Weddingbee
There comes a time in wedding planning when you morph into a semi-professional writer. No, I’m not talking about wedding blogging - I’m talking about writing your vows! These are your vows, so the caliber of writing is generally a bit above 7th grade English class.
The vows are kind of like the crux of the whole ceremony - everyone’s dying to hear them, especially your fiancé(e)! I’ve always thought it a shame when a groom pulls out a folded piece of notebook paper to recite his vows. I have to admit, though - it is quite heartfelt to think of your fiancé slaving away over his words of promise, number 2 nibbled to pieces, whittled to the eraser, and stuck behind his ear!
Still, everything else in the wedding is planned in detail - shouldn’t the presentation of your vows be equally beautiful?
Plus, there’s the rest of the ceremony - will our officiant read from memory? From a 3-ring binder? From a folder?
Ever since I saw this picture (below), I knew it would be the perfect volume to contain our vows and the words (that we’re going to write!) from our ceremony.
The only issue is the sticker price - it’s well worth the $80 tag, but a bit steep for me.
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First, thank goodness for those of you who are already married and still read Weddingbee. Bless you, love you, can’t wait to be just like you. I need your help.
For those of you who wrote your own vows, how long did it take you? Did you wait until just before your wedding day to write them or did you tweak your drafts over time?
I think that mine are written. *GASP* I know, me, Ms. Procrastinator has something done ahead of time, and (get this) with very little drama. I’m finding it difficult to believe too.
But I was perusing my blog and I found a post written last August:
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I’ll admit, I have little patience for pretense or fuss, and I don’t think that my wedding day should be “the best day of my life”. What a sad thought to spend decades in marriage looking back at the day it all began.
On the other hand, I do want it to matter.
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With less than three months to go until we get married, I’ve decided it’s time to start working on the part of the whole thing that I look forward to the most: the ceremony.
I was a bit uncomfortable about writing it; if I know every word, every passage, every sentiment, will I feel as engaged (no pun intended) during our ceremony?
But after much web surfing and some shower time (don’t you do your best thinking in the shower?), I’m very excited. I figure it’s much like live music: I may know every word and every note, but there’s just something special about hearing a song sung live.
So, as I get started (Wheeee! I’m excited!), I thought I’d share all of my ceremony links from Weddingbee. You can recreate my search by reading through every post tagged “ceremony” — or you can just use the list below.
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Let me start off this post by thanking the makers of Kiss Me mascara. Without this miracle invention, I would have spent much of Sunday afternoon looking like a reject from a Lifetime movie casting. My dear friends Lauren and Michael got married Sunday afternoon on a dock in the middle of Piedmont Park in Atlanta. And their vows, which they wrote together, were so beautiful and articulate that even a jaded wedding guest like me (theirs was like the twentieth wedding I’ve been to in the last two years) was reduced to a puddle.
Here’s in part what they vowed to one another:
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When we decided to have a non-officiant friend marry us (remember: anyone can marry you in Montana), I knew it meant that I would have to write our wedding ceremony, or at least contribute heavily to its creation. This was high on my list of “cons” relating to not hiring an officiant, but I very quickly came to enjoy that I had the power to word smith our ceremony in any way I wanted.
I want to share with you what writing our ceremony meant to me, the process I used to write it, and finally, our ceremony text, in case any of these things might inspire one of you to follow the same path.
A writer by trade and a poet at heart, I found that composing the ceremony text gave me not only literal control of our wedding, but also the power to truly imbue our ceremony with our personalities and express the importance of our wedding day to our guests. More than that, writing the ceremony gave me the ability to craft it into a ritual that would work most powerfully to move us (heart, mind, body & soul) into marriage.
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Before I knew anything else about my wedding, I knew I wanted to write my own vows. It’s not that I have a problem with the customary to-have and to-hold’s. It’s simply that I love to write, and if I’m too DIY-disabled to do my own invitations, I can at least redeem myself with that bit of creativity.
So far, I’ve yet to attempt the daunting task of sitting down to pen the pledges. But I have managed to find a few poems to go along with them as potential readings. This one in particular I think would make a fun, untraditional ceremonial sidebar. It’s not explicity about marriage, but that’s what I like about it: it’s unexpected. Still, the poem expresses everything I want my vows to: playfulness, affection, devotion, and cooperation. Plus, it has special meaning to me: I’ve trained Mr. Lovebug how to paint my toes. 
At Twenty-Three Weeks She Can No Longer See Anything South of Her Belly
I’m painting my wife’s toes
in Revlon Super Color Forty Nine.
I’ve no idea what I’m doing.
She asked me to get the bottle, Read more…
I don’t know how many of you out there are writing your own wedding vows, but I came across Elegant Vows today and perused their “Free Wedding Vows Collection.” I found some words in “Vow Three” particularly moving and beautiful….
When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. That is impossible. It is even a disservice to pretend it is possible. Yet that is what most of us demand. We have such little faith in the ebb and flow of life and of love and of relationships.
We leap forward at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb, for we are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanence, on duration, on continuity. But the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity and in freedom, as dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in creating the same pattern.
137 days to go! I tend to be a plan-aheader, so I asked our officiant (the lovely Terry Brady) if he could hash out an outline of our ceremony. Summer is just around the corner, and I don’t want to be stressed out and swamped with a To-Do list up the wazoo. I love that he is so flexible and willing to personalize the ceremony to our liking 100 percent! So Terry was kind enough to email us a rough draft yesterday.
Wow.
It’s not perfect yet and it needs a bit of tweaking. But sitting there, reading through what he wrote… it nearly brought me to tears and I had to look away from my computer to compose myself. I guess it was the combination of his words, and also the realization that soon, we will be making the most important promise of our lives! We plan on writing our own vows… it just seems more personal that way. But Terry also included a simple set of vows just in case we opt not to, that got me all choked up. If for any reason we develop a case of writers block, or suddenly are tongue tied on our wedding day, I would be happy just to repeat these words that Terry wrote.
As requested by reader Kris, I’m going to post some of the readings we have chosen so far. Although I know quite a few of you aren’t religious, I’m hoping we can really just see something lovely in these words, and not be cruel or judgemental. As I have said many times before, I am also not very religious, which is why I’m taking the readings so seriously. I’m going to run down the list of them, where they are from, and all that. The readings were chosen from the booklet “Together for Life”, something the Father gave us to choose from. I’m not quite sure if I may choose from another source, but this is what I have so far.
For our opening prayer, we have chosen:
Father,
hear our prayers for Kiwi and Mr. Kiwi
who today are united in marriage
before your altar.
Give them your blessing,
and strengthen their love for each other.
We ask you this through our Lord…
I chose this one out of four choices we were given. It seemed more about us being together, than about anything else.
…something good? I’ve brought up the personal vows thing with Mr. Kiwi. I said, “Honey, I want our ceremony to have something special, but I’d like that to be our vows.” Mr. Kiwi, playing Sword of Vermillion on PS2, patted my knee, gave me a grin and said, “I sure am glad you’re the writer in our family!”
When forced to elaborate on this, he said, “You’ll do such a good job writing our vows, babe.” So, I guess this means the vow-writing is on me. Ha. Obviously the vows are on me. Now, don’t think Mr. Kiwi is lazy, he certainly can be - about putting his socks in the hamper or washing out his pasta bowl- but when it comes to our relationship, he’s not.
Like I blogged about previously, he’s not a wordsmith, nor is he much of a reader. Quite differently, I read constantly and write whenever I can. So rather than writing vows that are from me to him or vice-versa, I think I will write a vow that we can both say and repeat back to each other. Does that make sense?
So far, my ideas are sappy and romantic, (that’s what happens when you create an ipod playlist of romantic songs!) with a touch of humor. I’m not sure where I want to take these - we’re a very silly couple… but during the wedding? I don’t know if I want that to be somewhere we try to joke it up.
Have you considered your vows? What kind of elements do you want in them?
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