number of people that we’re sharing oxygen with that believe that a wedding should be a certain way. Now we need to remember that the perceptions and experiences of others are vastly different from our own, but somehow after seeking everyone’s opinion it’s very easy to end up with a normal, homogenised, non-intentional, non-rebellious wedding.

An intentional wedding acknowledges and honours all of those opinions, and traditions, “the way it should be”. But it takes none of them at face value. The intentional wedding, and the couple being married within it, have asked the big questions and walked away with more questions than answers.

Regardless of where it is today, and how it plays out on the day, the intentional wedding is filled to the brim with purpose and meaning, happiness and joy, and it costs as little and as much as it costs, no more and no less.

You could consider this the path to a budget wedding and the truth is that money doesn’t control or drive the intentional wedding, intent does, but the intentional wedding should not bankrupt you or send you into debt.

The intentional wedding might upset friends and family, but when they are in the middle of it, they are going to love the wedding, because at your marital celebration the biggest thing happening is the two of you proclaiming to your tribe “this is who we are, and when people like us get married, we do it like this!”

An intentional wedding is a really good wedding.

💡
Think back over the weddings you’ve attended in the past, have any of them been intentional weddings?
Josh Withers

Josh Withers

The original rebel, husband, father, nerd and also a marriage celebrant for the world's most adventurous couple getting married today.
Baja California Sur, Mexico