A Wedding Expression

Elayne is WONDERFUL!!!! I had to plan my wedding from New York, so I did an internet search for an officiant in the Columbus area. After searching a ton of "marry you anywhere" officiant sites, I came across Elayne's website, aweddingexpression.com. What a lovely site! So informative and helpful. I immediately contacted Elayne, who to my surprise, contacted us back in less than 24 hours. Elayne was professional and helpful, even providing suggestions on where to perform the ceremony based on her experiences. Elayne has officiated over 600 matrimonies and it is clear that she loves what she does! Elayne took the time to ask questions about my husband and I; how we met, what we did for a living, where we were looking to live, etc. Elayne also shared her personal stories which I believe formed a lasting friendship between us. Elayne was so wonderful, we asked her to stay for a glass of champagne after the ceremony. I would HIGHLY recommend Elayne to everyone and in reference to the one or two bad reviews that she received on this site... I say: You can't always please everyone. There are people out there that wouldn't be happy if you placed gold on a platter and handed it to them! Bridezillas are bridezillas. If you want a professional, dependable and knowledgeable officiant, Elayne is the best choice.

Elayne was great in helping to make our day wonderful and met all of our needs and requests for a ceremony they included everything we wanted. She was flexible in the rehersal time when we could not secure a definite time until a few weeks before.

We chose her after our original wedding officiant got pregnant and was due the same month as our wedding. Through email at first and at our initial meeting went well and she seemed perfect, after that we were majorly disappointed. It started taking her forever to respond to emails. Her website talks about helping build the perfect ceremony and when I asked for help all she sent me was links to her website. When we wrote our ceremony she was quick to offers suggestions on how to change it, but we liked what we'd done. The day of our rehearsal when we went through the ceremony it was if it was the first time she'd read the ceremony. She'd had it for at least a month. The day of the wedding, it was the same thing. Her delivery of the words were stuttered and the flow we'd written didn't come through. 12 days after the wedding I called our county courthouse to see if our wedding license was ready to be picked up and was told they hadn't even received it yet. When I emailed her about it, instead of apologizing or at least giving an explanation on why it was taking so long, she responded with "legally I have 30 days to return it". Obviously this didn't seem very professional to us. She had said at our first meeting that she takes care of sending the license in so we didn't have to worry about anything and since we had an out of town wedding and were leaving on our honeymoon immediately, we liked the sound of this. Too bad we ultimately had to worry about it. After she had our money it seemed her interest in our wedding disappeared. The only reason I why I gave her any points is because she did technically do what she was hired for: she ran our rehearsal and married us.

We picked Elayne because she was highly recommended by our venue. We contacted her easily through her website and she got back with us easily. We met with her twice before the wedding, but I was disappointed in her disinterest in us. She never once asked us how we met, where we worked, or anything. It was all business with her - I do give her kudos for asking the right questions about how our wedding would be done. We heard and read reviews that said what a great personality she had, but we did not really see it. And we ended up writing our entire ceremony because her standard ones just weren't what we were looking for. So that was a disappointment, too, since we paid her to basically read something we spent hours and hours writing. During the ceremony, she stumbled over words and seemed awkward. In reality, she got the job done and that is the most important thing, but in hindsight I wish we had done a little more searching before going with her as our officiant. Finally, the person at the marriage license office mentioned that Elayne's paperwork is typically turned in very late after the wedding. She suggested that we just get the paperwork signed at the wedding and then come to the courthouse ourselves shortly after the wedding to get our real certificates. We did this and got everything taken care of the Monday after our wedding!

Elayne was exactly what we needed: a *professional* officiant who knows her stuff inside and out, who provided a ceremony outline upon which we could build, and was open to whatever we did or didn't want to add to the traditional ceremony and did not force any kind of religion onto our day. We used her basic humanist ceremony for the backbone, but we rewrote quite a bit and added readings, etc. It was perfect and very us. Elayne was familiar with our location, which was also a plus. She met with us beforehand, reviewed our ceremony and vows, arrived on time and dressed professionally, conducted the ceremony beautifully (even with our clunky hand-held mike) and made sure our flower-petal toss went off without a hitch (one of my concerns!). Just exactly what we wanted and I would highly recommend her to any brides and grooms in the Columbus area (esp. those who are looking to avoid the shady/flakiness of a "will marry you anywhere" craigslist/wedding chapel "preacher" - we found lots of those online :-P).

Elayne is extremely professional and easy to work with. She takes great pride in doing the job right. Some people might think that Elayne is not very expressive, but my feeling is if the couple wants an officient who will take the time to get to know them, they should get married by someone who knows them.

She is willing to do all kinds of ceremonies, religious or not, whatever you want. I would say that she's averaged priced. But most of all, she is a very pleasant person. We paid extra to have her at the rehearsal.