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Commitment Ceremony
Jul. 4th, 2015 05:59 pmDanae and I had a formal commitment ceremony yesterday!
I haven't actually written about this yet for a couple reasons. We wanted it to be a small event, primarily for people who've known both of us in a significant way. I didn't want people who weren't invited to feel at all left out. We want to have a larger, more professional, and more inclusive event later on, but timing and, perhaps more importantly, finances prevented that. Wedding-like events can be expensive!
And because I'm leaving for Syracuse, New York in a month's time, organizing something really big for the Summer would also not have been doable in the time frame we had after deciding we wanted to do this. Our little twenty-fivish person event was about as big as we felt we could handle right now.
We've spent the last couple of months, off and on, working on the ceremony. We essentially wrote it ourselves from scratch, incorporating elements of various traditions that were meaningful to us or connected to our cultural backgrounds, as well as working with the limitations imposed by logitics. (We're going to have the ceremony at 6:30 and then have dinner! Oh, we can't pick food up later than 6 from the caterer? Well, I guess we're doing dinner first!) This has been occupying a large part of my attention for the past while, increasingly so as the date of the event approached.
Everything went beautifully. There were, inevitably, minor snags. We forgot the plates at the condo when we left, for instance. Our friend Sneha saved the day by going out and buying some while dinner was being set up. But I can hardly think of anything else that went wrong.
Independance and considered choice are powerful themes in the conception Danae and I have of relationships. Many of the choices we made in designing our ceremony reflected that. I'm going to write about particular bits of the ceremony in a somewhat disconnected way because I feel a need to record them before they're out of my head. I'm sorry if they lose something for want of context. Please feel free to ask about anything you find interesting or confusing. I loved the ceremony and would enjoy talking about it, plus questions often bring up forgotten or overlooked details. We don't have a video recording of the ceremony, which I feel torn about. I think I really would have liked one, but there's also beauty in the ephemeral nature of the unrecorded. It makes the event feel a little more traditional, connected to so many such events in the past that happened before the ability to record them.
Maybe I'll begin with the text of the program we gave to attendees. That will give you a good sense of how things happened and where the bits I'm going to write about fit in.
More behind ( the cut. )
I haven't actually written about this yet for a couple reasons. We wanted it to be a small event, primarily for people who've known both of us in a significant way. I didn't want people who weren't invited to feel at all left out. We want to have a larger, more professional, and more inclusive event later on, but timing and, perhaps more importantly, finances prevented that. Wedding-like events can be expensive!
And because I'm leaving for Syracuse, New York in a month's time, organizing something really big for the Summer would also not have been doable in the time frame we had after deciding we wanted to do this. Our little twenty-fivish person event was about as big as we felt we could handle right now.
We've spent the last couple of months, off and on, working on the ceremony. We essentially wrote it ourselves from scratch, incorporating elements of various traditions that were meaningful to us or connected to our cultural backgrounds, as well as working with the limitations imposed by logitics. (We're going to have the ceremony at 6:30 and then have dinner! Oh, we can't pick food up later than 6 from the caterer? Well, I guess we're doing dinner first!) This has been occupying a large part of my attention for the past while, increasingly so as the date of the event approached.
Everything went beautifully. There were, inevitably, minor snags. We forgot the plates at the condo when we left, for instance. Our friend Sneha saved the day by going out and buying some while dinner was being set up. But I can hardly think of anything else that went wrong.
Independance and considered choice are powerful themes in the conception Danae and I have of relationships. Many of the choices we made in designing our ceremony reflected that. I'm going to write about particular bits of the ceremony in a somewhat disconnected way because I feel a need to record them before they're out of my head. I'm sorry if they lose something for want of context. Please feel free to ask about anything you find interesting or confusing. I loved the ceremony and would enjoy talking about it, plus questions often bring up forgotten or overlooked details. We don't have a video recording of the ceremony, which I feel torn about. I think I really would have liked one, but there's also beauty in the ephemeral nature of the unrecorded. It makes the event feel a little more traditional, connected to so many such events in the past that happened before the ability to record them.
Maybe I'll begin with the text of the program we gave to attendees. That will give you a good sense of how things happened and where the bits I'm going to write about fit in.
More behind ( the cut. )
