How long should wedding vows be?

Where the number comes from

Words are not the unit. Seconds are.

Word counts are only useful because they are easy to check. What the room experiences is time, and the conversion is worse than most people assume.

Ordinary conversation moves quickly. Vows do not. Read out loud, standing, to one person, with everybody watching, the pace settles at around 110 words a minute — well under a conversational one — and then you add the pauses, which are not optional and not a failure. You stop at the end of every promise. You look up. Your voice goes at least once and you wait for it.

So the honest conversion has the pauses costed in, which is what the times below are. They are the same arithmetic Personal Vows prints on the read-aloud page itself, rather than a rule of thumb.

Count the words in a word processor, not by eye. Almost everybody underestimates their own draft by a third, and the overestimate always lands in the direction that makes the vow longer than they meant it to be.

The reason for a ceiling

Why longer usually means less

A long vow does not hold more. It holds the same amount, spread thinner, with the part that matters arriving last into a room that has already spent its attention.

• Attention in a ceremony is not like attention anywhere else. People are standing, often warm, often emotional, and a good number of them cannot see properly. The room is generous, and it is generous for about two minutes at a time.
• The promises come at the end, and they are what everybody actually came to hear. Every extra paragraph before them is attention spent that you will want back when you get to the part with weight in it.
• You have to read the thing. Long vows mean more page, more places to lose your line, and more chances for the moment where your eye lands somewhere it has already been.
• Length is what people reach for when a vow is not specific enough. It is the wrong fix: one detail nobody could guess does more than a paragraph of true, general sentences.

If your draft is over by a hundred words, do not trim adjectives. Cut whole sentences — specifically, every sentence that would still be true if both your names were swapped for somebody else’s. That is almost always exactly the overage, and the vow gets better rather than shorter. The full method for writing them works through what that cut looks like.

The one conversation to have

Agreeing a length with your partner

Agree the shape. Never the words. A mismatch in length is the only vow problem that is genuinely uncomfortable for everybody watching, and it takes one conversation to avoid.

Agree on roughly how long

“About two minutes each” is enough. You do not need to compare drafts, and you should not — the surprise is a real part of the day, and a vow written to match another vow gets general in the effort.

Agree on roughly how funny

Tone travels further than length. If one of you is writing something wry and the other is writing something plain and serious, both will land — as long as neither is expecting the other one to match.

Do not split the difference

If one of you naturally writes 150 words and the other 300, meeting in the middle makes one padded and one gutted. Take the shorter one as the target, and let the longer writer keep the extra for a letter on the morning.

There is no rule about who says theirs first, and no tradition that settles it. Whoever is dreading it more should go first — the second one is much easier, and the first one is then free to listen.

Before you call it done

How to check the real length

A word count is a proxy. The only measurement that counts is you, standing, saying it out loud, at the pace you will actually use.

• Stand up and read it to a wall, at speaking volume, with a timer running. Sitting down and reading it in your head will come out about a third short of the truth.
• Read it slower than feels right. Everyone accelerates in front of people, so a rehearsal at your natural pace is a rehearsal of the wrong thing.
• Leave the pauses in when you time it. The silence after a promise is part of the promise, and it is where a good part of the running time lives.
• If it runs long, cut before the ceremony rather than on the day. Nobody has ever successfully shortened a vow while holding it.