How to Write Wedding Vows

Elena,

I didn't expect you. I had a clear picture in my head of how my life was going to go, and then I met you, and every plan I'd made suddenly felt like a rough draft.

You are the most genuinely good person I have ever known. Not easy — you challenge me, and you hold me to standards I wouldn't hold myself to without you — but good, in the deep, steady, real way that matters. Being loved by you has made me want to be better.

Today, in front of everyone who loves us most, I promise to be your partner in every season. I promise to choose you when it's easy and when it isn't. I promise to listen before I speak, to ask before I assume, and to remember that being on your side and being right are not the same thing.

I promise to make coffee before you wake up. I promise to sit with you in the hard things without trying to fix them. I promise to keep building a life with you that neither of us could have imagined alone.

You are my home. I love you.

Marcus,

Let me start by saying: you were not what I pictured when I told my best friend I was going back on the dating apps. She showed me your profile and said, 'He looks like trouble.' She was right, and I owe her an apology.

I fell in love with you on a Tuesday, in a parking lot, when you helped a stranger change a flat tire in the rain without being asked and without mentioning it afterward. I thought: this person does good things when no one is watching. I want to build a life with someone like that.

So here we are. I promise to always let you have the last bite, except when it's really good, in which case I'll pretend I forgot. I promise to tolerate your very specific and many opinions about espresso temperature. I promise to wake up glad that it's you next to me, even on the hard days, even when we're annoyed at each other — which, to be clear, will happen.

But mostly, I promise this: I will be in your corner every single day. I will root for you loudly and love you well.

I am so lucky you were trouble. I love you.

James,

Three years ago I sat in a hospital waiting room not knowing if you would be okay, and I understood in those hours what my life would be without you. I don't want that life. I want this one — messy and uncertain and full of you.

You have been the steadiest thing I've ever held onto. When my mother was sick, you slept in that terrible chair in the corner of her room without complaining once. When I lost the job I'd worked a decade for, you made me dinner and let me be devastated without trying to fix it. You show up in the ways that cost something, and that is the most important thing I know about you.

I promise to show up for you the same way. I promise to stay in the room when it's hard. I promise not to disappear when the distance between us feels too wide to cross — to build the bridge instead. I promise to grow old with you and to find every year of it interesting.

I have loved you quietly for a long time. I am grateful every day that you saw it and loved me back.

Thank you for marrying me. I love you more than I know how to say.

Chloe,

I will keep this short, because you know I mean what I say and I don't need many words to mean it completely.

You make me better. You make every room warmer. You have a laugh that I would do almost anything to hear.

I promise to take care of you. I promise to be honest with you even when it's uncomfortable. I promise to put us first. I promise to still be trying — to still be present and curious and in love with you — thirty years from now.

I love you, Chloe. Let's go.

Naomi,

I believe that God placed you in my path on purpose, and that the life we are beginning today is built on something larger than the two of us.

From the beginning, I have seen in you a faithfulness that inspires me — a steadiness of spirit, a commitment to loving people well, and a joy that is rooted in something real. You reflect something true about the way the world is supposed to work, and I want to spend my life learning from you.

Today, before God and the people who love us, I promise to be your husband in the fullest sense of the word. I promise to lead with humility and to follow when I should. I promise to pray with you and for you. I promise to be the kind of partner who makes the love of God more visible in your life, not less.

I promise to love you not just in the beautiful moments, but in the ordinary ones — in the Tuesday evenings and the hard conversations and the years that will ask more of us than we currently know.

With my whole heart, I am yours. I love you.