I Now Pronounce

July 17, 2015, my dear friends Mike and Missy got married, and I had the honor of officiating the ceremony.

Things no one tells you about officiating some of your best friends’ weddings:

• After you’ve agreed to do it, and think this is one of the coolest things you’ll ever get to do, you’ll realize the immensity of crafting one of the most important pieces of writing you’ll ever have to come up with, outside of any genre you’ve ever written in before, with the knowledge that this speech and its delivery matters more because it’s not about you, but the people you care about the most.

• In lieu of groomsmen attire you’ll have to make your own choice of what to wear, and nothing will seem quite right.

• Against everyone’s better judgment, the lunch before the ceremony will be Italian, and with the photographer looming, everyone will wear their suits already. Somehow, catastrophe will be avoided.

• Though the bride and groom will both insist on secular, the mother of the groom, one of the nicest women you’ve ever known, will turn a little cutthroat in her insistence there ought to be some mention of God in the ceremony.

• There’s something far more beautiful and breath-taking when the bride is not only one of your closest friend’s partners, but his home. When you can see a warm glow around her as she walks down the aisle, and when you can see in her father none of the societally conditioned misgivings about giving away his daughter, but rather the beam of pride in who she is and what this family might become.

• The groom, not the bride, will be the one to cry a little while reading vows.

• It will bring a tear to your eye at the reception when he sings a new song by an old favorite band, and enough so that you won’t notice when the band flubs it—only the perfection of the moment when he intones, “you’re my girl and I’m your groom.”

• When the bride and groom engage in a light saber duel it will confirm what you’ve come to recognize with age and experience. The best love stories stand far less on tradition than on authenticity and actually having fun.

• There’s a local R2D2.

• He does weddings.

• Perhaps the most important lesson of all, learned not during the ceremony or reception, but when the happy couple braves a hurricane to serve as groomspeople at your wedding the next year, or when they put you up at their house for Christmas the next winter, or when they’re the first friends you see after you relocate to Georgia—

A wedding is a day, and an important one. But for the best people in your life, it’s just one chapter, and there will always be more to come.

Happy anniversary, Peeks.