Writing Your Marriage Vows

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Laura, and today, I'm going to talk with you about writing your marriage vows. Writing marriage vows is a very personal process, and it should be a collaboration between the bride and the groom. So you should make a time to sit down with your soon-to-be-spouse and brainstorm some ideas on what you want it to be like. You need to write vows that reflect what you think about love and also reflect the style of your wedding. So you want to incorporate your own honest opinions in there, as well as make it formal or informal based on the style of your wedding. So if you have a really formal, religious wedding, you're probably going to want to have vows that incorporate a lot of those formal traditional prayers, the Sacrament of Marriage, the Covenant of Man and Wife, things like this. But if you're having a more informal, casual wedding, you can really do whatever you want. You can even throw in a little humor into your wedding vows, which is always refreshing and interesting to see whenever you go to a wedding. And would reflect your style in the way you relate to each other. You also need to decide how long the vows are going to be, and you need to stick to a...to a length for both of you. I've been to weddings where the vows have been, you know, pages and pages, and I've also been to weddings where the vows have been just a few lines. So especially when you're writing your own vows, you need to figure that out. And finally, you can consult books for templates on how to do this. It's sort of a hard thing to do just off the cuff because there are so many different things you could do. I mean, you could...you could pretty much say anything you wanted to say. The book I have today here is The Wedding Ceremony Planner: The Essential Guide to the Most Important Part of the Wedding Day. And in it, there are actually examples of the wedding vows with the words "bride" and "groom" in place of your name and his name or vice versa. So that's another way for you to get started on planning the ceremony. So have fun writing your marriage vows, and hopefully there's something that you're proud of."