Questions to ask before you write your vows

These are the questions to ask before writing your vows, and the order matters less than the fact that somebody asks them. A vow is hard to write because it asks you to rank a whole relationship in one sitting; it stops being hard the moment somebody asks you something small enough to answer. Every question below is that shape, and each one comes with the thing it is quietly retrieving.

Answer them out loud if you can, badly, into a notes app or at a kitchen table. You are not writing yet. You are collecting the material the writing will be made of, and by the end of the list you will have more than you can use — which is the only comfortable place to write a vow from.

Last reviewed August 19, 2026

Group one

The story

Start here, always. A story you have told before arrives with its own details attached, and details are the part you cannot summon on demand.

What is the story you always end up telling? The one that comes out when somebody asks about the two of you. It arrives already shaped, already funny in the right place, and already in your own words — which is exactly what a vow needs and what a blank document cannot give you.
Where were you both standing the first time you thought this was serious? A floor and a time of day. Openings fail when they open on a feeling; this question hands you a place instead, and a place puts everybody listening in the room with you.
What is the worst trip the two of you have taken, and what actually happened? Evidence under load. Nothing shows what a person is like faster than a plan coming apart, and the story is usually one you have both already agreed is funny.
What do your friends say about the two of you when neither of you is in the room? The outside view, which is often sharper than yours and always more concrete. If four people have made the same joke about you for years, there is something true underneath it.

What one answer turns into

You had been in the city four days and you got on the 44 going the wrong way, because you were reading. You sat next to me because it was the only seat left. Then you asked me, very seriously, whether the river was normally on that side.

Notice how little of that had to be written. The number of the bus, the four days, the reading — all of it was already in the version you tell at dinner. Writing it down is transcription, and transcription is a completely different job from composition.

Group two

The person

Every one of these is built to refuse an adjective. Asked in general what they love, people answer kind, funny, thoughtful; asked these, they answer with evidence.

What do they do when they think nobody is watching? The behavior nobody performs. It is the closest thing there is to proof of character, and you are one of very few people who has seen it.
Who do they become when somebody they love is in trouble? A whole person in one answer. Adjectives fall apart under pressure and this question skips them entirely — it asks what they did, on a specific bad day, for somebody specific.
What would you miss first? The detail underneath the big feeling. People answer this one with something absurdly small — a way of saying a word, a hand on a door frame — and that is precisely the line the room will remember.
What have you changed your mind about because of them? Evidence of influence, which is harder to fake than admiration. It is also a promise in disguise: whatever changed is usually something you intend to keep.
What are they better at than they think they are? Something they will not have heard from you before. Vows overwhelmingly repeat things the person already knows, and the two or three lines that do not are the ones that land.

If an answer comes back as a quality rather than a scene, do not accept it. Ask the follow-up — when? — and keep asking until there is a room in the answer. The quality is what you concluded; the scene is what you saw, and only one of the two can be said out loud without sounding like a reference letter.

Group three

The promises

This is the part that makes it a vow rather than a lovely paragraph, and it is the part people leave until they are already tired.

What have you quietly been doing for years already? The promises you can actually keep, because you are keeping them. This is the single most productive question on the page and almost nobody thinks to ask it.
What could they catch you failing at next week? The size a promise has to be. Anything that cannot be failed at on a particular afternoon costs nothing to say, and everybody in the room can hear the difference without being able to name it.
What are you afraid of, that a promise would help with? The one large promise. A vow of three domestic promises and one frightening one is stronger than four large ones, because the small ones make the large one believable.
What do you want to be true of the two of you in ten years that will not happen on its own? A promise pointing forward rather than a description pointing back. Anything that needs deciding on purpose is a vow; anything that would happen anyway is a hope.
What is the promise you would rather not say out loud in front of people? Usually the truest one, and not always one to use. Ask it anyway — you can decide afterwards whether it belongs in the vow or in a card on the morning.

What one answer turns into

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. I promise to take the burnt one. And when it is bad — properly bad, the kind we have not had yet — I promise to still be in the room.

Three to five promises is a vow. Nine is a list, and by the sixth nobody is holding their breath any more. If you have eleven answers here, that is the right problem to have: keep the ones only you could have written, and let the rest be things you do rather than things you announce.

Group four

The day itself

Four questions that are not about the writing at all, and that decide how the writing goes anyway.

What do you want them to feel while you are saying it? The tone, decided once, before you write anything. Every later choice — whether the joke stays, how the last line lands — answers to this and stops being a separate argument.
Which line will you not get through without stopping? Advance warning. There is nearly always one, you nearly always know which, and knowing means you can put it where a pause is survivable rather than at the very end.
Roughly how long is your partner’s going to be? The only vow problem that is genuinely awkward for everybody watching. Agree a rough length and a rough register — never the words — and it disappears.
What will you be holding, and can you read it at arm’s length? The practical answer everybody leaves until the morning. You will be looking up between sentences; losing your place is the thing that actually goes wrong.

The last one is the question nobody asks until the morning of. What to hold, and what to know by heart covers what that page needs to look like, and the answer on length covers how to agree a rough one without ever comparing drafts.

Working through the list

Four rules for answering them

The questions do most of the work on their own. These four keep the answers usable.

Say the answers out loud before you write them down. Speaking bypasses the part of this that goes stiff, and what comes out of your mouth is already in your own vocabulary.
Never answer with a summary. If the answer has no place, no time and nobody doing anything in it, it is a conclusion rather than a memory, and a vow cannot be built out of conclusions.
Do not skip a question because the answer feels too small. Small is the target. Nobody has ever been moved by the general fact that two people love each other.
Leave a question blank rather than filling it with something plausible. An honest gap points straight at what you actually want to say; an invented answer covers the spot up.

When the answers are collected, the writing is the easy half: the template gives you somewhere to put them, the full method explains what to keep and what to cut, and the worked examples show the finished shape several different ways.

How to write wedding vows: What to do with the answers — the arc, the promises, and the lines to cut.
A wedding vow template you can fill in: The three-movement structure with bracketed blanks, filled three different ways.
Wedding vow examples: Finished examples with the skeleton of each one named underneath it.
When you cannot write your wedding vows: If the questions are answered and the page is still blank, six exercises for tonight.

Being asked one question at a time, by something that waits, is the whole of what Personal Vows does — the story you always end up telling, what you love, what you are actually promising — and then four different drafts written from your answers and nothing else, with a bracketed blank left wherever you left one.

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