Choosing Your Wedding Vows

In all the wedding planning decisions, it’s easy to forget about the core purpose of a wedding. You are running around deciding which style of bridesmaid dress will flatter everyone of your bridesmaids, fielding menu requests from everyone and your uncle (gluten free, vegetarian, doesn’t like cheese, and can you put the carrots on the side of the salad?), trying to understand the difference in using local, seasonal, pesticide free flowers vs what you can get easily, year round and you haven’t even had the cake tasting yet. It’s not uncommon for talks of your vows to get pushed to the end. Then your scrambling, finding out your fiancé thought you were writing vows and you thought you would just use traditional vows, trying to figure out if your faith requires certain types of vows and wondering once again why you can’t just elope.

First step is to sit down with your fiancé and talk about how you want to handle your vows. 

• Do you have specific requirements for your faith? 
• Do you want to use traditional vows? 
• Do you want to write your own? 
• Or maybe just tweak traditional vows a little?  

If you do decide to write your own vows, make sure you set a framework. 

Will you be writing your vows together or separately?  Even if you each write on your own, talk through what you want them to look like so your vows flow.  You don’t want to pour hours into writing heartfelt, emotional vows and then hear your fiance recite just a couple lines back to you that you think he came up with about an hour ago…

Feel free to use traditional vows as a template or search online for some other vows to start with. 

There’s nothing wrong with using traditional vows either.  That’s what my husband and I chose to do – they were the words that spoke to us about marriage and what we were committing to each other.

I, ________, take thee, ________, to be my wedded husband/wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.

The most important thing is to make sure your vows communicate what you are committing to each other.  And what do you need to be reminded of 5, 10, 25 years into your marriage.  Not when you’re out on a romantic date, but when you are surrounded by screaming kids, dirty laundry, dirty dishes, missed deadlines, etc. – that’s when you need the reminder the most! 

Exchanging your vows may be a small part of the wedding time wise, but they are the center of your wedding celebration.  Take a date night to talk with your fiance about how these will best reflect you as a couple!

– Becky