Weddings used to be cookie cutter affairs, vows in a church then a chicken-or-beef reception. A waltz, a drunken uncle, sugared almonds.
Now they’re wilder and weirder, and far more wonderful. They’re more personal, more personalised.
On Saturday, at a wedding where the best man was a woman and Mr Whippy delivered dessert, the wedding vows included a moment to reflect on people who cannot get married. Who love each other and want to have their own sugared almonds moment – or get hitched underwater, take their vows in medieval costume or commit to matrimony in Ikea – and, by law, cannot.
Those people who can have an administrative union, a civil ceremony, a legal-on-paper commitment, but are not allowed to take part in one of our society’s most important rites of passage.
Those people who are mired in an Australian society that is in danger of falling further behind the rest of the West on this human right.