Weddingbee Blog

As far as our ceremony goes, Wolfman and I are not planning anything super religious, so we needed to find someone to marry us. Our first thought was to go to a friend, Joey Tribiani style.

(Photo via Fan Pop / Friends)

We even got to the point of asking one of Wolfman’s old coworkers, but only then I looked at all the rules for someone to be a legal officiant in DC. It was kind of a lot—basically, you have to prove that you are a minister of a real religious group that meets regularly. I know we could have done the friend thing and do the paperwork separately, but I wanted it to be legit at the time of the ceremony.

So I started searching around…it was important that we find someone who would pretty much let us design our own ceremony (type-A, whattup). On some of the DC wedding blogs, I kept seeing the same names over and over—Bill and Joyce from Say I Do Your Way. Really, hardly anyone else was mentioned.

(Photo via Say I Do Your Way)

I contacted them and they got back right away and offered to meet with us. I have been judging vendors a LOT on their responsiveness, so this was already going well. Wolfman and I met with Bill one night after work. Most of our vendor meetings have been somewhat perfunctory—just going through the motions, knowing we were going to pick them based on all the research we’d done before, making sure they weren’t secretly trolls—and I figured this might be the same, but we ended up talking to Bill for about an hour. He asked us all about how we met, our engagement, etc.—it was fun to tell those stories to someone who hadn’t heard them a thousand times already. We talked about what we wanted from our ceremony, and he went over exactly what he would do (or not do, depending on our preference). We signed with him that night—I left feeling like maybe I could trust someone else’s judgement about the ceremony content and not need to write out every single thing. So, even though he was a little more expensive than I wanted (something confirmed by other brides), the fact that he lifted some responsibilities off my plate (even though they were self-inflicted) was worth it.

So—we’re having a ceremony!