The long and gradual cancellation of Josh Withers

A list of all the times I’ve been cancelled or complained about since 2009, a 2025 edition:

Becoming a celebrant in 2009, I had multiple local celebrants tell me that someone like me, young and male, wasn’t welcome to celebrant and wedding industry events. I pretty much put the whole thing back in the freezer until Britt and I got married in 2012 and she encouraged me to attend a wedding expo after other expos and magazines had turned me away because the existing advertising celebrants didn’t like a new entrant to the marketplace.
Britt had the idea of pop-up weddings in 2013 - the concept of hiring a wedding venue for a day, styling and florals for the day, hire a photographer for the day, and we could marry a number of couples in a day which would keep the costs low for them, creating a new product for the wedding industry in between a wedding and a paperwork-only wedding or registry wedding. The wedding industry of the day called us out for creating a “conveyor belt of love” and cheapening the whole industry. Seven News even ran a story on that angle. The concept was that horrible that we were copied by hundreds of businesses worldwide and we rebranded to The Elopement Collective - at the time elopements were not a thing, but we popularised the elopement wedding idea in late 2015 - Trademark filing - and now it’s a valid option. Pop up weddings also led to the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department (AGD, they manage the celebrancy program) complaints and they had to issue a fact sheet about them in response to us doing them.
Feeling alone in the industry, I created a Facebook group called Engagers and some celebrants made cropped-out-of-context screenshots from the group in 2016 and sent them to the AGD implying that I was not obeying the law, which led to me being fired from OPD training (they emailed the CEO of the training company), a professional review by the AGD, me closing down the group, and out of its ashes The Celebrant Society was born.
Dally Messenger (one of the first celebrants ever appointed) emailed a celebrants mailing list in 2015 about me calling me “ignorant and sickening.” Saying of me “this is what you get when you ‘train’ people in invented legal trivia instead of poetry and music.” I’d been interviewed by the Daily Mail in the UK about my style of celebrancy and they published an article about me.
Every time I’d appear on the Today Show on Nine or Seven Sunrise as their regular correspondant about weddings and marriage, I’d get sickenging messages from celebrants for charging too much, about my body, for cheapening the industry, and for being “unprofessional” by their weird standards.
In 2014, I filmed as the wedding celebrant on the then unheard of new TV show by Nine, Married at First Sight, and when it aired in 2015 it spurred multiple complaints to the AGD and the BDM - because you can’t get legally married to someone you just met - don’t worry, the TV weddings were just TV, it’s all just made up - plus the LGBT blogs and radio shows called me out for not marrying LGBT people on the show, like I had a choice. It was weird to hear the breakfast show host of the Sydney gay radio station at the time, who I thought was my friend, rubbish me on air.
There’s always been comments about my style (I don’t read from a script and I don’t think rehearsals are the best), our business decisions to travel worldwide for wedding and to charge well for my services so I can afford to be a full-time celebrant where most celebrants today have day jobs, or they’re retired, or their partner is the primary wage earner.
I advocated for celebrants to be able to sign marriage paperwork on digital devices and an AGD fact sheet was released in response to it. Celebrants still go on about how I’ve “taken away their red book”.
Covid-19. Gosh the stories we could tell. One day, over a beer.
A prominent Byron Bay wedding venue banned me from being a celebrant at their wedding venue because a couple wanted to elope there and the way Byron Bay weddings work is that weddings don’t happen on their properties without the venue getting a cut and I’m not into that. So I didn’t know they were doing it outside of the wedding mafia and we got roused on during the elopement - I apologised - then found out later that couples who said I was their celebrant were being turned away. As I tend to do in moments like these I called them out in public, and I had every wedding vendor in Byron Bay calling me asking me to take it down because they didn’t want me to ruin the good thing they had going. The thing is, wedding venues don’t deserve a cut of my fee unless we have an agreement about that exist deal.
I wrote a Celebrant Institute blog post about celebrants needing to be better in response to photographers and videographers making complaints about celebrants to me. But then I upset all the celebrants and they turned out in force because I wasn’t kind enough or soft enough in my words, which is fair enough. I recorded a podcast apology for my tone but the message remained.
I made an Instagram video encouraging celebrants to say no to videographers wanting to tape recorders or wireless microphones to our microphones because of the electrical interference. Videographers still hate me for that, it was brought up again this week, like a year on. The truth is that strapping a radio microphone to another radio microphone is a bad idea.
A Tasmanian wedding directory owner had ‘run out of room’ on a website that that can be as long as you could ever want a website to be for paid listings for celebrants. I gifted that person some relevant domain names for the project (they were similarily named) partially because I didn’t want to compete in the wedding directory business and also to extend an olive branch to them in the spirit of networking, building relationship, and investing in my future in the industry.
After spending the last year trying to break into the Tasmanian wedding industry through paid advertising, networking, and meeting venues, all to minimal success, I studied SEO + GEO and started working to make my own website, and Britt’s at The Elopement Collective, more visible to the search and answer engines. Part of that process is in getting good links to your website from other websites, in particular, websites that are relevant in region (Tasmanian), websites that are relevant in topic (wedding), and in a type of website that the search engines and answer engines understand (like a directory). So I built a Tasmanian wedding directory for the purpose of telling the engines that I was a local celebrant. I wasn’t and still am not in the business of making money off a Tasmanian wedding directory. You want the linking sites to have good schema markup and a good page speed and the existing Tasmanian wedding directories didn’t offer those attributes. The name of the directory isn’t trademarkable because it’s generic in nature but I offended that directory owner and all their friends. Apologies and measures to make it right have fallen short. The side problem was that a year earlier I had gifted that person the domain names tasmanianwedding.directory and two others similar and they had not activated them, and they were still sitting in my Cloudflare account so I added them to the website.

Sixteen years of the being bullied by the wedding industry for creating change, for innovating, for thinking different, being brave, and being misunderstood - plus a handful of times I was actually wrong or stupid. When I’m actually perfect I’ll let you know how to do it too.

I often wonder how short this list would be if any of them called 0411 849 404 and we had a chat?

Here’s the thing.

Some of my closest friends around the world, through Canada and the USA, around Australia, Asia, and New Zealand, are all wedding creatives. I like wedding creators. But gosh, I don’t exist for them. I’m a husband and a father first. Secondly I’m a friend. Thirdly I operate a business for the benefit of my family eating each day and living in a nice home with our chickens and rabbits in the Huon Valley.

For most of these complaints I am not ashamed and would do the same things again. For the areas I’ve been wrong, I have always apologised, tried to make it right, and sought grace for that which I cannot.

Britt often tells me, along with Sarah Aird, my business partner at the Celebrant Institute, that it’s often not what I said, but how I said it.

This is good feedback that I try to deploy every day, and fail at least half the time. I’m trying to be better but I hope everyone can know that my heart’s intentions are pure and for the betterment of my community.

Some things I’ve always loved about the wedding industry are how it is driven by taste and creativity; how it’s always been a place welcoming to new people; a workplace quite literally fuelled by passion, love, and joy; fractured to a great degree by the simple “are you available?” email and your yes or no deciding everything; and that by nature of these virtues, an industry that thrives on competition and collaboration at the same time.

There are no required enemies, no divisions into tribes, no “us and them”, but instead this deep drive to celebrate uniqueness, taste, creativity, and individuality in a thoroughly team sport.

An industry so weird and wonderful. A bit like the platypus, it looks like God’s little joke.

It will always confuse me, then, when you meet colleagues that don’t celebrate these attributes.

Cancel me, complain about me, write about me, tell stories about me, I don’t really care. I walk with a clear conciescience today.

Since 2009 I have been laser focused on creating the best wedding ceremonies for my clients, and also nurturing the best wedding industry and world for my kids to grow up in, so that when they get married they can do it in an awesome way.

Am I a real boy with real feelings? Yes, but I also know who I am and the thoughts and opinions of others have only driven me to be better.

Feedback is the breakfast of champions and I’d love to have brekkie with you.