Wedding vow examples for him

These are vows written to the man you are marrying. Nothing on this page assumes who is saying them — a vow to a husband is written by whoever is standing opposite him, and the only thing his being a man changes is which words are available to you.

That is a smaller change than it looks, and a more useful one. "Husband" is one of the few words in a vow that carries weight without being a compliment, because it is a title you are handing over rather than a quality you are claiming to see. Every vow below uses it once, and earns it first.

What the word is doing

Husband is a title, not a compliment

Almost every word a vow reaches for describes him. This one does something else: it names what he becomes by the end of the sentence, which is why it lands when nothing around it is trying.

Earn it, then say it once: A vow that opens on the word has spent it before anybody has heard why. Put the story first and let the title arrive at the end of it, as the thing the story was heading toward. Once is enough. Twice is a chorus, and by the third it is punctuation.
"The man who" has to finish on a habit: The phrase only works if what comes after it could not be said about anyone else in the room. The man who reads the whole hardware aisle. The man who will not take the last of anything. If the sentence ends in a virtue instead, cut the phrase and keep the virtue — it was doing the work on its own.
Do not write to a type: The roundups on this term hand back the same four vows about a provider, a protector and a rock. None of that is about him. Whatever is actually true — that he keeps a level in the trunk, that he drove out at midnight and never said he had warned you — is the only material that could not be swapped onto somebody else.

One more thing the word can do, quietly: it is often being said out loud for the first time. Saying it flat, the way you would say it at the bank, is stronger than saying it as though it were a revelation.

Written for this page

Six for-him examples

Each one names the arc underneath it, why it works, and how to swap your own details in.

These run shorter than the 150 to 300 words a finished set usually takes. That is deliberate: each one is cut to the length where you can still see the arc working. Yours will be longer, because yours will have the details these cannot have.

Practicing the word

The admission

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.

Written for this page95 words · about 1 minute

Why it works: The title is the last thing in the vow rather than the first, and it arrives having been rehearsed out loud in a parked car — so it lands as something being claimed rather than an endearment being spent. The promise in the middle is two words lifted straight out of the story.
Make it yours: Say the word somewhere private before you write anything. Then find the smallest thing he did that you want it to mean, and promise that exact thing back in the words it happened in.

The man in the hardware aisle

The unflattering list

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.

Written for this page84 words · 55 sec

Why it works: "The man who" only works when what follows it could not be said about anybody else standing in the room, so every item is a thing done rather than a quality held. The closing promise is small, faintly silly, and about the speaker instead of about him, which is what keeps a list of habits from turning into a verdict.
Make it yours: Write down five things he does that you would have to explain to somebody who has never met him. Cut anything that makes him look good — those are the ones doing no work. Then promise one thing back that costs you something small.

The mother in the second row

The present tense

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.

Written for this page89 words · 60 sec

Why it works: Opens in the room, and takes its one marked word from a fact somebody else supplied — what his mother has twice said about her son. Nothing has to be asserted about him at all, and the promise that closes it is a piece of behavior rather than a feeling.
Make it yours: Name what he is genuinely thinking as you stand there, including the unflattering guess, and answer it. If somebody in the room has said a thing about him that is about to be proved wrong, that is a detail nobody else could have.

In sickness, named

The words everyone knows

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.

Written for this page99 words · about 1 minute

Why it works: Answers one clause of the traditional pair with a stretch that already happened, carried by a cup and a chair rather than by any word for hardship. The title arrives once, inside the health half, with the reason it has been waited for attached to it.
Make it yours: Pick the traditional clause you already know you want to say, and name the occasion it has been true. Then say what you want the other half of the pair to look like: years of nothing happening is an honest answer and a specific one.

Which of us was the groom

The comic anticlimax

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.

Written for this page99 words · about 1 minute

Why it works: The story everybody expects is told, credited and set down inside ten lines, so the joke never has to be defended. What replaces it is a driveway. The turn to the promise happens once and does not apologize on the way past.
Make it yours: Whatever the good story about your wedding is, tell it and then say plainly that it is not the reason. The reason is smaller, and it usually happened at somebody else’s house.

What my mother did with the spare room

The admission

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.

Written for this page97 words · about 1 minute

Why it works: The whole vow is two towels on a bed and the fact that nothing was said about them. The promise is that exact silence turned into a habit — the word said flat, in three places where nobody is expecting a speech — and the close returns to the object rather than reaching past it.
Make it yours: Find the thing somebody did for the two of you without announcing it, and promise the not-announcing rather than the thing itself. Then name three dull places you will use the word, because those are the ones that prove it.

The word is the easy half

All thirty-eight wedding vow examples: The whole corpus on one page, with the arcs underneath them and the lines worth cutting.
How to write wedding vows: The whole method, given away — how to start when the page will not start, and what makes a promise worth saying.

Anyone can write "my husband"; almost nobody can say offhand which night, which flashlight, which two towels somebody left out without mentioning it. Personal Vows asks the questions that get those out — the story you always end up telling, the thing you are actually promising — and writes four drafts from your answers and nothing else. Where you did not tell us something, the draft leaves a bracket for you to fill in rather than inventing one.

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