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We sat round the table, the photographer, the planner and I with identical expressions of misty-eyed reverie. Sometimes you just have to embrace the fact that you’re completely absorbed in the wedding day and acknowledge that you have been carried along on the collective stream of emotion. Even though we were all there for work purposes, we were all entirely smitten with the clients and weren’t afraid to admit that this is one of the perks of the job.

It can sometimes be hard for me to initially find my feet at a wedding, as I am the strange girl who turns up with a notebook and sits in a corner scribbling away. I live in Bristol and no one else does (or at least, none of my clients thus far have) so I often won’t have personally met my couples prior to their wedding day purely due to logistics. How then, do you create a relationship that allows you to feel connected and invested in the subjects you’re writing about?

Magic, that’s how.

Even if I’m walking into a venue with only a piece of paper containing the names of the principal characters, I know that by the time I leave later that evening I will feel like I’m a part of their family. I know that I’m going to burst into tears when the bride walks into the room, fall in love with the little boy hurtling down the aisle, find myself too teary to write legibly during the speeches and laugh wildly at the borderline inappropriate stories drunk people will tell me after the wedding breakfast.

I know this because I know that weddings are magic. They have the ability to melt even the most hardened of hearts and to bring together groups of random people in an amazingly harmonious manner. Weddings are magic because they give people a common denominator to talk about (the couple) and the license to let them talk at length, with free reign and unabashed love. Weddings are magic because they make everyone in the room forget about their troubles, their tribulations and their concerns in the outside world.

I tend to fall in love with my clients a little bit. I leave every wedding feeling like I wish the bride was my best friend and bursting with pride on the groom’s behalf. I live with their wedding filling up my head for at least two weeks as the words swell up in my brain and tumble out of my fingers to create their report. By the time I send them the first draft, I feel like I have known them forever, such is the power of witnessing their love and enjoying the company of their friends and family.

I can only hope that when they pick up their report and read it for the first time or the fiftieth time, that they feel I have submerged myself enough in their lives for that one day to be able to accurately represent the magic of their wedding.