Wedding Vows & Ceremony Discussions


How many readings would you say is appropriate? Most of the ones I'm looking at are short, but should I still keep it down to one or two, or could I squeak an extra one in? I don't want the ceremony to run more than half an hour at the outside, but the base ceremony scripts our officiant gave us are more like 15 minutes, and there are some really beautiful verses out there making me all weepy.

Where are the best spots in the ceremony order to add readings? What are your thoughts on having them together vs. scattering them throughout?

I'm also super curious which readings you guys have used or will use.
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Re: Readings?

  • IMO two is a good maximum. You'll start to lose people's attention if you put in too many. We went to a friend's wedding where there were at least four singers because the bride knows a lot of musically-inclined people and didn't know where to draw the line.

    We actually didn't have any readings because we had two songs instead and they tend to be a little longer than a reading.
  • I think you need to consider how long it would take to read them and if there are multiple readers. More readers mean more time getting up, sitting down, finding the podium, taking the mic, stepping down, trading places...KWIM? 

    We had two readers and two readings: a sonnet and a bible reading. Each reading was about 1-2 minutes so the whole thing took 2-4 minutes, which was NBD. 

  • I think 2-3 readings at the most, any more and it starts to become overkill.

    We had two readings (one bible and one poem) that only lasted a couple minutes and I think that worked well.
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