Renewing your vows

The whole difference

You are testifying, not promising into the dark

A first vow is made in good faith about something you have not lived through. A renewal is made by somebody who knows what it costs — and can say so.

Stand at the front on your wedding day and promise to stay through the hard part, and you mean every word of it while having only a general idea of what the hard part is. That is not a criticism of first vows; it is the nature of them. It is also why they lean on adjectives, on the future tense, and on how sure you feel — because feeling sure is genuinely most of what you have.

Years later you have something better than certainty. You have things that actually happened. A year one of you would rather not describe. A month somebody slept in a chair. The winter the money did not work out. Every one of those is proof of exactly what the first vow could only assert, and the whole craft of a renewal is putting the proof where the assertion used to be.

This is also the answer to the worry almost everybody has about renewing: that saying it twice makes the first one look provisional. It does the opposite. A promise repeated by somebody who now knows what they were promising is the strongest version of it there is, and everybody listening understands that without being told.

Why now

Four occasions, and what each one changes

The reason you are doing this is already half of the writing. It sets what the vow is about and it answers the only question anybody listening has.

A round-numbered anniversary

The material is the years themselves. Ten of anything is a lot of evidence, so the temptation is to summarize it — resist that, and pick two or three specific years instead. A vow that names the year the boiler broke is worth six that say “a decade of memories”.

After a hard year

The most common reason and the least often stated out loud. You do not have to describe what happened; you only have to be honest that something did. Naming it in one clause and then moving to what you are promising next is almost always enough, and it is the version everybody can get through.

Because the first time was small, or fast, or nobody was there

Eloping, a wedding done in a morning, a wedding rearranged twice and then held with four people. This one is not a repeat at all — it is the first time these words have been said in front of the people you wanted at the time, which makes it much closer to writing a first vow, with the advantage of years of material.

No reason in particular

Perfectly good, and the hardest to write, because there is no occasion doing the framing for you. Supply one from the material instead: something you noticed recently, something you have never said, something that has changed in how you see them. Then it has a reason, and the reason is true.

Whichever it is, say it in the vow rather than assuming everybody knows. One sentence, early — we are doing this because — settles the room and gives your own writing something to push off from.

The originals

What to keep, and what to quietly update

Go and find the old ones if you still have them. They are the best writing prompt you will get, whichever way you end up using them.

• Keep one line, verbatim. Say it again exactly as you said it, and let the room hear the quotation. One repeated sentence does more than a whole vow of new ones, because everybody can hear the years between the two sayings of it.
• Update the promise you got wrong. Not the one you broke — the one that turned out to be about the wrong thing. Most first vows promise something the marriage never actually needed. Replacing it with what it needed instead is the most honest sentence available to you.
• Retire what has been achieved. “I promise to build a life with you” was a good promise once. It is now a description of the house you are standing in, and it should be said as one and then let go of.
• Add the one you could not have made. There is always a promise you did not know to make at the time, because you did not yet know it was needed. That is the line the whole thing is for.
• If the originals are lost, say so. “I cannot remember what I promised you, apart from one part” is a true and rather good opening, and it is a great deal better than reconstructing something and presenting it as what you said.

The general-to-specific edit is the same one a first vow needs, and the pillar works through it at length in the full method. What changes here is that you have better material to swap in.

Instead of“These twenty years have flown by”

Twenty years, and I could still tell you what you said to me on the stairs the night before we moved.

The same span of time, said as a thing you can check rather than a thing people say about time.

Instead of“You have been my rock through everything”

You slept in a hospital chair for nine nights and you never once made me feel like it was a favor.

A first vow could not have written the second sentence. That is the entire advantage of writing this one now.

Instead of“I would marry you all over again”

I am saying this again on purpose, in front of people, with the receipts.

The stock line is the sentiment; the replacement is the act you are actually performing.

The register

The room is smaller, and the writing should know it

Almost everybody in front of you already knows the story, has met the family, and watched some of the hard part happen. That changes what the words have to do.

• Skip the introductions. A first vow spends its opening establishing who these two people are for an audience that partly does not know. Yours does. Start further in — it is the single biggest reason a renewal can be shorter and better.
• You are allowed to be funnier, and specific enough to be private. An in-joke that would have needed explaining at the wedding lands here, because the people in the room were there for it.
• Drop the formality a notch. The grand register belongs to the first time, when the words were doing something official; this is two people who have been talking to each other every day for years, and it should sound like one of those conversations, said carefully and out loud.
• Expect it to be harder to say, not easier. First vows are carried along by nerves and adrenaline. These are said calmly, about things that actually happened, which is precisely why people stop halfway. Practice the paragraph you already suspect.

One thing worth deciding early: whether you write these together or apart. Writing them apart and hearing them for the first time on the day is the version with the surprise in it, and after years together a genuine surprise is rare and worth protecting. Agree the rough length and the rough tone, then stay out of each other’s drafts.

How long

Shorter than you think, and shorter than the first ones

The same band works: 150 to 300 words, which is 1½ to 3 minutes said out loud at the pace people actually read at when they are standing up. Aim at the lower half of it.

The pull toward length is strong here and it is worth naming, because it is a reasonable instinct rather than a mistake: there is more to cover, so it feels as though more should be said. But a renewal has no introductions to make and no case to argue, and the extra years do not need summarizing — they need two or three of them naming precisely. Coverage is what makes these run long, and coverage is exactly what nobody remembers.

Three or four promises, the same as the first time. If there is a stretch of years you want to account for, account for it in one sentence and one detail rather than in a paragraph. The full answer on length, with the timings works through the arithmetic, and it applies here unchanged.

Print what you are going to say, large, one promise to a paragraph, with no promise split across a page turn — and do it days before rather than the night before. That advice is identical for a first vow and it matters slightly more here, because you will be reading calmly, at arm’s length, with people close enough to see the page.