Wedding Readings that are ‘Just Outside of the Box’

If you are thinking about readings for your ceremony, you may be finding that quite often the same readings keep popping up. If you are searching for something meaningful that feels authentic & unique to you and may be something that you, or your guests haven’t heard before, here are some of my favourite ‘lesser-spotted’ wedding readings that are still beautiful and filled with meaning!

I hope you find something you love here! Why not find out more about planning a Humanist Wedding and other wedding ideas. If you’ like to chat or ask any questions, don’t hesitate to say hello!

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Bold - Amahla 

In strength I can say that you saved me

Because I've become, what you’ve made me

Within your arms there’s safety

You make me believe

That I’m ready to give you more

If I may be so Bold

I can’t deny I’m unsteady

Taking my own advice

I will adhere to my convictions

And put emotions ahead of pride

Make me feel things I never

Thought I'd feel in my whole damn lifе

You are what I’ve been missing

Our moment has arrived

In strength I can say that you saved me

Because I've become what you’ve made me

Within your arms there’s safety

You make me believe

That I’m ready to give you more

If I may be so bold.

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The Hot Priest’s speech from Fleabag - Phoebe Waller-Bridge 

Love is awful. It’s awful. It’s painful. It’s frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself, distance yourself from the other people in your life. 

It makes you selfish. It makes you creepy, makes you obsessed with your hair, makes you cruel, makes you say and do things you never thought you would do. 

It’s all any of us want, and it’s hell when we get there, so no wonder it’s something we don’t want to do on our own.

I was taught if we’re born with love then life is about choosing the right place to put it. People talk about that a lot, feeling right, when it feels right it’s easy. 

But I’m not sure that’s true. It takes strength to know what’s right. And love isn’t something that weak people do.

Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope. I think what they mean is, when you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope.

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Wild Awake by Hilary T Smith

People are like cities: We all have alleys and gardens and secret rooftops and places where daisies sprout between the sidewalk cracks, but most of the time all we let each other see is a postcard glimpse of a skyline or a polished square.

Love lets you find those hidden places in another person, even the ones they didn’t know were there, even the ones they wouldn’t have thought to call beautiful themselves.

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On the Radio - Regina Spektor 

No, this is how it works

You peer inside yourself

You take the things you like

And try to love the things you took

And then you take that love you made

And stick it into someone else's heart

Pumping someone else's blood

And walking arm in arm, You hope it don't get harmed

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You Deserve a Lover - Frida Kahlo

You deserve a lover who wants you disheveled, with everything and all the reasons that wake you up in a haste and the demons that won’t let you sleep.

You deserve a lover who makes you feel safe, who can consume this world whole if he walks hand in hand with you; someone who believes that his embraces are a perfect match with your skin.

You deserve a lover who wants to dance with you, who goes to paradise every time he looks into your eyes and never gets tired of studying your expressions.

You deserve a lover who listens when you sing, who supports you when you feel shame and respects your freedom; who flies with you and isn’t afraid to fall.

You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.

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So much happiness by Naomi Shabib Nye

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.

With sadness there is something to rub against,

a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.

When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, 

something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.

It doesn’t need you to hold it down.

It doesn’t need anything.

Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, and disappears when it wants to. You are happy either way.

Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house

and now live over a quarry of noise and dust

cannot make you unhappy.

Everything has a life of its own,

it too could wake up filled with possibilities

of coffee cake and ripe peaches,

and love even the floor which needs to be swept,

the soiled linens and scratched records…..

Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness,

you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you

into everything you touch. You are not responsible.

You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit

for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,

and in that way, be known.

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Finally by Author Unknown 

Finally, I have found a place into which I fit, 

Perfectly, safely and securely, with no doubts, no fears, no sadness, no tears. 

This place is filled with happiness and laughter, 

Yet it is spacious enough to allow me to move around, 

To live life and to be myself. 

This wonderful place, which I never believed really existed, I have found. 

Finally - in your arms, in your heart, in your love.

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The Confirmation​ by Edwin Muir 

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.

I in my mind had waited for this long,

 Seeing the false and searching for the true,

Then found you as a​ traveller​ finds a place

Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong

Valleys and rocks and twisting roads.

But you,

What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,

A well of water in a country dry,

Or anything that's honest and good, an eye

That makes the whole world seem bright.

Your open heart,

Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,

The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,

The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea.

Not beautiful or rare in every part.

But like yourself, as they were meant to be

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Reason & Love by Rumi

Lovers find secret places inside this violent world

where they make transactions with beauty.

Reason says, Nonsense.

I have walked and measured the walls here.

There are no places like that.

Love says, There are.

Reason sets up a market and begins doing business.

Love has more hidden work.

Hallaj steps away from the pulpit and climbs the stairs of the gallows.

Lovers feel a truth inside themselves

that rational people keep denying.

It is reasonable to say, Surrender is just an idea 

that keeps people from leading their lives.

Love responds, No. This thinking

is what is dangerous.

Using language obscures what shams came to give.

Every day the sun rises out of low word-clouds

into burning silence.

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Heart to Heart by Rita Dove

It’s neither red, nor sweet.

It doesn’t melt, or turn over,

break or harden,

so it can’t feel pain,

yearning, regret.

It doesn’t have a tip to spin on,

it isn’t even shapely—

just a thick clutch of muscle,

lopsided, Mute.

 Still,

I feel it inside its cage sounding

a dull tattoo:

I want, I want—

but I can’t open it:

there’s no key.

I can’t wear it on my sleeve,

or tell you from

the bottom of it

how I feel. 

Here,

it’s all yours, now—

but you’ll have

to take me,

Too.

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Get Married, Get Married, Chris Gordon

Some of us are cynics 

And then the penny drops and we get it

We become like evangelists

Get Married, Get Married, It’s bloody marvellous.

You know, It’s not what you think it is.

You won’t own them they won’t own you

You’ll hold hands in this sea that you’ve created.

A sea of friends and foes and families. Places you’ve been and places

you imagine you might be.

You’ll hold hands and the waves will push you very close sometimes, so  you’re pretty much one person. Thinking and feeling the same way.

Sometimes the waves will pull you apart until you have to crane your necks to see each other. Just let one drop of forgiveness or good humour change the tide and you’ll be even closer than before. It changes. Every day it changes.

I hope you revel in the changes you bring about in each other.

I hope you treasure each other’s eccentricities and embrace all the

weirdness and wonder of each other’s humanity.

I hope you fight, I am sure you will, it shows great passion to hold a point

of view even when you start to doubt it.

I hope you argue, it’s almost inevitable, but make up and do it before you turn out the lights, then breakfast will taste better.

I hope you dream and that often your dreams collide, and they take you to far away and wonderful places. And I hope you love and that the love you have for each other pushes out into the world around you.

To your friends and to your foes and to your families.

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Summer & Austin have left their apartment for a house By Romie Stott 

I meant to write a poem for your wedding

about superfluids. About quantized groupings

whose singular momentum pushes up and over containers –

about transmission of heat, creation of vortices,

the creation of h/m proportions of vortices where h is planck's constant –

a spun bucket that holds a dozen whirlpools.

I meant to write that you were aligned together

in the same quantum state,and could not be contained.

I meant to write a poem of matter, 

of transition points – of energy that transforms liquid to gas –

of boiling water at a steady temperature

as molecules leap into vapor.

They don’t use the term latent heat anymore.

I can’t use it to say you’ve changed states.

It was a long time building, only seeming

the same, like boiling water, as you transformed

into something that rises.

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Love Letter to June Carter by Johnny Cash 

“We get old and get used to each other. We think alike. We read each other's minds. We know what the other wants without asking. Sometimes we irritate each other a little bit. Maybe sometimes take each other for granted.

But once in a while, like today, I meditate on it and realize how lucky I am to share my life with the greatest person I ever met. You still fascinate and inspire me. You influence me for the better. You’re the object of my desire, the reason for my existence. I love you very much.” 

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Variations on the Word Love By Margaret Atwood 

This is a word we use to plug holes with.

 It’s the right size for those warm blanks in speech, 

for those red heart-shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing

like real hearts. 

Add lace and you can sell it. 

We insert it also in the one empty space on the printed form

that comes with no instructions.

 There are whole magazines with not much in them

but the word love,

you can rub it all over your body and you can cook with it too.

How do we know it isn’t what goes on at the cool debaucheries 

of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard? 

As for the weed- seedlings nosing their tough snouts up among the lettuces, they shout it.

Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising their glittering knives in salute.

Then there’s the two of us. 

This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters, 

too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars

that press on us with their deafness.

It’s not love we don’t wish to fall into, but that fear.

this word is not enough but it will have to do.

 It’s a single vowel in this metallic silence,

a mouth that says

O again and again in wonder and pain, 

a breath, a finger

grip on a cliffside.

 You can hold on or let go.

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