Different Vows

In developing wedding scripts with couples, I send each partner a questionnaire so I can draft their love story, and I recently added a piece at the bottom where they tell me what vows they want from the dozen I sent them. Since they fill out the questionnaires separately and are asked not to work on them together, I've gotten back different vows selections from each party.

This means if I honor their wishes, each will speak their own choice of vows to the other. So, please repeat after me will not be the same. I'm perplexed right now since I used to have them consult on this, but with the new questionnaire, their choices are divergent.

Frankly, I like the unique vows, since couples who compose their own vows almost always write something unique to them. Last fall I even had one groom who whispered his vows to his bride.

I'm curious how this will finally play out in the coming months. We get used to hearing fairly standard vows and the same ones for each partner, but that assumes we all think homogeneously. We don't. Feel free to comment. What do you think?

Wedding vows

The traditional wedding vows are serious business. Probably the hardest one to uphold is: for richer, for poorer. Few of us are so hard-hearted to abandon a sick spouse or run from the sorrows of a shared suffering. But poorer has it all: it's worse, it's often sorrowful, and its miseries can make us sick.

We tend not to dwell on the vows, but in fact they are solemn promises to keep. The vows are the center of the ceremony and even if we have a civil ceremony, the vows themselves are what makes it all legal. We don't need the rings, and here in Massachusetts, we don't even need witnesses.

So, if you're writing your own vows, look first at tradition---those words can be excellent guidelines to how you construct your own promises.