About Today’s Weddings
A wedding reference that began as a message forum in 1999 and has been answering the same questions, carefully, ever since.
Today’s Weddings began in July 1999 as a message forum — a free meeting place on Delphi where people planning weddings traded what they had worked out for themselves. It became one of the busiest wedding forums on the service, and the answers members kept giving each other were worth more than a thread. On April 1, 2000, they became a website, created and largely written by Vanessa Kasal Kunze.
Much of the early material came from that community: readings members had actually used at their ceremonies, wording they had puzzled over for a difficult invitation, favors they had made at the kitchen table and then explained to everyone else. The rest was researched and written for the site. A quarter of a century later, couples still find their way to it — to the ring inscriptions, the song lists, the anniversary gift chart, the dress glossary — because the questions haven’t changed much, even if almost everything else about weddings has.
What you’ll find here
Guides. Long-form, practical pieces on the decisions every couple faces: how to plan a wedding, the budget, the guest list, writing your own vows, the order of the ceremony, the reception, hour by hour. Each is dated and revised when the advice changes.
The reference library. The part of the site people bookmark: ceremony readings, ceremony and reception music, invitation verses, ring inscriptions, the language of flowers, the wedding dress, decoded, anniversary gifts by year.
Traditions. Where the customs come from and what they mean, from something old, something new to weddings around the world and Puerto Rican wedding traditions.
The archive. Craft projects, reader galleries, and articles from the site’s first two decades, kept online because people still use them. Each is marked From the Archive, with an editor’s note where something has changed.
How we work
The guides are written and edited by the Today’s Weddings editors. We read the sources, check the dates and the attributions, and say plainly when something is a matter of taste rather than etiquette. We would rather tell you that a tradition is optional than invent a rule. Our editorial standards explain how we handle copyright, photography, the archive, advertising and corrections.
Corrections and suggestions
Some of this material is more than twenty-five years old. If a reading is misattributed, a name is misspelled, a link has gone stale or a page is missing something it used to have, we’d like to know. Write to us and it will be fixed.
Using what you find
Print whatever you need for your own wedding, with our blessing. Everything here was researched and written for Today’s Weddings unless noted otherwise, and it may not be republished elsewhere without permission. Readings in the public domain are, of course, free for everyone.
