My grandmother didn't have a wedding Pinterest board. She didn't have a mood board or a vendor team or a timeline spreadsheet. But, for all the years I can remember, she had an apple turnover and a cup of coffee — the same one, every time, without fail — waiting for my grandfather in the morning. They both had a shopping grocery date together once a month where they would stock up on everything they needed - together.
Nobody told her to do that. There was no guide. She just understood something that I think we've started to forget: that love isn't built in the big moments. It's built in the small ones you choose to repeat.
That's what a ritual is.
Not a habit. Not a routine. A ritual is a small, intentional act you return to, on purpose, because it means something to the two of you that it doesn't mean to anyone else. It's your inside story played out in real life. The thing that, years from now, makes one of you say remember when and the other one smile before you even finish the sentence.
My parents had one too. It was their weekly check-in, before anyone else was awake, she'd make coffee in the same two mugs and sit at the kitchen table with my dad. No agenda. No phones (though that wasn't the temptation then that it is now). Just the two of them and whatever needed to be said — or didn't.
I didn't understand it as a kid. I do now.
Why Rituals Matter for Engaged Couples
Here's the thing about engagement season: it moves fast. There's a proposal and then suddenly there are vendors and venues and guest lists and dress appointments and everyone has an opinion about your centerpieces. The season that's supposed to be about you two quickly becomes about everyone else.
Rituals are how you stay tethered to each other in the middle of all that noise.
They don't have to be elaborate. They don't require a purchase or a plan. They just need to be yours — something you do together, on purpose, that exists outside the wedding checklist.
Because here's what I've learned after 11 years of hosting weddings and watching over 500 couples walk down the aisle at our venues: the couples who seem the most grounded on their wedding day aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the most detailed timelines. They're the ones who built something together during the season before it. Little rhythms. Tiny anchors. Rituals they could return to when everything else felt like too much.
The Analog Argument
We live in a world that moves at the speed of a screen. And there's nothing wrong with that — until you realize that most of what you're documenting digitally will be buried in a camera roll you never open, on a phone you'll replace in two years.
Rituals ask you to go analog. To put the phone down. To be in the room ... not capturing it, but living in it. A handwritten note. A Sunday morning mug. The smell of something familiar. The feeling of someone's hand in yours when neither of you is reaching for a device.
This is how memory works. Not through highlights and hashtags, but through repetition and presence. The things you touch, see, smell, and do (over and over) become the architecture of your story together.
Starting Your First Ritual
You don't need thirty rituals. You need one.
One small thing you do together this Sunday that you agree to do again next Sunday. And the one after that.
Maybe it's breakfast without phones. Maybe it's a walk with no destination. Maybe it's something as simple as taking a photo of your hands together — just your hands, intertwined — and doing it again next year. And the year after that. One day there will be a smaller hand in the frame. And one day those hands will be weathered and you'll have an entire collection of the years you held on.
That's not a photo. That's an heirloom.
This is why we started Sunday Rituals — a series where, every week, we share one small ritual to try with the person you love. Some will feel like you. Some won't. That's the whole point. You take what resonates and you make it yours.
Because the wedding is one day. But the rituals? Those become the marriage.
And the marriage is the part worth keeping.
— Holly
Follow along with our Sunday Rituals series on Instagram @beforkeeps, and explore the pieces we've designed to hold your most meaningful moments at beforkeeps.com.
