The Vows We Almost Did Not Write

Two nights before our wedding, my fiancé and I sat on opposite ends of the couch with laptops open to completely blank documents, both of us pretending to type. Neither of us had written a single word of our vows. We had, by that point, successfully planned a hundred and forty-person wedding down to the minute, and we had somehow managed to avoid the one piece of it that was supposed to matter most.

How we let it get this far

It wasn't that we didn't care. If anything, it was the opposite problem — we cared so much about getting the vows right that every time I opened a blank page, I closed it again within about ninety seconds, convinced that whatever I was about to write wasn't good enough for the moment it needed to hold. My partner, it turned out, had been doing the exact same thing, just more quietly.

We'd talked around it for months. "I should probably start thinking about vows soon," one of us would say, usually apropos of nothing, usually followed by a long pause where neither of us committed to an actual date. The wedding planning itself had deadlines — vendor deposits, RSVP cutoffs, dress fittings — that forced our hand. The vows had no deadline except the one neither of us wanted to think about: the actual ceremony.

What finally broke the block

What got us moving, in the end, wasn't a burst of inspiration. It was my future mother-in-law, calling to ask an unrelated question about seating charts, who mentioned almost in passing that she still had the vows she and my father-in-law wrote thirty-one years earlier, and that she reread them every anniversary. I hung up the phone and, for the first time in months, didn't feel the pressure of writing something perfect. I felt the much smaller, much more doable pressure of writing something true enough that I'd still mean it in thirty-one years.

That reframing did more work than any writing advice I'd read. I stopped trying to write vows and started just writing a letter — specifically, a letter to him, about the version of him I'd fallen for and the version of him I was choosing on purpose, with full information, years later. The letter format took the performance pressure out of it. I wasn't writing for a room of a hundred and forty people. I was writing to one person who already knew me completely.

What we actually wrote about

Looking back at both sets of vows now, neither of us said anything especially original. We both talked about specific small moments instead of grand abstractions — he mentioned the way I fall asleep in the car within four minutes regardless of the time of day, and I mentioned the particular, deeply annoying way he hums while he cooks, badly, always the same three songs. Neither detail would mean anything to a stranger. Both details made the other person cry, which, as it turns out, is the actual bar.

• We each picked three specific memories instead of trying to summarize the whole relationship.
• We promised things we could actually keep, not aspirational ideals we'd privately doubted.
• We let ourselves be a little funny, because that's genuinely how we talk to each other.
• We read them out loud to ourselves, alone, before reading them to each other — which is the only way to catch a line that sounds good on paper and strange out loud.

The morning of, we almost swapped them in a panic

Even after finishing them, the anxiety didn't fully leave. The morning of the wedding, getting my hair done, I had a sudden, specific fear that mine was too long and his was going to sound thin by comparison, and I genuinely considered texting him to renegotiate length in the middle of getting ready. My maid of honor took the phone out of my hand, which was the correct call. There is no version of this where comparing vow lengths an hour before your ceremony improves anything.

What I'd tell a couple staring at a blank document right now

Start earlier than feels necessary, not because the writing itself takes long, but because the avoidance takes a surprising amount of emotional energy that you'll want back for everything else happening that week. And when you do sit down, don't try to write vows. Write a letter to the specific person you're marrying, about the specific things you love, and let someone call it vows later. The format we were both afraid of disappeared the moment we stopped trying to write it.

What I'd have told myself, months earlier

If I could go back and interrupt my own procrastination, I'd tell myself that the fear wasn't really about writing ability at all. It was about the strange vulnerability of putting a private, specific feeling into words that other people would hear out loud. That fear doesn't resolve itself by waiting — it only gets louder the closer the deadline gets, which is exactly backwards from how most of us assume avoidance works. I'd have told myself to write the first terrible draft in March, not because March's draft would be good, but because having something, anything, down on paper removes the particular panic of a truly blank page with forty-eight hours left on the clock.

A year later

We read them again on our first anniversary, the way my mother-in-law described doing for thirty-one years. Mine held up better than I expected. His made me cry in exactly the same spot it had the first time, the line about the humming, which neither of us saw coming when he wrote it in a panic on a Tuesday night with a blank document and about forty-eight hours to spare.