What’s different about becoming a celebrant?

Becoming a celebrant has been quite a revealing development for me. After so many years working in large corporate organisations, spending time and energy trying to work out how to protect a business’s reputation, the chance to use my creativity for something more positive is refreshing. Instead of telling a story for a company, I now get to tell real people’s stories and it is always a good news story.

The greatest change is the freedom to use more poetic and romantic language. It is not often that you get get to paint such delightful pictures when writing a chairman’s statement for an Annual General Meeting.

It is this new opportunity to help create the romantic stories at the heart of other people’s happiness that I am finding the most rewarding. A celebrant is in a unique position. Unfettered by centuries-long traditions, language and structures, a celebrant can draw upon inspiration from many sources to build a narrative specific to the couple they are working with to deliver a truly personal and relatable story the captures the best of all involved.

As couples think about their own Hollywood rom-com wedding or perhaps an alternative steam punk inspired union, everything is planned for perfection. So why have the same words as everyone else? Use a celebrant to script the perfect lines and for the first time in your life be sure that you are going to be using the right words, at the right time, for the best effect - now that’s magic.