your UNFORGETTABLE WEDDING

      THIS BOOK IS A COMPENDIUM OF WEDDINGS from the heart. It is designed especially for you if you desire above all to have a wedding that touches your heart and changes your life, a wedding you'll feel the profoundest sense of joy in recalling, long after the confetti and rose petals have been swept from the driveway.

      A wedding from the heart is a ceremony that springs from your own deep feelings and arouses such feelings in all those who witness it. It is a sacred chalice for your love, an elegant frame for the portrait of you and your beloved as you are united by high hopes, profound emotion, and a desire to honor your relationship by expressing it as a commitment made in the presence of family and friends.

      Not necessarily traditional, but more than a mere formality, a wedding from the heart is a truly emotional experience, one borne up on a flood of feeling rather than homogenized through the heavyhanded application of familiar conventions. It has as its hallmark the beliefs that your relationship is a treasure and that your wedding day will be one of the most precious in your life. In creating a wedding from the heart, you recognize not only that your wedding is a symbol of your love, but also that it can be a deeply moving experience for everyone involved, even for you as you plan and organize it.

      More than a major social event, a heartful wedding is more about what you say, do, and feel than what you wear or how many courses you serve at the reception dinner. It's about love and not about impressing people; it's about your love—what it means to you, where you want it to take you, and what hopes you have for it.

      This isn't to say that your beautiful dress and the exquisite flowers aren't important, nor that you shouldn't have the traditional photo of you and your new spouse feeding each other a piece of wedding cake. What it does mean is that you will include these things only because they have meaning for you, because they genuinely reflect what you both feel, because they speak to your heart.

      A ceremony is a special event that contains formal or ritualized components and which has as the purpose the setting apart and elevating of a particular person or event in our consciousness. We have ceremonies to acknowledge personal achievement, to celebrate national victories and heroes, even to mark our sorrows and losses; but of all our traditional ceremonies, the wedding is the sweetest, because it is a celebration of love. It celebrates possibilities; its attitude is joy; its mood is hope.

      But, unfortunately, for all too many of us the beautiful possibilities of the marriage ceremony become gradually eclipsed by the demands of organizing the wedding itself. The endless phone calls, decisions, arrangements, and expenses involved in planning such an event can leave a bride and groom feeling like the frazzled producers of an off-Broadway musical about love and romance instead of participants in a sacred ceremony that celebrates the power of love and the meaning of their particular relationship.

      Indeed, weddings can get so bogged down in the endless exigencies of organizing and planning that the experience itself, when it finally occurs, can seem as though it has very little to do with the love that inspired it in the first place. You can get so involved with the rehearsal dinner, the wedding bouquet, and the band at the reception that you forget that the most important part of the wedding is the ceremony itself—the words that are spoken, the promises you make to one another, the bond you create as you enter into marriage.

      Everyone wants their wedding to be beautiful, and of course you also want your wedding to flow smoothly—and it will. But all this requires a great deal of effort. Don't lose the spirit of the day by getting so overwhelmed with endless details that you allow yourself to get disconnected from what your wedding is really about—the love you have for the person you're going to marry and the life you want to share in the future.

      Keeping these deeper things in mind at every step of the process is what will make your wedding unforgettable, an occasion which, when you call it to mind in the future, or relive it through the photographs or videos, will remind you of the moving, exuberant, tender, passionate, and