Dread Pirate Jimbo and I got married last August by a very nice woman we looked up in the Yellow Pages (Jim is a very lapsed Catholic and I am a Pantheistic Neo-Christian, so we both decided very early on that a church wedding wasn’t in the cards for us). We met her twice before the ceremony, we wrote our own vows based on what is required by the Province of Alberta, they took about 5 minutes, and that was that.
If I had been going through the crap with a minister that you were going through before the wedding, lissa, there would have been words exchanged that you really shouldn’t oughta say to a minister. The last thing you need while going through all the stress of preparing to get married is fighting with your minister, and dammit, they should know that. You can get back at them easily enough by having a long, successful marriage, though.
I’ve been to some weddings before where the sermon was all about how the couple would be happy forever if they just followed strict gender roles. Bleah!