Weddingbee Blog

Our vows are something that took Mr. Cola and me a while to decide on.

On one hand, I didn’t really want to do the more traditional vows, where we would just repeat the same thing our officiant said. I wanted something a little more personal and meaningful for us, especially since we pieced together the ceremony wording ourselves.

But on the other hand, Mr. Cola thought that writing our own vows would be a lot of work. And I couldn’t argue with that, because I agreed it would be. And then I read Miss Sewing’s post about vows, and she brought up the very good point that when a bride and groom both write their own vows, and don’t see them in advance, there’s a good chance they could end up being vastly different in length and/or tone.

So Mr. Cola and I came up with a compromise: Vow Libs!
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So I took a stab at writing my own little “letter” to read to Mr. Sew at our ceremony. My thoughts are to read our heartfelt sentiments to each other, then commence with the rings and traditional vows. I always love it when couples say something personal to each other. There’s something that just seems so special about it.

(source)

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Mr. Argyle and I decided pretty early on that we were going to write our own vows. This stemmed on the fact that we really wanted a family member or friend to officiate our ceremony. Neither of us are very religious and we weren’t raised with religion, either. It only seemed natural that we have a friend take care of the ceremony in a way that truly represents us. And, it only seemed right that we write our own vows. This will help to make the ceremony “ours” and personalized in a way that is truly a reflection of our relationship.

We are at the point right now where our decision is in each of us writing our own separate vows or writing our vows together so that we both make the same promises to each other. Their are pros and cons to both (if that is even possible).

If we write our vows separately, it will allow for us to tell the story of our relationship from our own perspectives. It will be from our individual voices, and a true representation of the relationship from each side. However, this could also result in our vows being so vastly different in tone that they don’t complement each other. Not only that, but each could differ in length. There are ways to prevent that, which include having a family member or friend reading each of our vows beforehand to let us know if we need to make any tweaks. I’m not really a fan of that idea, as I want our vows to have an element of surprise (a loving surprise) for our guests.
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Photo by Matt Miller

Last week, we (finally) booked our officiant, so of course I’ve had wedding vows on the brain.

I’m on the more traditional wedding vow team for a few reasons:

1. I’ve always liked the traditional ones. I find comfort in the fact that these words have been said over and over by so many couples throughout the years. It is familiar to most, and gives me comfort. (Even if the divorce rate is ridiculous in this country, leave me alone, I can still use this reasoning.)

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Selecting our wedding officiant was pretty easy for us, although I know many couples that find this process difficult. But for us, it came down to figuring out which friend of ours, who isn’t in the wedding, would be good at it!

We never even considered a pastor/priest/religious figure, since we aren’t religious ourselves. And even the justices of the peace and other non-church affiliated officiants in the area were pretty expensive—the lowest I found was around $400. For an approximately 16 minute ceremony, that was pretty steep. So, we decided to ask one of our good friends to do it, and I know we will be very happy with our decision. He’s totally cool with us writing everything he has to say, he’s great at public speaking, and he’s a really fun, entertaining guy. He even took the initiative to get ordained online right after we asked him to be our officiant (even though it appears in our county they don’t actually verify if your officiant has been ordained or not)!

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I’m seriously contemplating the idea of renewing our vows for some upcoming anniversary - five years maybe? I’d love to do it over, without the same stress, without all of the fanfare, just with us and a spectacular photographer.

We won’t be redoing our wedding photos this summer after all, because, well, I no longer fit into my wedding dress! If you remember, I lost a lot of weight the summer before our wedding because of stress and a very tight budget, and dropped down to a very unhealthy size for my height. After suffering two miscarriages this year, I’ve been doing my best to gain back the twenty+ pounds and settling into a healthier, more fertile BMI. But, as a result of those efforts, my wedding dress no longer zips up past my now-ample bosoms. Whoops.

Surprisingly, I’m not so terribly sad, despite my disappointment over our wedding photos.
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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.

source

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:

~~~

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.

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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.

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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.

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