Here is the text from our wedding vows, which the local officials had taken the time and effort to write. Read them and weep - many who were there did. If this doesn't convince you to be married in Slovenia...
To the Bride and Groom,
I think Goethe's thought, "Nothing is more precious than the present day" the most suitable for this solemn moment, for the present day is for you, both precious and unforgettable.
This is the day when you start to weave the most fragile embroidery of your life - matrimony: the binding that will connect you for your whole life. This is the moment when your hearts are open to solemnity, when you feel the love that found and joined you; love that may never cease but grow and ripen from year to year, and become in its maturity yet more comelier.
For it is as beautiful to wake up at dawn and be grateful for a new day of love, as well as it is when you find peace at your midday rest and meditate on the ecstacy of love, or to return home in the evening, with gratitude, to fall asleep with a song of praise on your lips and a prayer for your beloved in your heart.
And yet a happy marriage isn't just about love. A happy marriage is mutual trust and respect; a happy marriage is friendship and understanding; it is devotion and giving.
That's why matrimony is a fragile embroidery: immensely beautiful but also deeply sensitive. A marriage is woven of countless tiny precious moments that have to be cared for. If a marriage lacks jewels such as love, respect and trust, the fragile embroidery may change into a heavy chain that hurts and becomes an unbearable burden for the married couple.
I hope you will walk the more beautiful, and not the more demanding path of love and understanding. This will only come true if you aren't just a wife and husband, but also first and best friends.
If you unselfishly help and trust each other - if you surrender to love. Offer generously and take gratefully from each other. Only thus will you keep your marriage as a precious embroidery; only thus will you be able to overcome difficulties which on this path cannot be avoided, but can always be surmounted.
Keep and cherish your love carefully - for being loved means much more than being rich... or being happy. It means there is always somebody whose shoulder you can rest your head upon.
It is your decision to marry, and today's ceremony also brings with it rights and duties.
Yet these official regulations will only remain as dead words, unless you two inspire them with life.
I hope and wish that you will will do more for each other and mean more to each other than the law imposes upon you.
I will now ask the registrar to read the regulations of the law of marriage:
- The partners are equal in marriage.
- They must respect each other; to trust each other and to help each other.
- They decide freely about the birth of their children, and regarding them, have the same rights and duties.
- Each partner chooses freely his or her profession or work.
- You will decide together about your place of living, and common affairs.
- The partners will pay towards the family's living costs in proportion to their means.
- If a partner has no means of his or her own, and is unavoidably or unable to work, they have the right to be kept by the other partner, inasmuch as the other is able to do so.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love;
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cups, but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread, but eat not from one loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of the lute are alone, though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together;
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow. |
