Rev. Robin L. Zucker - Flowingforce

We were married July 2, 2016 To start, I want to be more detailed but the character limit hurts. She sent our paperwork in quickly. She performed a personalized ceremony. We did the PREPARE program. I wouldn't recommend it to replace actual premarital counseling. She was flexible when we had to reschedule our first session. After our ceremony, she told us that she would contact us to have our final session. We never heard from her again after our wedding day, but we did hear from the First Unitarian Church. We were told that she was "asked to leave" (I'm using their words because I do not know the full circumstances) the parish and her last day was not long after our wedding. Our photographer was told the same on our wedding day when she was crabby with him. I was very alarmed at how she treated my family (the antithesis of how she was during our sessions). I have a large, friendly, and loving family who has been through many weddings rehearsals. They've always been joyful and full of laughter. She scolded my father for lightly joking around during rehearsal (typical dad stuff, saying "nope! She's staying my baby forever" when he was supposed to hand me off to my husband). We had many discussions with her regarding our wedding party and she had the names of the children involved. She gestured to them and said in such a nasty voice, "I don't know their names." She fought with my mom and their mothers because she didn't want them sitting in the front row during the ceremony and explained children were a loud distraction in weddings (all four children were angels during the ceremony, FYI, as I knew and explained to her they would be). After, she must have felt bad because she said she was just trying to get everyone organized. They were organized. She just seemed to be in an extremely sour mood. Luckily, my family is chill and let it roll off. We didn't let it ruin anything, but I spent a majority of the evening apologizing to my wedding party.

We went with the preparatory program that Robin recommended because we wanted her to be able to get to know us for the ceremony. It was interesting because the results pretty much aligned with what my husband and I expected-- we have a solid relationship built on respectful communication and shared goals-- but it was nice to affirm that and explore minor areas where we can continue to work. We enjoyed our meetings with Robin as we got to know her and she got to know us. I will say that scheduling with Robin was difficult at times and one time we arrived at her office for a scheduled appointment to find that she was nowhere in the building. Turns out, she had left quickly on emergency pastoral business and had completely forgotten about our meeting. She did apologize for it and we had no further problems with making scheduled appointments. Also, she didn't send me any reminders about my balance being due but at my rehearsal she insisted on being paid before the ceremony the next day. She did do an amazing job with the ceremony. She put together a personal and eloquent ceremony for us and we got a lot of compliments about how beautiful it was. She also filed the certificate in a timely manner so I had no problems retrieving it for my name change.

Let me start by saying we gave an average of 4 stars for our other vendors and everything went perfectly at our wedding except for our interactions with Robin. Robin strongly recommended we take a marriage prep course with a stated purpose of getting to know us better as a couple costing $300. The experience got off to a bad start when scheduling those meetings with her was difficult and it became increasingly clear with each subsequent meeting that she hadn't gotten to know us as a couple whatsoever. It was also clear that the preparation program was not helpful as she did not even realize we only had completed half of it in our sessions. This would not had been terribly concerning to us but for how things went at the ceremony. At the rehearsal and the day of the wedding Robin was extremely pushy and ill-tempered. She told three of my bridesmaids to "act with a little dignity" while sipping champagne immediately prior to the ceremony. For the record, no one was anywhere near intoxicated. Both sets of parents and almost all 14 members of the bridal party individually made unsolicited comments to us about how uncomfortable they felt with her. In spite of these issues, the ceremony was nice, but only superficially personal. She performed the necessary functions and mailed the certificate in a timely fashion We selected her initially because we thought she would be relaxed, flexible and progressive, but we were disappointed to find out that she was rigid, condescending and judgmental. At the end of the day the reason for the bad review was because she was the only source of negative emotion on an otherwise incredible day.