Forming the Marriage Hexagon
The Design of our queer wedding ceremony
I’m sure it surprises none of you that our wedding ceremony is designed from scratch, full of quirks, an embodied reflection of our deepest-held values, and anchored in powerful friendships. We knew that it would only work if it felt authentically us when we got to the front of the room.
So, let’s take a look at this strange creation.
Bride: Avery Alder
Darling: Milo Offerein
Celebrant: Samuel Stevenson
Channeler: Autumn Strom
Entrusting Our Vows
Our marriage will be founded on six vows that we hold to be sacred: healing, intimacy, queer possibility, community, permission, and family. These are the six sides of our hexagon.
Relationships don’t exist in isolation, and so we want to tag in key friends to help us keep these vows alive and flourishing. Each vow has an appointed Vowkeeper – members of our wedding party who will safeguard our vows and hold us accountable to them over time.
These vows were shaped by important works of art and writing, which is why each one will be framed in response to a reading given by its Vowkeeper.
Our vows are not a back-and-forth transactional exchange of things we wrote privately. Instead, they’re promises that we wrote together, to our relationship, and that we’ll be entering into together.
Once made, each vow is placed within a vessel and entrusted to its Vowkeeper.
Vows and Vowkeepers
Community
Vowkeeper Laurel
read from
The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Reading
“The bond that binds us is beyond choice.
We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood.
We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is.
You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free.
All you have is what you are, and what you give.”
Our Vow
Our love is not private. It connects us to our friends, our family, and our values. We will keep nourishing the people around us and receiving their care in return.
The Vessel
Image coming soon.
Intimacy
Vowkeeper Sharang
read from
This is How You Lose the Time War
by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
The Reading
“I want to be a body for you.
I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me.
I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand.
Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.
I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”
Our Vow
What do you desire right now, in this moment? Shall we share our truths with one another? Can I bring unexpected pleasure into your life? These are good questions to keep asking one another.
The Vessel
Image coming soon.
Queer Possibility
Vowkeeper Ivy
read from
Uses of the Erotic
by Audre Lorde
The Reading
“This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all.
For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.
Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.
And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”
Our Vow
Our love draws from a great lineage of fabulists and rabble-rousers. In the ways that we love, we will help make a world that is deeply honest and glitters with strangeness.
The Vessel
Image coming soon.
Permission
A commitment to being surprised by one another, to polyamory, and to exploration.
Vowkeeper Hannah
read from
You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For
by Richard C. Schwartz
The Reading
“When you achieve a degree of trust in Self-leadership, you become liberated from these exiling dances.
You can accept and encourage your partner to explore all of their parts because they don’t threaten you. Your partner senses that acceptance and freedom, which feel wonderful and unusual to them.
They come to trust that they don’t have to protect themselves from you, and they keep their heart open.”
Our Vow
Our love is strongest when it is confident and celebratory. I want you to pursue your true desires, and you want me to pursue mine. It’s so easy to know that we will stay integral to one another.
The Vessel
Image coming soon.
Healing
To us, healing means safety, nurturance, growth, reciprocity, and futurity.
Vowkeeper Pragya
read from
Parable of the Sower
by Octavia Butler
The Reading
“All successful life is Adaptable, Opportunistic,
Tenacious, Interconnected, and Fecund.
Understand this. Use it.
Shape God.”
Our Vow
We will continue to attune, tend to one another, nurture, and grow together. We do this because we know the depths of safety and aliveness that are possible, and, quite simply, because we cannot help it.
The Vessel
Image coming soon.
Family
Building a life together, weaving together the families born, found, and chosen.
Vowkeepers Lou and Clover
read from
The Velveteen Rabbit
by Margery Williams
The Reading
“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’
‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.
‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for they were always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’
‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’
they asked, ‘or bit by bit?’
‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Our Vow
Our family makes time to play games, have fun, and eat good food together. We will continue finding out what both of you like, and need, in order to create a space of true belonging.
The Vessel
Image coming soon.