Second marriage vow examples

Vows the second time round are written by somebody who knows what the promises cost. That is an advantage, and most advice on second marriages treats it as a problem to be managed.

The vows below use it. They are specific about what was learned rather than about what went wrong, and none of them spends a line apologizing for having been here before.

The thing only you can say

What the second time knows

A first vow promises in good faith. A second one promises knowing exactly what is being promised, and that is the only thing a first vow cannot do.

Acknowledged, never characterized: Your first marriage can be present in the vow without being described in it. "I know what I am promising" says everything the room needs. A characterization — of the marriage, of the person, of whose fault it was — turns your wedding into a hearing about somebody who is not there.
Say what you learned, in behavior: Not "I have grown" but the thing you now do. Saying the hard thing on the day rather than the following week. Asking rather than assuming. A lesson stated as a habit is checkable; a lesson stated as growth is a claim.
Choosing is the second-time verb: The first time, the story is usually falling. The second time, it is choosing — deliberately, with your eyes open, more than once. That is the arc underneath most of the vows below, and it is not available to anyone marrying for the first time.

If children are part of this marriage, the promises made to them are the ones most likely to be remembered. There are examples of that on the blended family page.

Written for this page

Four second marriage 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.

Doing this again

The promise renewed

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.

Written for this page40 words · 30 sec

Why it works: Admits the earlier failure without litigating it, then replaces the abstraction with a behavior. Three words close it, which is what makes them land.
Make it yours: Do not explain what went wrong before. One sentence of acknowledgement buys you the entire rest of the vow.

The key on the hall table

The admission

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.

Written for this page77 words · 50 sec

Why it works: Opens and closes on the same object, with the smallest detail in the scene — "nothing else written" — turned into the promise word for word. The earlier marriage is acknowledged in one line and never explained, which is what buys the rest of the vow its room.
Make it yours: One sentence of acknowledgement is enough, and it sits better near the end than at the start. Spend the opening on something they did before you had asked them for anything.

The year after the easy one

The present tense

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.

Written for this page81 words · 55 sec

Why it works: Starts in the room and names the fear instead of the occasion. What the second time knows is put as a piece of behavior — telling somebody you have gone quiet — rather than as a lesson learned, so nothing has to be said about how the first one ended.
Make it yours: Say what you are actually afraid of, then promise the exact signal you will give when it happens. A fear is only worth naming out loud if the promise follows it immediately.

Nineteen, in pencil

Precision as proof

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.

Written for this page68 words · 45 sec

Why it works: Counts something the other person does rather than something the speaker feels, which is what keeps an exact number from being a flourish. Refusing the larger claim — that everything has been learned by now — is what makes the small promise after it believable.
Make it yours: Count something they do for you and say where you have been keeping the count. Then promise the smallest possible version of doing it back, and stop there.

You already know what this costs

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.

Which is exactly why the blank page is worse the second time. 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 your history, because nothing is written that you did not say.

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