It's never to early to start on your vows

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While rushing to write your vows while you're getting dressed on your wedding day is definitely not advised, is starting too early also a problem? Most wedding advice says you shouldn't because you will be tempted to work them over and over and over again.

I, on the other hand, am a firm believer in starting as soon as you can. With a rider of course. It all depends on how you interpret "start" and what working on your vows entails.

There's work to do before you start writing

Vows don't just come out of the air. Unless, of course, you just google, find something that will do, and copy. and paste. Which isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, writing your own vows.

Trying to recycle someone else's commitment doesn't work!

It doesn't work because all you're seeing is the end of THEIR process, not the history, thought, and personal commitment that was fed into that process, nor the psychology of the specific word choices that make those vows specific to that couple.

Consider you vows in the context of your whole ceremony

Your vows should complement your ceremony, not duplicate parts of it. If you're getting married in a celebrant-led ceremony, the ceremony will be grounded in your relationship. It will be personal. Which means it will naturally include references to your story and to your feelings for one another. If, however, you are marrying in a religious ceremony, the ceremony will be grounded in liturgy, with little or no personal references, meaning that the only opportunity for you to make any sort of personal statement about your relationship will be through your vows. Under those circumstances, following the common advice to include reminiscences about how you met and include an anecdote or two, makes sense.

Negotiate

Some judicious negotiating before you get down to actually writing your vows will pay dividends.

There are two people you need to reach agreement with.

1. The person who is officiating the ceremony
2. Your partner

Your task will be made easier if you understand the expectations of both!

In a civil celebrant led ceremony there are legal vows that you need to make in order to be legally married. And then there are personal vows. You must comply with the legal requirements and ensure that your personal vows meet legal requirements (in Australia it is not permissable to put conditions on your commitment to marriage) and flow effortlessly when said in conjunction with the legal words.

For symmetry the two of you need to make vows of similar length. Your celebrant may have some advice about how long they should be, expressed either in word-count or minutes. For reference, I recommend no more than 2 minutes.

But, you should also agree on a number of other things, some of them purely logistical, others important to your relationship.

• Will you work on your vows together, or keep them a surprise for the day?
• Will you
• read your vows
• repeat after your celebrant, or
• do something unusual, like frame your personal promises as a question and answer conversation between the two of you?
• Are you going to have a discussion about the broad areas you are both going to commit to but do the actual writing of your promises in each in your own style?
• Or will you work on core promises together, so you make identical promises, but each add one or two personal promises you haven't shared beforehand?
  

Think first, draft next, write last

Or, to put it another way

• Explore what you want to say in your head well before you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard
  
• Develop the structure - what goes first, what will you say in the middle, and how will you wrap it up
• Scribble! Don't worry about sentence structure, perfect grammar, or even necessarily the perfect words. Just get your thoughts down
• Let it settle and then come back to it, review to ensure that you've covered the bases, and only then edit til you have a final version that says what you want it to say, and it easy to read or say out loud.

Share with your celebrant

Your celebrant needs to see your vows ahead of your ceremony in order to be able to

• compare your vows with your partner's for length
  
• to make sure that your personal promises meet legal requirements (there are some!)
• to be alerted to any need to make changes to the ceremony script in order to avoid duplication
  

Practice, practice, practice

Practice saying your vows out loud. Again and again. The more familiar your tongue is with your vows, the more confident you'll feel on the day.

Format and print

If you are reading your vows, print in a clear and large font on an attractive card. You need to be able to read them, easily, and you want the card to look great in the photos.

Thanks for reading!