I want to take you back to the late '70s. Getting married was just about what every straight person did.
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By the time I finally persuaded my beloved to marry me, it was the early '80s. In 1983, we finally tied the knot and so did another 120,000 couples.
But in our happy romance, we hadn't considered a really crucial question. Who would marry us?
Seems amusing now but then, all our friends were doing church weddings or synagogue weddings or garden weddings with some representative of a religion conducting the formalities.
In our case, that wouldn't work because we were both godless. My mother-in-law kept suggesting I toughen up and convert.
My own mother was just relieved I would be off her hands (this was weird, because I'd moved out of home years before and earned an actual living so I wasn't actually on her hands).
I was reminded this week of all our heated discussions about who would do the honours. When I say "our" I really mean our mothers who had issues of one kind or another.
I loved them both but honestly, challenging the wedding venue two weeks before the actual date of the wedding was just a little bit too much.
July 19 marked the anniversary of the Marriage Celebrants Program in Australia. In 1973, the then Commonwealth Attorney-General Lionel Murphy appointed the first civil marriage celebrant in Australia, Mrs Lois D'Arcy from Queensland. She's still registered as a civil celebrant today.
Now there are about 10,000 civil marriage celebrants who can perform marriage ceremonies on any day, at any time, and at any place in Australia. Hippies, Elvis impersonators, comedians, singers, actors.
Champions, all of them. I have fancied taking it up myself but doubt I could stop myself from intervening if I didn't think all was AOK.
![Marrying couples is just one part of a celebrant's job. Picture Shutterstock Marrying couples is just one part of a celebrant's job. Picture Shutterstock](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/rJkJNFPcdBkDQKqtkgHSjA/909acc9a-9726-41d1-a961-6fecedd03c56.jpg/r351_30_2664_1439_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Our celebrant's name was Ann and she pretty much let us have free rein so we were all Song of Solomon and flutes in a park near the ocean. We loved and honoured but didn't obey because better not to start married life with lies. And here we are, 40 years later, and whatever she did worked.
We didn't let her give up on us after that though. If you can have a celebrant to marry you, you could also get her to fill in on all the other significant milestone events.
By 1985, we had our first kid and the territory wars began. We signed a ceasefire immediately by explaining we would have a celebrant to say lovely things about our bouncing baby and to wish her well and appointed godlessparents.
By the time we had number three, our celebrant had done scores of naming ceremonies, what we called a baptism or a brith when its purpose was to celebrate rather than to inculcate.
The glorious thing is that civil marriage celebrants now conduct about 80 per cent of marriages in Australia. When we did it, our friends and family thought it was weird - but we desperately needed someone who didn't want one of us to convert, didn't freak out that we were living in joyful sin and wasn't going to make us follow rules we didn't need.
I'd like to think marriages which begin where the two of you get to make your own rules do better than those where someone else gets the say.
Or where someone else gets to say you must obey.
Can't say I'm looking forward to my next milestone but I know who I will want to run it.
- Jenna Price is a regular columnist and a visiting fellow at the ANU.