Wedding vow examples

Everyone here already knows the words. For better, for worse. In sickness, in health.

I want to say which ones I mean. I mean the winter the boiler broke, and you wore my coat indoors and never once said it was hard. I mean the year you were ill and would not say so.

We did those years together already. I vow to do the rest with you — through the highs and the lows.

To have and to hold, from this day forward.

I have been working out what holding is, and it is smaller than it sounds.

It is you at the bottom of the ladder in September while I did the gutter and said I was fine. It is you holding the dog at the vet’s so I did not have to.

To have and to hold. I will hold the ladder. I will hold the dog. I will be at the bottom of whatever the next one is.

For richer, for poorer.

We have done poorer. Nineteen months of it, the apartment over the laundromat, you counting the electric bill out in quarters and singles on the arm of the sofa so I would not see you doing it.

I do not need to promise you richer. Richer looks after itself.

For poorer, then: I will count it out on the arm of the couch beside you, and neither of us will be doing it alone.

You picked me up at two in the morning and didn’t ask why I was crying. You just put the heat on.

So here is the promise: I’ll put the heat on. I’ll say let’s go home when you’ve had enough, and stay a little longer when you haven’t.

For every two in the morning after this one.

You alphabetize the spice rack and then never cook. You say “one second” and mean eleven minutes. You cry at commercials for banks.

I am not marrying you in spite of any of that. I looked at all of it and stayed.

You read the last page first and then tell me you have not spoiled it. You own four half-used bottles of sunscreen and buy a fifth at the airport. You apologize to furniture.

None of that is why I am marrying you. It is how I know it is you and not somebody doing an impression.

I promise to buy the fifth bottle and never once ask about the other four.

It has been four thousand and six days. I know because I counted last Thursday, on the train, on the back of a receipt.

I am not promising forever. Forever is easy to say. I am promising to keep counting.

Right now you are wondering whether I wrote this this morning. I did. I have written it eleven times.

Here is the one I am going to keep: I will do the hard part of the conversation first. I will not let it get late before we say the true thing.

You put the good knife in the dishwasher the week we moved in. I said nothing. That might be the whole marriage.

I promise to say nothing about the knife. I promise to say everything about the rest.

People will tell you I fell for your kindness. For the record, it was your parallel parking.

I have watched you reverse into a space nobody else would try, and thought, plainly: that is the one.

So I promise to be the one holding the coffee while you do the difficult thing.

You will be told I fell for the way you are with my nephew. That is not it.

It was the fitted sheet. You folded one in eleven seconds, did not swear once, and then folded mine, which I had made into a shape.

I am not going to learn how. That is not the promise.

The promise is the difficult end of everything: I will hold it, I will stay in the room, and I will say out loud that you did it.

I chose you in a kitchen with bad light, before I knew what I was choosing.

I chose you again in a hospital corridor at four in the morning.

I am choosing you here, in front of everyone, which is the easiest of the three.

I will keep choosing you on the days it is not easy.

I am not good at saying things like this. So, plainly: I am staying.

I will make the coffee. I will tell you the truth even when it is late and I would rather not.

That is all of it.

I do not think anything arranged this. No plan, no design, no one watching. We met because you took the wrong train.

That is better. It means every day since was chosen, not given.

I promise to keep choosing it on purpose.

I was taught that a promise is a thing you make in front of witnesses so that you cannot quietly take it back.

So, in front of these people and before God: I will not take it back.

I will do the small work. The dishes. The patience. Asking twice how you really are.

I am not here to replace anyone.

I am here for the school run, the wrong-sized shoes, the tenth reading of the same book.

[Their name], I promise you the boring parts. That is where I will be.

The first Christmas I got Nell’s size wrong in every single package. You did not tell me until January.

So I promise to keep guessing. I will get it wrong, keep the receipt, and go back on Saturday.

About the things that actually matter to her, I promise to ask first, and to ask her.

I chose you in a car park outside a swimming lesson, holding somebody else’s towel.

I chose you again the night Theo was sick and asked for you and not me, and I was glad it was you he asked for.

I am choosing all three of you here, which is the easy one.

The fourth time is years off. He will be sixteen and want nothing from me but a ride. I will be in the car.

There were three chairs at your kitchen table. You bought a fourth one second-hand and put it there without saying anything about it.

So here is the promise: without saying anything about it. The ride at seven thirty. The extra sandwich. The school play, both nights, because Ivy is in one and Sam is in the other.

I am the fourth chair. It was in the room before I noticed it was mine.

The first time I did this I meant it, and I did not understand it.

I understand it now. It is not a feeling. It is turning up in a bad week without being asked.

I promise the bad weeks.

You had a key cut for me before you asked me anything. It was on the hall table in a brown envelope, my name on the front, nothing else written.

So here is the promise: nothing else written. No conditions added later. Nothing kept back in case. The same on the days you are hard work and the days I am.

I have done this before. I know exactly what I am leaving on the hall table.

You are standing there wondering whether I am frightened. I am. Not of you. Of being easy to live with for a year and then not being.

So the promise is about the second year, not this afternoon. When I go quiet, I will tell you I have gone quiet. You will not have to work it out from the kitchen doorway.

I have stood up and done this once before. This is the part I did not know to promise.

Nineteen times this year you have asked me how it actually went, and waited through the first answer for the true one.

I know the number because I have been marking them in the back of my planner, in pencil.

I am not promising you that I have learned everything the first time round had to teach me. I am promising the pencil, and the true answer first.

Twenty-two years, which is one thousand one hundred and forty-four Sunday dinners, give or take the ones we ate in the car.

I worked that out this morning on the back of the hotel notepad while you were asleep.

I am not promising you another twenty-two. That one is not mine to promise. I am promising that I am the one who peels, the way I have been since the first of them.

I chose you at twenty-six because you were the most interesting person in a bad apartment.

I chose you at forty, in the car outside the bank, the year the store went and neither of us said whose fault it was.

I am choosing you again today, in front of the same people, plus the two we have made since.

The fourth one has not happened. I will not see it coming. I will choose it anyway.

The closet door has been off its hinge for eleven years. We have discussed it perhaps forty times. It is still off.

I promise you the closet door stays exactly where it is. Some things are load-bearing.

Everything else — the money, the move, the thing you have not told me yet — I will do this week, and not in eleven years.

I have been saying the word husband out loud in the car, to hear what it does to my voice.

The night the alternator went you drove out to me with a flashlight in your teeth and never once said that you had told me to get it looked at.

So here is the promise: never once. I will not say I told you so. I will be the one out there with the light.

Husband. I have practiced it in the car for a month. I can say it in front of people now.

You are the man who reads the whole hardware aisle and buys the second cheapest of everything. You keep a level in the trunk. You will not take the last of anything in case somebody else wanted it.

Nine years of that, and I am still finding things out and writing them down like they are good news. They are.

So I promise to say that I want the last one, out loud, so you can hand it over and be right about me.

You are standing there working out how long this is going to be. It is short.

Your mother is in the second row and she has told me twice that her son does not cry. She is going to be wrong in about a minute, and that is fine, and I am not going to look when it happens.

Here is the one I am going to keep: when I am angry with you I will say the actual thing and not the smaller thing standing next to it.

In sickness and in health.

We have done sickness. Nine days last March when you could not keep water down, and I learned the words for things I had never had to say out loud.

You apologized. Twice an hour. To me. For being ill.

In sickness, then: I am not accepting the apology. I will fill the cup, set it where you can reach it, and go back to my chair.

And in health, husband — I have wanted to call you that since March — I would like a great many years of nothing happening at all.

You open the kitchen window in January for four minutes, every morning, because you say a house should get a chance to start over. I have complained about it for six years and I have never once closed it.

So here is the promise: four minutes. I will complain, and I will leave it open, and I will be standing in the cold beside you when the four minutes are up.

Here is the sentence I have been waiting to say in front of people: my wife opens the kitchen window in January.

You are the woman who owes the public library forty dollars and will not renew online because you would rather walk in and be told off by somebody who knows you.

You salt everything before you taste it. You have named both cars.

I did not agree to any of it. I found it out one piece at a time over four years, and I am still finding it out.

I promise to pay the fine and not tell you until you notice.

There are two hundred and six voicemails from you on this phone. Nobody has left a voicemail since 2015 except you.

I counted them Sunday morning while you were at the market, and then I sat there and did not delete one.

I am not going to promise that I will keep all of them forever. Phones do what phones do.

I am promising to pick up more often, so there are fewer to leave — and the ones there are, wife, I am keeping as long as the phone lets me.

I chose you at a rest stop on I-80, eating a sandwich off the hood of the car, before I knew I was doing it.

I chose you again in a stairwell the afternoon the offer fell through, when you said we should go and look at it anyway.

Your grandmother asked me that year what my intentions were with her granddaughter. I did not have the words then. Today is the words.

The fourth one has not happened. It will not look like a choice when it comes. I will make it anyway, and tell you on the day.

The story everybody wants is the florist, who called Monday and asked which of us was the groom, and then went and found a form with two lines on it without being asked twice.

Good story. Not the reason.

The reason is that you answer the phone at my parents’ house like you live there. You have said “we” about their driveway. You know which burner does not light.

So, and this part is not a joke: whatever line a form gives us, I am standing in it with you, and I will be the one who calls back.

The first year, my mother put us in separate rooms. The second year she did not, and she did not say anything about it either. There were two towels on the bed.

She calls you her son-in-law to the neighbors now. I heard her practicing it at the sink.

So here is the promise: two towels, no announcement. I will say “my husband” at the tire shop and the dentist and the bank, flat, the way you say the weather, until it is the weather.

She put them out the night before we got there. I checked.

We argued for a week about whose name went first on the mailbox. Not the paperwork. The mailbox.

You won because you said yours was shorter and would look better. That was true, and it was not the reason.

The caterer’s sheet says BRIDE 1 and BRIDE 2. You are one. I am two. I let that one go.

So: I promise you the mailbox. It stays as it is.

Everything else — the money, the move we keep not making — I will bring up first, and I will not make you win it twice.

Two names, one box. Mine is the long one.

From this day forward.

A word about the days before it.

For the first six years, this state would not have let us stand here. We did not spend them waiting. We spent them painting the back bedroom the wrong yellow, twice, and driving to your sister’s on the worst road in the county.

So: from this day forward. Also every day before it. I am not starting today. I am saying what was true at the first yellow.

Wife: the back bedroom is due another coat. I will be wrong about the color again, in front of everybody, as long as you want the house.