I have one request to make of the pagan community at large.

Before you go looking for a High Priestess to officiate at your wedding, please, stop, stop and think. Why do you want a religious wedding?

Seriously. I mean it.

This is one of those things that annoys me at a fairly irrational level. I don't subscribe to sacramental marriage, personally; it isn't a part of my theology, and from a practical recon end of things, my ancients didn't do it. Marriage is a contract for forming alliances between families, dealing with property and property transfers, and producing legitimate offspring. The sort of thing that tends to go through the legal system, or a set of secular customs for addressing such things (the sort of things that get codified into common law, in other words).

Sacramental marriage may well have been invented by Paul. You know Paul, right? The fellow that a number of people rant about as being the reason they stopped being Christian? That Paul. He considered the relationship between man and wife (language intentional) to be allegory for the relationship between Christ and Church. The holiness spillover was backed up by Jesus's vigorous dislike of divorce.

There are sacramental arguments for marriage. I think the folks with the easiest case for it are the Wiccans, given that they already have the Great Rite as a central sacramental Mystery of the faith. The idea of bringing that into a marriage of mortal humans is not terribly much of a stretch. But I want to see those arguments made, not just left to the wayside.

There are communitarian arguments for marriage in a religious structure; not as a sacrament per se, but as something to which the gods are asked to give witness, as they are members of the community that will be bound to affirm the newly-constituted family. I want to see those arguments, rather than just imagining what they might be if someone were making them.

One may wish to call the Unseen world to witness oaths made; I want to see that done for oaths in general, not just the ones that are considered mainstream numinous, though.

My gut feeling is that religious marriage as a default, as something that automatically gets included in a religion, is mostly because the defaults are set by a surrounding culture that is predominantly Christian. But the arguments need to be made, not from "it's the normal way to do things", but rooted in the worldview and theology of our actual religions. I want to see this developed, thought through, I want to see people doing the work of building their religions as self-consistent wholes.

I want to see the sort of background people are putting in to understand why they're having a marriage ritual that I hope they're going to put into their marriages.

(If I ever get my act together and go through that seminary program and wind up able to perform marriages, I am so going to wind up putting people through a wringer in pre-ritual counselling. . . .)