How to write wedding vows

Before the first sentence

What a vow actually is

A vow is a set of promises, said to one person, in front of people who will remember them. That definition is doing more work than it looks like it is.

Almost every vow that goes wrong goes wrong by being a different document wearing a vow’s clothes. A love letter describes how somebody makes you feel. A speech performs for a room. A toast is funny about two people to their friends. All three are good things and none of them is a vow, because none of them commits you to anything.

Three properties separate a vow from all of those, and if you keep only these you can ignore the rest of this page.

It is said to one person

Not about them — to them. Every sentence should be addressed to the person standing opposite you: you, your, their name. The moment a line starts describing them in the third person, it has turned to face the room, and the room is not who you are marrying.

It contains actual promises

Something you are committing to do, on purpose, from now on. Without that it is a beautiful paragraph about the past. The promises are what make everyone in the room hold their breath.

It is specific enough to be unusable by anyone else

The test is brutal and it takes four seconds: could another couple read this out unchanged? If yes, it is not finished. Not because it is untrue, but because the truth in it is the general kind, and the general kind does not sound like a promise.

Witnesses matter to the writing more than people expect. You are not sending this; you are saying it out loud, once, at a volume, while looking at someone. Anything you would not be able to get through, or would not want your father to hear, belongs in a card on the morning of the wedding instead. That is not a smaller thing to write. It is a different one.

Where the words come from

How to start when you cannot start

Do not begin by asking what you want to say. Begin by telling the story you always end up telling, exactly as you tell it, and then take it apart for parts.

The blank page is not a shortage of material. It is the opposite: it is what happens when you try to rank everything at once. Asked for the most important thing about a person you have loved for years, the mind stalls, because there is no most important thing and choosing feels like a betrayal of everything you did not choose.

The way out is to stop ranking and start recalling. There is one story you have told at dinner tables until your friends can finish it. It is almost never the most significant thing that has happened to you. It arrives already shaped, already funny in the right place, already in your own words — which is exactly what a vow needs and what a blank document cannot give you.

Now mine it. A told story is dense with material you did not have to invent, and every usable piece falls into one of three buckets.

• The details. The number of the bus. Four days. Reading. Details are what make a vow unusable by anybody else, and you cannot think of them on demand — you can only find them inside a story you already know how to tell.
• What it shows about them. Very seriously. That is not a fact about a bus, it is a fact about a person, and it is the thing you will still be describing in thirty years.
• What you did. You answered. You stayed on past your stop. Vows are usually written as if only one person in them has a character; the story remembers that you were there too.

If nothing comes — if you sat down tonight and the page is still empty — that is common enough to have its own page here: what to do when you cannot write your vows. It is exercises, not encouragement.

The shape underneath

The arc: the two of you, then them, then the promises

Three movements. It is not the only shape a vow can take, but it is the one that works when you have never written one before and will not get a second attempt.

1 — Open on the two of you, in a specific place

Not on how you feel. On a moment, with a floor and a time of day. A vow that opens on a feeling has to earn the room’s attention; a vow that opens on a place already has it, because everybody listening is now in the room you are describing.

You were asleep on the floor of the airport with your coat over your face, and our flight had been gone two hours, and I remember standing there thinking that I would like to be the person who woke you up.

2 — Say what you love, in things nobody could guess

This is the movement that fails most often, because “what I love about you” pulls adjectives out of people, and adjectives are interchangeable. Do not describe the quality. Describe the evidence for it and let the room do the arithmetic.

Instead of“You are the kindest person I know”

You answer the phone when your sister calls at midnight, and you have never once let her hear that it was midnight.

Kindness is a claim. The phone call is proof, and it is proof only you were awake for.

Instead of“You always know exactly what to say”

In the corridor at the hospital you did not say anything at all. You stood next to me until somebody came out.

The strongest evidence is often the thing they did not do.

Instead of“You make me laugh every single day”

You have done the voice for the dog for six years, and you have never broken character, not even in front of your mother.

Six years and one mother. Two facts, and the line is now impossible to lift.

3 — Land on the promises

The turn from past to future is the moment the document becomes a vow. Say it plainly — so, here is what I am promising you — or just start promising. Either works; a long run-up does not. Three to five promises is a vow. Nine is a list, and by the sixth nobody in the room is holding their breath any more.

You can reorder these. Opening on a promise and reaching the story afterwards is a real arc and a good one. What almost never works is having no story at all: an unbroken run of promises reads as a contract being executed, and it makes even true promises sound administrative. If you want more shapes than this one, the worked vow examples set out several, each with the skeleton named.

The part that makes it a vow

What a good promise looks like

The test is simple and slightly uncomfortable: could they catch you failing at this next week? If not, it is a sentiment wearing a promise’s clothes.

“I promise to love you forever” cannot be failed at on any particular afternoon, which is exactly why it costs nothing to say and why it does not land. A promise that could be broken this week is a promise with weight in it, and everyone in the room can feel the difference without being able to name it.

Instead of“I promise to love you unconditionally, always and forever”

I promise to say the thing I am annoyed about on the day I am annoyed about it, and not three weeks later in a car.

Small, checkable, and unmistakably written by somebody who has been in that car.

Instead of“I promise to always be there for you”

I promise to come and get you, wherever you have ended up, and to ask how you got there afterwards rather than on the way home.

“Always be there” is a mood. Coming to get someone is a thing with car keys in it.

Instead of“I promise to support your dreams”

I promise to keep the Sunday of every long weekend free for whatever you have decided we are doing this time.

Support is invisible. A cleared calendar is not.

Two more things worth knowing about promises, both of which come up the moment you write your third one.

• One promise can be enormous. Small does not mean trivial. A vow of three domestic promises and one very large one — about illness, or about staying — is stronger than four large ones, because the small ones make the large one believable.
• Say them in the same grammar. If the first begins “I promise to”, keep the rest there. The repetition is what makes a run of promises feel like a set rather than a paragraph — but change what each one points at, or it turns into a chant.

The second draft

What to cut

Cutting is where a decent vow becomes a good one, and almost all of it is one rule: delete any sentence another couple could have written.

Go through the draft with one question. Could this be about anyone? If a line survives having both your names swapped out, it is not doing any work, and worse, it is loaning its flatness to the true line after it. A used-up phrase makes the honest sentence next to it sound rehearsed as well.

These are the lines the room has heard at every wedding it has been to. None of them is wrong. All of them arrive pre-discounted.

• “From the moment I met you” — the most-used opening in the category, and it announces that the next sentence is a formality.
• “You are my best friend” and “my other half” — true of a great many marriages, which is precisely why they identify none of them.
• “I promise to love you unconditionally” — a promise with no failure condition is not a promise.
• “You complete me” and “you make me whole” — borrowed from films, and the room hears the film rather than you.
• Anything that thanks the guests, the caterers, or the weather. That is a speech, and you have one of those later.

Cut the jokes that need the room to explain them, too. A line the guests are meant to laugh at is a line facing the wrong way — it is addressed to them and not to the person in front of you. Keep the funny ones that are true and small, and say them to your partner, quietly. Everybody else is welcome to overhear.

When you cut a borrowed line and cannot think what to put back, do not put anything back yet. The gap is useful information: it is pointing straight at the specific thing the borrowed line was standing in for. That is usually the best sentence in the finished vow.

Enough, and not more

How long it should run

Between 150 and 300 words, which is 1½ to 3 minutes said out loud at the pace people actually read at when they are standing up.

Length is the easiest thing on this page to get wrong in the direction of more. A long vow does not contain more; it contains the same amount, buried. The promises are what the room came for, and they arrive last, which means every extra paragraph before them is spending attention you will need.

Agree a rough length with your partner beforehand, and agree on tone while you are at it. Not the words — never the words. Just the shape, so that one of you is not reading for three minutes after the other read for forty seconds. That mismatch is the only vow problem that is genuinely awkward for everyone watching, and it takes one conversation to avoid. The full answer on length, with the timings works through the arithmetic.

The only draft that counts

Reading it out loud

A vow is not a piece of writing. It is a thing that gets said once, standing, out loud, to somebody’s face — and almost every problem left in your draft only shows up when you say it.

• Read the whole thing aloud, standing, before you change another word. Sentences that were fine on screen turn out to have no air in them. You will hear the line you would never actually say, and you will hear it immediately.
• Go slower than feels natural. Everybody speeds up in front of people, so practicing fast is practicing the wrong thing. Read at the pace you would use to give someone directions they genuinely need.
• Print it large, with a paragraph per promise and no promise split across a page turn. You will be reading at arm’s length and looking up between sentences, and losing your place is the thing that actually goes wrong.
• Carry a second copy, and give one to somebody who will be standing close. You will not need it. Knowing it exists is what the second copy is for.

Do not break your lines to show yourself where to breathe. It turns the page into a poem, and a page that looks like a poem gets read like one — in front of everybody you know. Set it as prose, one paragraph per promise, and let the writing do the pausing. If you want to know parts of it by heart, here is the honest answer about memorizing them.

The whole method

Everything above, in eight lines

If you read nothing else on this page, this is the part to keep. It is the entire process, in the order you would actually do it.

1. 1Write out the story you always end up telling, badly and in full, the way you tell it out loud.
2. 2Underline the details in it — numbers, places, exact words, times of day. Those are the parts nobody else can use.
3. 3Write ten sentences that begin “You are the one who…”, and do not stop to make any of them good.
4. 4List what you are promising, as bare notes. No sentences yet.
5. 5Cross out any promise they could not catch you failing at next week. Replace it with the small version of itself.
6. 6Build the arc: a moment, then the evidence for what you love, then the promises.
7. 7Cut every line that would survive having both your names changed.
8. 8Read it aloud, standing up, twice. Change what your own mouth refuses to say.

Steps one to three are the ones people skip, and they are the ones that make the rest possible. Everything after them is editing, and editing is easy compared with an empty page.