Hello, I'm David.

Helping you create a wedding that feels like yours

Your wedding should reflect the two of you—your personalities, your relationships, your values, and the life you are beginning together. That belief is at the heart of Our Wedding Guide.

This site was created to help couples move beyond simply following traditions or checking items off a wedding-planning list. You’ll find practical guidance for planning your wedding, managing your guest list and budget, making decisions, and creating the many details that make the celebration your own.

My particular area of experience—and one of the things that makes Our Wedding Guide different—is the wedding ceremony itself.

Why the wedding ceremony matters to me

I have had the privilege of officiating at many weddings. Each one was an opportunity to celebrate a relationship and mark the beginning of a new chapter in the lives of two people. As an officiant, I always tried to understand the couple—their personalities, their story, what mattered to them, and what they wanted their ceremony to say about their relationship.

I soon discovered a problem. Many of the ceremony resources available to couples and officiants offered essentially the same thing: a prescribed ceremony with traditional wording and only a few opportunities for personalization.

I wanted couples to have choices. Over the years, I developed different options for each part of the wedding ceremony, giving couples greater freedom to choose words and ideas that genuinely reflected them. Rather than saying, “This is what you are supposed to say,” I wanted to be able to ask:

“What would you like your ceremony to say about the two of you?”

Much of what you will find in the ceremony section of Our Wedding Guide grew from that experience.

More than a wedding ceremony

Of course, a wedding is more than the words spoken during the ceremony. There are guests to invite, budgets to establish, decisions to make, celebrations to plan, traditions to consider, and hundreds of details that can easily become overwhelming. Our Wedding Guide is here to help with those things, too.

Throughout the site you’ll find practical information, examples, questions to consider, planning tools, and ideas designed to help you make decisions with greater confidence. You don’t have to use every idea you find here. In fact, I hope you won’t. Use what fits. Change what doesn’t. And allow the ideas to spark ideas of your own.

A wedding with meaning

I believe some of the most memorable weddings are not necessarily the largest, most elaborate, or most expensive. They are the weddings that have meaning. They feel authentic to the couple. Guests leave knowing a little more about the two people whose marriage they have just celebrated. And years later, the couple can look back and recognize themselves in the day they created.

That’s what I hope Our Wedding Guide helps you accomplish.

I am a creative person—or at least I like to think I am—and one of the great joys of creating this site is sharing ideas that may awaken creativity and imagination in someone else. Perhaps you will find exactly what you need here. Or perhaps something you read will lead you to an idea that is completely your own. Either way, I will consider that a success.

Thank you for spending some time with Our Wedding Guide. And most of all, congratulations on your upcoming wedding.

David

A little about us

My wife, Shannon, and I have been married for over 50 years. We have three adult children and eight grandchildren. We share a love of spirituality, music, the arts, nature, travel and family, and those are the things that shape how I think about marriage and about weddings.