June 8, 2006

Some Tips on Writing Your Own Vows

By JOHN LOFY
For The Associated Press
Of the many important parts of a wedding — the perfect dress, good music, someone who wants to marry you — one stands apart: the vows. Reduce the ceremony to its essentials, and what do you have? A promise, a VOW, with witnesses.
You can dress that promise in expensive pageantry and glamour, or blurt it out in a Vegas drive-thru, but either way, you’re hitched.
If you’re like a lot of almost-marrieds, you’re thinking about writing your own vows.
“Even in traditional ceremonies,” says Kathleen Murray, senior editor of the wedding Web site The Knot, “most people are doing their own.”
Some tweak old formulas (remember “love, honor, and obey”?) to suit modern tastes. Others compose vows that are entirely new.
Lauren Kingsley, a writer and artist from Dexter, Mich., says she and her husband, Jack Spack, Jr., wrote their own vows because they wanted to say something new that was not “a cliché, schmaltzy or stale.”
Still, the prospect of writing and performing the vows was intimidating. Though Kingsley is a professional writer, she wasn’t quite sure what the vows were actually supposed to do. As for Spack, who runs a septic company, he was afraid his wife’s ease with words would make him look “like an idiot” by comparison.
They found themselves confronted by a common problem: Once you’ve decided to write your own vows, and received the go-ahead from your wedding officiant, what next? What ingredients make vows perfect and amazing?
First of all, Murray says, keep it brief and simple. “The best vows are short, sweet and from the heart.” No doubt you could praise your loved one for hours, expressing your devotion to his or her every hair follicle. Don’t.
“You can write your spouse a letter saying those things,” says Murray.
Reducing your vows to the essentials is difficult, but it’s worth the effort. It makes you figure out what’s most important, and when you say those few crucial things, people — you included — will remember them better than you will a long list.
Other suggestions:
— Figure out the core of what YOU have to say. Let tradition and other people’s words inspire you, but make your vows your own. After all, that’s the point of writing them yourself. Why do you want to marry this person? What are you promising?
“Put your parents out of your mind, or anyone who wants you to say certain things, and say what you want to say,” Kingsley advises. “This is purely a sacred thing between you and your beloved.”
— Speak to your mate, but remember the audience. “Don’t be cryptic,” Murray says. Inside jokes and obscure references leave the audience out — and you did invite them to witness and approve your union.
But what about that performance anxiety? Kingsley answered her question about the function of the vows by studying books and Web sites for examples from different religions, cultures and eras. (The Knot’s site has its own list.) “I mainly learned what I didn’t want to say,” she laughs, but the history lesson gave her confidence and direction.
Spack, who feared his vows wouldn’t match up to his bride’s, found that the writing wasn’t so bad after all. “I just sat down and wrote from the heart,” he said. To his surprise, writing allowed him to say more than he might have otherwise. “People say things to each other all the time, ‘I love you’ or whatever. But when you write something, you take it more seriously.”
To make the writing go easier, Murray offers a few additional tips.
“Don’t wait until the last minute,” she insists. “Sit down together with a glass of wine, well before the ceremony, and talk about what you want to say.”
Do you both want to say the same words, or each come up with your own? Some people split the difference, starting and ending with a shared promise, and inserting their own material in between. For some, the vows consist only of the promise. Others add a statement of love, or a short explanation of why they’ve decided to marry.
Once you’ve written a draft, Murray advises, “Practice. Read it through to avoid tongue-twisters” and to check the length.
And finally, don’t worry about perfection.
“If there is a glitch,” Murray says, “it just humanizes the event.”
What makes for bad vows? Murray, whose job requires that she be diplomatic, says there are no “worst vows,” because all of them are meaningful. But, she sighs, with the tone of someone who’s heard it all, “You don’t want to give a baffling performance-art monologue.”
Kingsley takes it a step further. “Get your ego out of there,” she says. “This is your promise to your spouse. It’s not to show off or get people thinking you’re so funny or eloquent.”
Be sure your vows “fit the vibe of the ceremony,” Murray says. “In a very traditional Catholic High Mass, you probably don’t want to tell embarrassing stories about your spouse.”
In fact, even an informal ceremony should include “nothing embarrassing. It’s not the time to roast your spouse.”
Lastly, remember that writing fresh vows isn’t for everyone. Murray herself, just married this fall, did not write her own. She preferred words “passed down from generation to generation. They spoke to me of the core value of the sacrament.”
In the end, that’s what matters most. New or old, the best vows are so powerful they can change your life. Being married is very different from living together, mainly because of the seriousness of a promise, spoken in front of family and friends.
“We’d been together eight years, and we thought we loved each other as much as we could,” says Spack. “But saying those vows, saying what we felt and making that commitment, it deepened our love.”