First, let me congratulate you on getting married. It really is the thing that grown-ups do. To be a husband or a wife is more than being a “partner”: it’s entering into a covenant relationship whereby you submit your own personal feelings, happiness, and choices to this greater commitment that you have made. And should you keep that commitment, you will be a better human being for it.
But now the wedding is approaching and you’re starting to get into the details of the ceremony. The question arises: should we write our own vows? This has become quite the thing to do, with estimates (there probably aren’t super reliable statistics on something like this) being that around half of couples deciding to write their own vows. I want to say: don’t do it.
I will grant from the outset that the modern wedding format is not intrinsically sacred nor required. One does not need to honor every tradition, and if one chose to do so it would be a long wedding. A wedding is meant to publicly declare the commitment a man and woman make to one another in a way that is culturally understandable. Jewish, Indian, and Mexican weddings all vary in their customs, moods, and duration – and this is a good thing. So I don’t want to pretend that there is a specifically “Christian” way of organizing a wedding to which everyone must conform. Having said that, if you are reading this in English and are a descendant of Western Christendom, then I think you should use the traditional vows.
Wedding vows date back to the middle of the 16th century and the Book of Common Prayer. Various Christian traditions exist and there have been modifications over time. The concepts behind the vows stem from a traditional Christian understanding of marriage, but the words themselves do not flow verbatim from the texts of Scripture. So again, there is no violation of a biblical mandate if these words are not used.
But if you want to have a successful marriage, then you had better understand what you’re getting into. Marriage isn’t about your personal happiness. Marriage isn’t about how you feel today. Marriage is a commitment involving children, property, dinner, church, loss, sorrows, joys, and a million other things that you will encounter together in the relentless flow of time. You are pledging to remain faithful and loyal to your spouse even if you change, or they change, or the world changes. Marriage is leaving individualism far behind. Marriage is for the days of plenty and the days of lack. Marriage is for the good times and the bad.
If you start that journey off by trying to define your relationship with this other human being in terms that reflect a personal, subjective, and mutable commitment, I say that you are not getting off on the right foot. The glory of the vows is that they represent something outside of the individuals getting married. If you want to tell your spouse how you feel, then by all means write it in a card or a poem or a song. But if you want to enter into that glorious institution of marriage, then make the pledge that your fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers (or mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers) made. The whole purpose of marriage is negated if marriage becomes subject to your own definitions. The glory of marriage is that it is larger than you and outside of your control.
If you want to define the nature of your relationship, then your marriage will always be contingent upon you. Your feelings: which will change. Your concepts of personal fulfillment: which will change. You get the picture. The only way to start off a marriage on the right foot is by acknowledging that marriage itself is something above you. It is beyond your ken. You will one day complain that you didn’t know what you were getting into. Right. Now you’re onto something. But knowing that you didn’t know what you were getting into, you pledged that you would experience that journey with this other person: handcuffed together for life. And don’t worry, you won’t have too much time to think about it if you’re making babies and raising babies and feeding babies. And by that time, you’ll start to understand the joy and glory of submitting yourself to a standard high above your personal feelings. So use the vows. Enter into the glorious mystery, the cosmic wonder, and the ancient practical joke that is marriage.
Groom: I,____, take thee,_____, to be my wedded Wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth.
Bride: I,_____, take thee,_____, to be my wedded Husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I give thee my troth.
Nathan Writes 