Wedding reading
All I Know About Love
Neil Gaiman
“All I Know About Love” by Neil Gaiman is a prose reading read at a wedding ceremony. It takes about a minute and a half read aloud, usually by a guest reader. It is still in copyright, so the words are not reprinted here — the reader brings a printed copy.
Why the words are not printed here
Gaiman wrote it for the wedding of two friends in October 2017 and posted it to his own journal afterwards. That post, linked below, is the only wording to trust: it circulates as "What I Know About Love" and as a passage from The Sandman, and it is neither. It is his and still in copyright, so ask before you reprint it in an order of service.
Pieces still in copyright are listed by title and author only — we name them and tell you where to get them, but we do not reproduce the words. Public-domain text is printed in your script in full.
What it is about
Written for a friend’s wedding in 2017, and published by the author himself.
Read at a wedding ceremony. Themes: what love is · written for a friend’s wedding · a modern secular reading · plainspoken · often mistaken for a Sandman passage.
Questions about reading it aloud
How long does “All I Know About Love” take to read aloud?
“All I Know About Love” takes about a minute and a half read aloud at a ceremony pace, which is slower than conversation — roughly 130 words a minute. That is the figure the run-sheet uses when it works out the timing for the whole service.
Who usually reads “All I Know About Love”?
Usually a guest reader rather than the officiant. “All I Know About Love” runs about a minute and a half, which is a manageable amount to hand to a friend or family member. Give them a printed copy of their own, in a size they can read without their glasses, and tell them where to stand and how you will introduce them.
Can “All I Know About Love” be printed in a ceremony script?
Not by us. It is still in copyright, so we name it and point you at a copy rather than reprinting the words. Gaiman wrote it for the wedding of two friends in October 2017 and posted it to his own journal afterwards. That post, linked below, is the only wording to trust: it circulates as "What I Know About Love" and as a passage from The Sandman, and it is neither. It is his and still in copyright, so ask before you reprint it in an order of service.
Where to find it
No text is reproduced here, so there is nothing to verify — bring a copy from a published edition.
Checked
A reading is two minutes of the hour.
The rest is the welcome, the vows, the ring exchange, the pronouncement — and the timing that holds them together. Answer some questions about the couple and get the whole ceremony, written out, with this reading in its place.
Other readings that suit the same service
- On love, from All About Love: New Visionsa minute and a halfbell hooks
- On Marriage, from The Propheta minute and a halfKahlil Gibran
- On Becoming Real, from The Velveteen Rabbit55 secondsMargery Williams
- from Obergefell v. Hodgesa minute and a halfJustice Anthony Kennedy
- from the Symposium — the speech of Aristophanestwo minutesPlato, tr. Benjamin Jowett
- from Jane Eyre — ten years marrieda minute and a halfCharlotte Brontë