How long should a wedding ceremony be?

Your wedding ceremony can be as long or as short as you want it to be.

Having said that, here are my thoughts and my advice on this. Weddings have a very long history in human society. If you go back a hundred years or so, life was difficult and generally there was not much happening could be described as happy or exciting so when a wedding rolled around you wanted it to take as long as possible. Additionally, ceremonies were delivered in church and as a general rule these ran really really long.

In modern times, life is generally far better and there are many options when it comes to what we focus our attention on. This are many positives about this but attention span is not one of them. People’s attention spans in general are not very long and consequently we become distracted easily.

A wedding ceremony has to be long enough to know that something important happened. It is important enough that your friends and family pause their lives for a moment to focus and be a part of it. But if it is too long we start to lose people.

The magic number, in my experience, is 20 minutes. This is the perfect length of time. It lands up being around half an hour because proceedings don’t start exactly on time and then afterward there is the signing of the register and presentation of the couple. You should be looking at 20-35 minutes for the ceremony.