My fiancee and I are planning our wedding (T-minus 7 weeks, yikes), and we are now in the “find an officiant, get the license” stage. We are living in the Boston area, but we are getting married in Washington DC. It will be a very small ceremony (<15 people), and we aren’t picky about who we get to marry us. Basically, they just need to be a licensed officiant who will behave professionally and not screw up the marriage certificate or anything.
A quick Google search shows that there are a bunch of people who are basically professional licensed officiants. We would love some advice on selecting an officiant, as we’ve never done this before and meeting a bunch of candidates in person is impractical.
Got married in July, and I never met my officiant before our wedding. It went smashingly well. Our county had a list of civil officiants online, from which we picked a name to call. She was an older judge and had done marriages many times before. We discussed the date/time/venue location, she took down our names, emailed us a PDF of the ceremony, and reminded us to bring the license & 2 witnesses with us. We read the PDF to make sure it didn’t contain any “honor or obey” clauses. And that was it… took less than an hour to arrange, after all was said and done.
Ditto this. My daughter just got married this past weekend, and they had her fiance’s grandmother do it. Having her do it made it all the more meaningful. Getting an online ordination is easy, and that usually satisfies the requirements.
