How often do you have so many of your friends' and family's voices captured at once? Perhaps at your funeral, which you never get to experience. My 93-year-old grandma. A childhood friend who knows things about me my partner doesn't know. The dear friend who introduced us at her birthday party at the House of Prime Rib. A message completely in Kiswahili, which neither of us speak. My wife's cousin who spoke about my wife's father, who I never got to meet because he died from MS. Family members who said, "May God bless your marriage." A running joke across several messages throughout the night from two more recent, and now best, friends pretending to be our children calling from jail to come bail them out.
It's like a slice of life, a reminder of the color and richness of the characters and relationships that surround us. The marriage is about us, but so much more than us. Our guests all had their own experience at the reception, separate from us. That made putting this event together all the more worthwhile, and it's something we wouldn't have fully known without giving them the chance to tell us that.
No written guestbook can match the power of connecting the sound of someone's voice to their words. There were 130 people at our reception. It would have been tough to hear all of that through direct conversation … and when would we have had time to dance?!
William Collins