I went to a wedding a few years ago where the couple had done something I loved. In the week before the ceremony they posted their vows to each other publicly, so friends and family could read them, including the people who could not make the trip. They were good. Specific, funny, honest about what they were signing up for.
At the reception I told the bride how much I had enjoyed reading them, and asked why they had not used them in the ceremony. She said, we tried, but it was too much work. So they went with the default ones the preacher recommended. I understood completely. A wedding is enormous pressure and the vows are the one item on the list that cannot be delegated to a vendor. So the most personal 90 seconds of the whole day gets outsourced to a template, and then it sits in a drawer for 15 years.
Almost nobody can recite their own vows
Try it. Not the gist. The actual words. Then ask your spouse separately and compare. In my experience one of you gets a fragment and the other one gets a different fragment, and neither is confident.
I see the exact same thing when I coach executives. I ask a chief executive what the vision, values and mission of the company are, and there is a pause, and then something approximate. Not because they do not care. Because those words got written once, at a certain moment, for a certain reason, and then the business went and did what businesses do, which is get busy. Businesses want to be profitable. Marriages want to be happy. Neither of those is a plan. Your vows are the plan. They are the answer to how, and if nobody can say them out loud, they are not guiding anything.
A promise you cannot recite is not steering anything
This is not sentimentality. A commitment you cannot state is a commitment you cannot check yourself against on a hard Tuesday. Bring it to the top of your mind and it starts doing work again.
Why the originals stopped fitting
Here is the honest problem with wedding vows, and it is nobody's fault. They were written by two people who did not know each other yet.
You promised things a 29 year old could imagine promising. To honor, to cherish, in sickness and in health. Fine words, and completely general, because at that point your marriage was general. It had no children in it, no mortgage, no career that ate a decade, no parent who got sick, no year where you barely spoke. You could not have written a promise about any of that because none of it had happened.
What you have now is specific. You know exactly which things are hard for the two of you. You know what he does when he is scared and what she does when she is overloaded. You know the 4 fights you actually have. A promise written from inside that knowledge is worth more than any promise written before it, because it is aimed at something real.
Your wedding vows were written by two people who had not met each other yet. That is not a criticism, it is just the timing.
Matthew W. Hoelscher, PCC
I did this myself at 10 years
My wife and I wrote our own vows for the wedding and said them to each other, which already put us ahead of most of the room. Then we did it again 10 years later when we celebrated the anniversary.
We did not renew the old ones. That was the point. Our life had changed enormously in those 10 years, and some of what we promised at the start no longer described anything we were actually doing. So we made new commitments to fit the marriage we had built, and in the same conversation we let go of some of the old ones, because a promise you have quietly stopped keeping is worse than no promise at all. It sits there generating a small amount of failure every year.
That second half is the one people skip. It is easier to add than to release. There is a whole page on the releasing part, letting go of what no longer serves you, and it pairs with this one directly.
Good moments to do this
There is no correct occasion, and waiting for a round anniversary is how it never happens. The moments that produce the best versions of this are usually the ones where something has already shifted.
When couples do this well
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After the shape of the life changed
The last kid started school. Somebody changed careers. You moved cities. The marriage you promised into is not the one you are living in, and everybody can feel the gap.
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After you came through something
An illness, a betrayal, a year that nearly ended it. Couples who rebuild after a hard stretch and never restate what they are now promising tend to drift straight back into the old arrangement.
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Before something big
A baby, a move, a business, an aging parent moving in. Making the promises before the pressure arrives is enormously easier than making them during.
How to actually write them
The trick to making this good rather than a greeting card is specificity. General promises are comfortable and useless. Specific promises cost something to say, which is exactly why they mean something.
So do not promise to always be there. Promise the thing you know you have failed at. I will not go quiet for three days when I am upset. I will tell you when I am scared about money instead of getting sharp about the grocery bill. I will stop pretending I do not mind the thing I mind. Those are real, they are checkable, and they land in the room like weight.
Write them separately. Do not workshop them together, because the editing kills the thing you are trying to get to. Give it 30 minutes each with a piece of paper, not a phone.
Writing a set that means something
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Each of you, alone, 30 minutes, on paper. Answer one question: what am I actually promising this person for the next 10 years.
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Write 4 or 5, not 20. A list of 20 promises is a list nobody will keep or remember.
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Make at least one of them uncomfortable. If nothing on your list costs you anything, you wrote a greeting card.
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Write one thing you are letting go of. An old promise, an expectation, a grievance you have decided to stop carrying.
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Trade nothing yet. Set a time to say them out loud to each other, and do not read each other's paper before then.
Saying them out loud
This is where people get shy, and the shyness is the whole point. Reading aloud is not a formality. Saying a sentence out loud to someone's face makes you own it in a way that handing them a page never will.
You do not need a venue or a ceremony or anyone watching. A kitchen table after the kids are down works fine. Take turns, whole list each, and the person listening does not respond until the reader has finished. No commentary, no negotiating, no defending. Then swap. Then talk.
Afterwards, put them somewhere you will actually see them. A drawer is where vows go to be forgotten. A note in the kitchen, a photo on both phones, a card in a wallet. Once a year, take them out and read them again and see which ones are still true.
Promises with weight in them
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I will tell you when I am scared instead of getting sharp with you about something else
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I will not use the kids as the reason I am not looking at us
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I will stop keeping a private ledger and then reading it out loud during fights
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I will ask for what I want directly, even when asking feels humiliating
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I will let you have an evening that has nothing to do with this family
This is really a vision exercise
Under all of this is a bigger question, which is what the two of you are actually building. Promises without a picture attached are just good manners. If you have never sat down and described the marriage you are trying to have, start there instead, with creating a unique vision for your marriage, and let the vows come out of it.
And if you find, when you sit down to write, that most of what you are promising sounds like something your parents would have written rather than something you chose, that is worth its own conversation. I wrote about where those inherited rules come from in stop letting others define your marriage. New vows written from an old script are just the old script in nicer handwriting.
Talk it through
Some couples do this beautifully on their own. Others get about 10 minutes in and find out they disagree about something large, which is useful information but not a fun evening without help. If that is where you land, book a free 25 minute call. It is for first timers and it costs nothing. This is also one of the better things to do in a session, because it is the rare piece of marriage work that is genuinely a good time.
Questions couples ask
Is this the same as a vow renewal ceremony?
No, and it works better without one. A renewal ceremony is usually a party with the original words repeated. This is two people writing new promises for the marriage they actually have now, said to each other, with nobody watching. No venue, no guests, no photographer.
We never wrote our own vows in the first place. Can we still do this?
You are in the majority and you are actually in a better spot. There is nothing to renegotiate, no sentimental attachment to a phrase somebody else supplied. You are just writing the first set you ever meant, from inside a life you now know something about.
What if my spouse thinks this is corny?
Quite likely, and I would not push it as an idea. Push it as a question instead. Ask them what they think they are actually promising you at this point. Most people find they cannot answer, and the discomfort of not being able to answer does more than any amount of persuading.
How often should we redo them?
There is no schedule. My wife and I did it at 10 years because the life had changed enough that the old promises no longer described anything we were doing. Read the current ones once a year, and when a chunk of them has stopped being true, that is your signal to write again.