A wedding vow template you can fill in
A wedding vow template is worth having for one reason: it removes the question of what comes next, which is the question that keeps people staring at a page. What it cannot do is write the vow. Every word that will matter on the day is a word only you can put in, so this template is built out of blanks rather than sentences — fill them in and you have a draft; leave one in and you have something nobody could stand up and read.
Below: the three-movement structure with the blanks marked, three worked passes that fill the same shape from completely different material, and the short list of ways to stop it sounding like a form.
Before you fill anything in
What a template can do, and what it cannot
A structure is scaffolding. It holds the shape up while you work, and then most of it comes down.
The reason a blank page is hard is not that you have nothing to say. It is that you are being asked to decide what to say and what order to say it in at the same time, and those two jobs interfere with each other. A template settles the second one for free. That is genuinely most of the difficulty, and it is why starting from a shape rather than from nothing gets a draft out of people in one evening.
What it will not do is make the vow yours. A filled-in template is a first draft, and the difference between a first draft and a vow is entirely in the details you put in the blanks — the number of the street, the thing you have watched a hundred times and never mentioned, the promise you are slightly afraid to say in front of people. Nobody can supply those and no structure implies them.
There is one template on the internet you should be careful with, and it is the finished one: a complete vow with two names swapped out. It reads beautifully, because somebody wrote it about somebody. Said at your own wedding it is a well-made suit cut for another person, and the room can tell — not from any single line, but from the fact that none of the lines could only be about the two of you.
The structure
The template, in three movements
Open on the two of you in a specific place, say what you love in evidence rather than adjectives, then land on the promises. Everything in brackets is yours.
- 1 — Open on the two of you, somewhere
- A place, a time of day, and one thing that happened. Not a feeling — a feeling has to earn the room’s attention, and a room already has it. Say their name early: it turns the whole thing to face the person it is for.
Movement one [their name] — [the place this all started], [the time of day]. [what the two of you were doing there]. I remember [the small thing you noticed and have never mentioned], and I remember thinking [the thought you had, in the words you had it in].
- 2 — Say what you love, as evidence
- This is the movement that collapses into adjectives if you let it. Do not name the quality; describe the thing you watched, and let everybody listening do the arithmetic themselves. One piece of evidence, told properly, outruns four adjectives.
Movement two What I know about you, I know because [the ordinary thing you have watched a hundred times]. You [the thing that happened, told plainly], and [what that cost, or what nobody else noticed about it]. That is not [the easy word for it]. That is [what it actually is], and I have never had to take anybody’s word for it.
- 3 — Land on the promises
- Three to five, in the same grammar, each pointing at something different. The turn out of the past is the moment this stops being a lovely paragraph and becomes a vow, so make it plainly and do not take a run-up.
Movement three So here is what I am promising you. I promise to [the promise you want to make first]. I promise to [the small thing], every time, [the moment when it actually counts]. I promise [the promise that scares you a little]. And when [the hard thing you can both already see coming], I promise to [what you will do about it].
Two optional blanks, both of which belong at the very end if you use them at all: [the thing you would say if nobody else was listening], said anyway, and [the day you would both want to remember], named once. Skip both before you pad either. A short vow that stops when it is finished is one of the few things in a wedding nobody ever wishes had gone on longer.
The same shape, three times
Three passes at the blanks
One template, three completely different sets of material. What they share is the skeleton; what makes them unusable by each other is everything else.
Nadia — the parking lot behind the Greek place, eleven at night, both of us waiting on a tow truck that a man on the phone had already promised twice. You had my jacket on and you kept saying you were not cold. You read the menu in the window out loud, doing all the accents, and I stood there working out that I would be fine waiting until morning.
What I know about you, I know because I have watched you make the phone call nobody wants to make. You called that company back a third time and you were kind to the woman who answered, and she was not the reason we were standing outside in October. That is not patience. That is a decision, made again every time, and I have never had to take anybody’s word for it.
So here is what I am promising you. I promise to make the call when the call is mine to make. I promise to take the burnt piece of toast, every time, without turning it into a thing you have to thank me for. I promise to tell you the bad news on the day I hear it. And when the truck is two hours late and it is nobody’s fault, I promise to be the one reading the menu out loud.
Priya — the kitchen on Ashby Street, six-thirty in the morning, the radio turned down so low that neither of us can hear it. You stand there waiting for the kettle with your eyes shut. Nine years of that and I have never once mentioned it to you. I am mentioning it now, in front of everybody, because it is the picture I have of you.
What I know about you, I know from what you do with a bad week. You do not announce it. You make the dinner that takes four hours, and then you talk about something else entirely, and by the time the plates are cleared the thing has been put back to its actual size. That is not being easy to live with. That is work, done quietly, and I have watched you do it for nine years.
So here is what I am promising you. I promise to be up before the kettle more often than I have been. I promise to say the hard thing first, on the day, and not to save it for a car journey. I promise to keep learning the four-hour dinner, badly, for as long as it takes. And when it is my bad week, I promise to let you see it, which is the one I will find hardest.
Theo — the line for the bathroom at somebody else’s birthday, which is not a story and I am telling it anyway. You asked me what I did and then you listened to the whole answer, which took a while, because I was nervous and it was not a short answer. You did not look over my shoulder once.
I cannot prove what I love about you with one thing, so here are three small ones. You text your grandmother back the same day. You have never let me feel slow. You still read the instructions, all the way through, while I am already holding the wrong screw.
So here is what I am promising you. I promise to read the instructions. I promise to listen to the whole answer, including the part where you are working out what you think. I promise to be somewhere you can find me. And when I am wrong about something in front of your family, I promise to say so at the table rather than in the car afterwards.
Read the three openings next to each other and you can see what the template is actually worth. It decided the order and it decided nothing else — a parking lot, a kettle and a line for a bathroom are not variations of one another, and no amount of structure would have produced any of them. If you want more shapes than this one, the worked vow examples set out several, each with its skeleton named.
The second pass
Five ways to stop it reading like a form
Everything that makes a template useful while you are writing makes it audible once you are finished. This is the pass where the scaffolding comes down.
- Cut the joins. “So here is what I am promising you” did its job in the draft by getting you across the gap. If the promises can start on their own, let them, and delete the sentence that announced them.
- Break the rhythm once. Five sentences of the same length in a row is the sound of a form being completed. One very short sentence, in the middle, fixes it — usually the truest one you have.
- Swap one adjective for a fact. Go through and find the place you described a quality instead of the evidence for it. There is almost always exactly one left, and it is almost always in movement two.
- Move a movement. Opening on a promise and reaching the story afterwards is a real arc and a good one. The order here is the safest, not the only.
- Read it standing up. A template’s seams are inaudible on screen and unmistakable out loud. Whatever your own mouth refuses to say is the line the structure wrote, not you.
One last check, and it is the same one the full method ends on: swap both names out and read it again. Any sentence that survives intact is a sentence the template wrote. Delete it, and put the thing it was standing in for in its place.
Related
- How to write wedding vows
- The whole method underneath this template — where the material comes from, and what to cut.
- Wedding vow examples
- Finished examples, each with its arc named and instructions for refitting it to your own.
- Questions to ask before you write your vows
- The questions that fill the blanks, grouped, with what each one is quietly retrieving.
- How long should wedding vows be?
- What a filled-in template should come out at, in words and in minutes said out loud.
Personal Vows is this template with the blanks turned into questions: it asks one at a time, writes four different drafts from your answers and nothing else, and leaves a bracketed blank wherever a detail is missing rather than inventing one — then sets it large enough to read from at arm’s length.