Most wedding scripts on the internet were written for a default couple — a bride and a groom, in that order, with a father giving someone away. When you sit down to write a ceremony for a queer couple, those scripts don't quite fit. Here's how to write one that does.
Start by asking what they want
Before you write a word, ask the couple two questions:
- Do you want the ceremony to reference the fact that you're a queer couple, or do you want it to be a wedding that happens to be queer?
- Are there family dynamics we should plan around? (Estranged parents, recent loss, anyone who's traveled a long way.)
Both answers are valid. Some couples want explicit celebration — a line about how this ceremony wouldn't have been legal a decade ago, a nod to the people who fought for it. Other couples want what everyone else gets: a normal wedding ceremony, full stop. Your job is to deliver what they want, not what you'd write for yourself.
Drop the defaults
Read your script and hunt for assumed language. Common offenders:
- "Husband and wife" — say "spouses," "married couple," or whatever the couple uses. If one or both are non-binary, ask.
- "Bride / Groom" — same thing. "Marriers" feels clinical but works. Their first names always work.
- "Father of the bride / mother of the groom" — just say the family member's name and relationship if they're being honored.
- "The two of you" gendered phrasings — most are fine, but watch for asymmetric ones like "the man and woman before me."
Keep the structural beats
A wedding ceremony has the same beats regardless of who's getting married:
- A welcome
- An acknowledgment of why marriage matters
- The vows
- An exchange of rings
- The pronouncement
The beats don't change. The language inside them does.
A note on affirming language that doesn't land
There's a kind of pre-canned "love is love" rhetoric that has become its own cliché. It's not wrong — it's just generic. If you're going to talk about the couple's identity, talk about them specifically: how they met, what their first apartment looked like, the joke only they laugh at. Specificity is what affirming language actually sounds like when it's working.
The best line in any ceremony is the one only this couple could have inspired.
Closing
Most of officiating well is paying attention to the couple in front of you. The script is downstream of that. If you've listened — to who they are, who's in the room, and what they want this day to feel like — the script will write itself.