Same-sex wedding vow examples

These are vows for two grooms and vows for two brides. The job is the same as on every other page here: one thing that happened, and a promise small enough that somebody could catch you failing at it next week.

What is particular to these shows up as detail rather than as subject — a florist with one line on her form, a mother who set the spare room out differently the second year, an argument about whose name goes first on the mailbox. None of the vows below is about being a same-sex couple. Every one of them is about one person.

What is and is not different

Your wedding is not a statement

Most advice written for these vows turns them into an occasion — a milestone, a long road, a thing that finally happened. That is somebody else’s framing, and a vow written inside it has stopped being addressed to the person standing opposite you.

The small stuff outranks the occasion: Whatever it took to get here, the vow is still built out of a mailbox, a phone answered at your parents’ house, a back bedroom painted the wrong yellow twice. Those are the details nobody else in the world could have, which is the whole reason they are worth saying in front of a room.
The history can be one sentence: If it matters to you that the law took its time, say so — once, plainly, and then keep going. One line lands and stays landed. A paragraph makes the topic the subject of your wedding and leaves the person you are marrying waiting for their turn.
Say the word you are claiming: Husband, wife: the titles do exactly the work here they do anywhere, and they are often being said out loud for the first time. Earn them with the story first, then say them once, flat, the way you would say them at the bank.

Two vows written by two people who agreed to match each other come out general enough to fit either of them. Agree on the length and the tone beforehand, and leave the words alone.

Written for this page

Four same-sex examples

Two written to a husband and two to a wife, each naming the arc underneath it and how to refit it.

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.

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.

Whose name goes first

The trivial object

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.

Written for this page105 words · about 1 minute

Why it works: One argument about something that does not matter, undersold and then promised in the terms it has always had. The caterer’s form sits in the middle as a fact rather than a grievance — noticed, answered in a line, left behind — and the second half puts a rule on everything the mailbox is standing in for.
Make it yours: Pick the argument the two of you actually had about something trivial, and promise to leave it exactly where it is. Then name the things you will not leave that long, and say who is going to raise them.

From this day forward, and the days before it

The words everyone knows

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.

Written for this page106 words · about 1 minute

Why it works: Quotes the clause the room is waiting for and then argues with it gently: the promise is not starting today. The years the law took are one sentence long and are spent immediately on a back bedroom painted the wrong color twice, which is what keeps the vow addressed to one person rather than to an occasion.
Make it yours: If part of your history is that this took a while, give it one line and then get back to the house. What the room cannot supply for itself is the wrong yellow, the worst road in the county, and what you are going to be wrong about next.

Nobody else has your mailbox

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.

Personal Vows asks the questions that get the details out — the story you always end up telling, the thing you are actually promising — and writes four drafts from your answers and nothing else. Nothing is assumed about which of you is which, nothing is borrowed from a form you did not pick, and nothing in it reads like AI wrote it.

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