Love's Blueprint ♥️

By Sam Conroy, Humanist Wedding Celebrant | Edinburgh, Glasgow and all of Scotland

Every so often, a couple hands you a phrase so perfect you want to steal it and use it forever. Jessica gave me one of those. She called it love's blueprint.

She wasn't being poetic on purpose. She was just explaining, quite matter-of-factly, why she knew what she wanted from a marriage before she'd even met James. Because she'd watched it. For years. Up close. And then it turned out, so had James.

James's grandparents, Charlie and Edna, had been married for over fifty years. Fifty years of 'ask the boss', said with a knowing wink whenever James asked for something. Fifty years of a devotion so complete that nothing about caring for the other person ever seemed to register as effort. Not a chore. Not a sacrifice. Just what you do, when you've found your person and you've had the decades to prove it. Edna was Charlie's everything as he was to her.

Watch two people like Charlie and Edna for five minutes and you understand exactly what Jessica meant. That's the blueprint. Just showing up, every day, like it's the easiest thing in the world.

I had the privilege of meeting Charlie. The sort of calm that makes a room settle when someone walks in it. He was utterly lovely, the easiest man in the world to love, and it wasn't har dot see where James got it from. James shared with me a little about how they first met. I won't be writing that here. Some things are only for the heart to hear. But it endeared me even further and I truly believe in love's blueprint.

Here's the part I love most, though. James's grandparents weren't the only blueprint in the room.

Jessica had her own, closer to home. Her parents, Ray and Debi. Thirty years married, and still utterly devoted to each other. Theirs is a calmer kind of love. Gentle. Quiet. An equal partnership through and through. But don't mistake calm for lacking spark. That would be a mistake.

Jessica grew up reading the love letters her parents wrote each other, and she always dreamed of a love like that. Open. Honest. Unguarded. The kind where two people know each other so completely that just being in the room together says more than words ever could. Serenity and kindness, as standard. Except when the board games come out! Then all bets are off.

So between Charlie and Edna's devotion and Ray and Debi's quiet honesty, James and Jessica didn't just fall in love. They inherited two blueprints for how to do it properly.

And that's the bit that gets me every time I stand in front of a couple. We talk about love like it's something that strikes out of nowhere. A bolt, a spark, a moment. But so often what I'm actually watching is something much older than the couple in front of me. A pattern, laid down by people who had no idea they were teaching anyone anything. Grandparents who just got on with loving each other. Parents who wrote letters nobody else was ever meant to read.

None of them set out to be a blueprint. They were just living their own ordinary version of forever, decades before anyone else needed it. And somewhere along the way, without a single lesson or a single word of advice, they built the exact template someone else would go on to fall in love by.

That, to me, is the most beautiful, quietly poetic thing about love.

It doesn't start with the couple standing in front of me. It starts long before them. And one day, if they're very lucky, they'll get to become someone else's blueprint too. This couple have already become one of mine ♥️

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Sam Conroy is a Humanist Wedding Celebrant and registered Legal Marriage Officer, authorised by the Fuze Foundation under the Marriage (Scotland) Act 1977.

Based in North Lanarkshire, Sam covers Edinburgh, Glasgow and all of Scotland.