Once you’ve decided you want to get married (congratulations, by the way!), you’ve got lots of decisions to make about venues and menus, all of which can take up a lot of time. It’s worth taking a moment to think about who you want to celebrate your marriage too, because how they conduct themselves will have an important bearing on the mood of the day.

Humanist celebrants come in all shapes, sizes, genders and ages; you can get a good idea of who we are by visiting our web site and reading our profiles. When you’ve done that, choose a few, give them a call, see who’s available for the date and time of your choice and then arrange to meet the ones you liked the sound of.

If you don’t live in Scotland, meeting up before the ceremony may not be possible, so you may have to do all of this by email and phone: it’s not ideal, but it works perfectly well.

Once you’ve met them all and chosen the lucky candidate, please remember to let the others know, so that they can free up your date and time in case someone else wants it.

One small but rather delicate point – as humanists, we try to treat everyone equally, whatever your gender, age, race or sexual preference and we hope that you’ll do the same. So please don’t book a female celebrant and then change your mind because “you think it would be more traditional to be married by a man”. It’s not very humanist, it’s against the law and – more importantly – you wouldn’t like it if it happened to you…