Optional Readings**

~Congratulations~

Your marriage makes a public statement about your private thoughts and commitments to each other. Marriage means sharing your most intimate self with one other person whom you can trust and turn to in times of need and joy. Marriage means living with your best friends, someone you can give love to and receive love from. Love is reality, affinity, and communication. Marriage is a symbol of creating a new life together in which the base is love.

~On Marriage~

Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other’s cup, but drink not from one cup. Give one another bread, but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone: even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of life can contain your hearts.

And stand together, yet not too near together: for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

From The Prophet, by Kahil Gibran

~Romantic~

Love is not Stillness, Love is Motion.

A good relationship has a pattern, like a dance, and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart’s.

The joy of such a pattern is not only the joy of creation and participation, it is the joy of living in the moment.

One can not dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on the present step as it comes.

Being fully present in each moment, the fluidity of motion, is what creates that sense of ease, of timelessness, of the eternal.

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh