How to write your wedding vows

At some point in the months before a wedding, one or both partners will sit down at a kitchen table with a blank document open and try to write their vows. The blank document is the hard part. What follows is a field guide to filling it — drawn from the patterns that recur in the vows we typeset and from the small structural mistakes that make personal vows stall.

This guide is built around three premises:

1. Personal vows are short. The good ones almost always land between 300 and 500 words. Anything longer starts to feel like a toast.
2. Personal vows are specific. Vague vows are forgettable; specific vows are the ones the room remembers fifteen years later.
3. Personal vows are promises. They are not a love letter, an introduction speech, or a list of compliments. They are a small set of declarations about the future, delivered in front of witnesses.

Hold those three premises and the writing gets a lot easier.

Before you write: a few decisions to make together

Some couples write their vows in isolation and surprise each other on the day. Some draft them collaboratively, then read them at the ceremony. Both work. But there are a small number of decisions that are much easier to make together, before either of you writes a word:

• Length. Are you each writing 300 words, or 800? If one of you writes a paragraph and the other writes an essay, the asymmetry will be felt. Pick a target length together. We recommend 350–450 words read at a conversational pace — about two to three minutes.
• Tone. Is this primarily serious, primarily funny, or a balance? If one of you opens with a joke and the other opens with "I will love you until the day I die," the contrast can read as a mismatch. Pick a tonal range and stay roughly inside it.
• Structure. Are you both writing the same structural shape (e.g., "I promise to...") or are you each free to do what you want? A shared scaffolding makes the vows feel like halves of the same ceremony.
• What's off-limits. Inside jokes that the room won't get. Names of exes. Anything that would embarrass a guest. Pick the boundaries together so neither of you has to edit the other's work later.

Make those four decisions in a thirty-minute conversation, then go off and write separately. The conversation removes 80% of the friction.

The structure that works

There is a structural shape to good wedding vows that recurs across cultures, ceremonies, and writing styles. It is roughly four parts:

1. An opening that names the moment.
2. A short passage about who the other person is to you.
3. A set of specific promises — the vows themselves.
4. A closing line that lands.

You can deviate from this. But if you've never written vows before and don't know where to start, this is the shape to write toward.

1. The opening

The opening names the moment. It is not the place to be original. It is the place to be present.

Standing here, in front of the people we love, the only thing I want to say first is this:

I have written this draft eleven times. I deleted nine of them. What's left is the part I couldn't cut.

We've practiced this morning so many times in my head that the real version is going to sound exactly like the rehearsal — but here we are anyway.

Two or three sentences. Then you move on.

2. Who they are to you

A short passage — eighty to one hundred fifty words — that locates the other person in your life. Not a biography. Not a compliment list. A handful of specifics that, taken together, say this is who you are to me.

The trick here is specifics, not adjectives. "You are kind and generous and patient" tells the room nothing. "You are the one who texted me at 2 a.m. the night my mother went into the hospital and said I'm already in the car" tells the room everything.

A few prompts if you're stuck:

• The thing they do that no one else in your life does.
• The decision they made — small or large — that revealed who they were.
• The way they show up in the dailiness, not the big moments.
• The way they made you better at something specific.

Pick two or three. Write them in sentences, not bullet points. Then move on.

3. The promises

This is the vow proper. Most modern personal vows include some variation of "I promise..." repeated three to six times. The structure is borrowed from traditional liturgical vows because it works — the repetition gives the room something to track, and the parallel structure makes the moment feel ceremonial rather than conversational.

A good set of promises usually includes:

• One promise about the daily. The mundane, the unglamorous, the ordinary care. "I promise to make the coffee on the mornings you can't." The dailiness is the marriage.
• One promise about the hard. What you'll do when things are hard — not a generic "I'll be there," but something specific. "I promise that on the days when the world is too much, I will not try to fix it. I will just sit with you on the couch until it passes."
• One promise about growth. What you'll do as both of you change. "I promise that the person you are at sixty will not have to apologize for the person you are at thirty. I will love every version."
• One promise that is specific to you two. The inside one. The promise that no other couple in the world could plausibly make. The one that gets the laugh of recognition from the people who know you both.
• (Optional) One promise about the long view. Children, work, where you'll live, what you'll do with the years.

Three to five promises is usually right. Six starts to feel like a checklist. Two can feel underweight.

4. The closing

The closing is one sentence. Maybe two. It is the line the room will remember, so it deserves the most editing of anything in the vows.

A few patterns that land:

• A return to the opening. If you opened by naming the moment, close by naming the future. "Whatever comes next, this is where it starts."
• A short declaration. "I am yours." "For all of it." "Always."
• A specific image. "Forty years from now, when we are old, I will still be the one making the coffee."

The closing should not be the longest sentence in the vows. It should be the shortest.

What to cut

A short list of moves that flatten otherwise-good vows. Cut them ruthlessly.

• The biographical introduction. "When I first met you, you were wearing a blue sweater..." The room knows how you met. They don't need the recap.
• The list of adjectives. "You are kind, funny, smart, beautiful, and the best person I've ever known." The room hears static. Replace with one specific.
• The qualifier-stacking. "You make me want to be a better person, and I think — I hope — I know — that..." Cut the qualifiers; let the sentence stand.
• The joke that's only funny if you know the context. If you have to explain it, the room won't laugh. Save it for the toast or the table card.
• The promise you don't mean. "I will never go to bed angry." Yes you will. Don't put it in the vows.
• The reference to a song or a movie quote. Unless the song/movie is yours in a way the whole room knows, the reference reads as filler.

On reading the vows out loud

Two practical notes.

Write for the ear, not the eye. Read every draft out loud. Sentences that look fine on the page can collapse when spoken — a sentence with three commas in it will trip you in the moment. If you stumble while reading, the audience will too. Rewrite for breath.

Print them on something nice. The day-of object matters. A folded printout from the home printer is the right level of casual for some weddings; for others, the vows are a small ceremonial object that becomes a keepsake. Some couples have their vows typeset and framed after the ceremony — see the Vows Edition for one version of that.

If you are reading from a phone, the photographer will likely capture it. If you are reading from paper, your hands will shake. If you are reading from memory, you will probably forget a line. There is no wrong answer; just pick one in advance.

A note on traditional vows

If after reading all of this, you find yourself uninterested in writing personal vows from scratch — say so. The traditional vows are traditional because they work. They have been refined over centuries to be the shape that holds the weight of the moment. There is no shame in using them. Many couples write personal vows to read at the rehearsal dinner or to deliver privately the night before the ceremony, and use the traditional vows at the altar itself. That arrangement gives you the specificity of personal vows and the gravity of the traditional ones.

A starting prompt

If the document is still blank and you don't know how to begin, start here:

Of the thousand small things I love about you, the one I want to name first is this:

Fill in the blank. Write the next sentence. Then the next. Stop when you've said the true thing.

You will rewrite it many times. The vows you read on the day will be the eighth or ninth draft. That's how it always goes.

The point is not the writing. The point is the marriage.

Write something honest. Cut it down. Read it out loud. Then put the draft away for a week and come back to it.

The version you'll read on the day will already know what to say.