What goes on inside the head?
What does it feel like to be a humanist celebrant?
There’s a moment — it happens in almost every first conversation — where something shifts. I’m a humanist celebrant. We’ve been talking for a while, and you’ve started to relax, and one of you says something about the other that wasn’t planned. A small, unguarded thing. The way he still gets nervous ordering food in restaurants. The fact that she rings her sister every single day. Something that seems throwaway but isn’t. And I find myself sitting very still, because I know that’s the real beginning of the ceremony. That’s the thread I’ll pull.
I don’t think people fully understand how much emotion a celebrant absorbs. From the outside it probably looks like a nice little career: turn up, say some words, smile for photos. But from the inside, it’s more like being invited into something private, over and over again, and being trusted to do something good with what you find there.
The getting-to-know-you part — the conversations before I write a single word — is where most of the work actually happens. And this is why I often emphasise on my Instagram page, what I call ‘the vibe’. The vibe is something hard to describe. But you’ll know it when you feel it.
What does it feel like?
It’s strange work, because I’m not a therapist, and I’m not a friend, but over time I’m no longer a stranger either. I’m something else. A particular kind of witness. People tell me things they don’t always tell each other, or not in those words, not all at once. Sometimes I learn something in a conversation with one partner that reframes everything I thought I understood about the other. I hold a lot.
Some couples are completely at ease from the start. They finish each other’s sentences and laugh at the same things and the whole meeting feels like being invited to a very good dinner party. Others are quieter, more contained — and I’ve learned not to misinterpret that reserve. The deeper the feeling, sometimes, the harder it is to find the language. Part of my job is to do that finding for them. To say, on the day, what they couldn’t quite say themselves, and have them recognise it as true.
And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t carry some of it home.
Some couples stay with me. Not in a sentimental way — more that I find myself thinking about them, hoping they’re alright, long after the confetti has been swept up. A couple who’d had a really hard road to their wedding day. Two people who had each lost a parent in the same year and were navigating all of that alongside planning a ceremony. People are often going through more than you’d guess, and they still want to celebrate, still want to stand up in front of the people they love and make these promises. There’s something in that I find genuinely moving, every time.
Being a celebrant is also — and I want to be honest about this — a job that requires you to manage yourself. I have to care without getting lost in it. I have to be fully present on the day — completely steady, completely focused, fully in the room — which means all that feeling has to go somewhere useful rather than just sitting on the surface. I’ve stood at the front of ceremonies where I knew enough about the couple’s story that the whole thing had weight for me too. I’ve had to hold that. It’s a particular kind of discipline.
And then the day ends, and people go off to eat and drink and dance, and I drive home. Alone, usually. And with all of it still in me. You can’t leave emotion in the car park. You can decide not to look at it, but it’s there — in the passenger seat, waiting. I’ve thought about this a lot, particularly through the lens of my other work as a leadership coach, where the question of what we do with feeling — how we process it rather than just suppress it or perform our way through it — is something I return to constantly.
The answer I keep coming back to is deceptively simple: you have to give it somewhere to go.
For me that’s usually on my daily walks with Ted the labrador (often chronicled on Insta), or writing something in my journal, or just giving myself permission to feel it rather than packaging it up efficiently and moving on. Ceremony work sits in the body as much as the mind. The joy of it is real, and so is the weight of it, and both deserve a bit of space.
I think that what makes this work sustainable is not pretending the emotion isn’t there, but learning to work with it rather than around it. The couples who trust me with their stories deserve someone who can hold the full scale of what they’ve given me, not someone who’s quietly flattening it down in order to function.
What I wasn’t prepared for, when I started, was how cumulative it would be. Not in a draining sense — in the opposite sense. Each couple adds something. Each ceremony teaches me something about my capacity to listen and what it means to commit to another person. I’m not the same person I was when I started doing this work, and I think that’s because I’ve had a front-row seat, again and again, to human beings at their most intentional. Choosing each other, in public, with full knowledge of what that choice costs and means.
That’s not a bad thing to have in your bones.
