Why does marriage matter to people?

Transcript: Michelle Hall, wedding planner

Do you know, that’s one of the first things that I ask to sort of get the relationship going with couples. You know, why are you here? Why are you getting married? And I could probably sit here for most of the day and give you examples of why people are getting married. The really extreme one would have to be illness. I really, enjoy is not the right word, but I really take great pride in dealing with those weddings because the couple have come to a time in their life where perhaps they’ve been thinking about getting married, but life’s got in the way. And all of a sudden when that’s questioned, and you are part of that couple’s day, it becomes a very intimate wedding planning job that you’re doing with the couple. And I’ve had some absolutely marvellous weddings that we’ve managed to pull off in six, seven days for young couples, for old couples, for couples with children that… that’s the lasting memory that the surviving partner is going to have — that particular day. So it is extremely special.

So that’s the extreme one, I suppose, that we don’t get a lot of, thank goodness. But they do happen. Unfortunately, finance is one of the ones that I hear quite often. I think we actually have one in house today where they’ve been married 19 years… sorry, they’ve been together 19 years and getting up to retirement age and have thought, “Oh! Perhaps financially we’d better secure things and get married.”

And then… because people are in love! That’s the nice one! That’s the nice one. When people tell you that they’re getting married because they love each other. And they’ve only been together maybe a couple of years or three years. We have a lot of couples who are on their second or, recently, we had a couple who are on their third time getting married to each other. So they had been married two times previously, to each other. Divorced, completely. And then remarried to each other again. So lots of reasons.