The Old Vows Are the Best Vows
6 min read
Vow-taking is the centerpiece of most American weddings. It’s an ancient tradition, probably secular in origin, that can be traced back to pre-Conquest Anglo-Normandy. There are 10th-century poems in Old English that allude to love and marriage vows. Over the centuries, the custom of wedding vows—formal promises of the terms of the marriage, spoken before guest witnesses—persisted and spread. But today, according to a 2021 survey by The Knot, half of American couples abandon traditional vows in favor of writing their own.
This became a trend in the 1970s. Couples rejected the wifely vow of obedience and, in many cases, the vow of fidelity, and tacked on a few new vows. By 1990, when my husband and I married, self-composed vows were commonplace. We took for granted that we would recite vows. But having abandoned our religious roots, his Jewish and mine Christian, we wanted secular, gender-neutral vows, and we wanted to write them ourselves. Published authors both, we did not foresee that this meant ghastly hours of struggle, blank paper, narcissistic offense and defense, and, ultimately, despair. We hated what we came up with. Happily, no record of our efforts survives.
Our experience is not unique. Today, many couples find the task of writing vows so onerous and anxiety-provoking that there are professional vow writers who advertise online that they can put your most personal thoughts into beautiful words. Our solution was far easier—and free. For inspiration, we turned to the old Anglican wedding ceremony, essentially unchanged since 1549. In about 10 minutes, applying red pencil to archaic verb forms and pronouns and religious references, we created short, modern, secular vows. Our version included the classic “to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health.” We vowed to love, to keep (guard, protect, or care for), to honor, to forsake all others, and to do all of this until death parted us—five of the vows from 1549, ditching only the bride’s promise to “obey and serve,” and the groom’s promise to comfort.
Only years later, researching the subject, did I learn that these venerable words were far older than I had imagined. “In sickness and in health” and “keep” appeared in wedding vows recorded 1,000 years ago, and I was stunned to find all five of our vows (plus, for women only, “obey” and “serve”) in an 800-year-old service manual for the York Minster cathedral.
Back then, those five vows embodied the meaning of marriage. They still do today—in a 2022 Gallup poll, a whopping 89 percent of Americans indicated that they strongly disapproved of marital infidelity. Yet the 20th century’s sexual revolutions left many people with guarded attitudes toward marriage and promises to love.
Many self-written vows reflect these underlying anxieties about marriage. Couples may try to ward off fears about their marital future by avoiding the promises that most clearly name them—especially the vows of fidelity and permanence. When I asked one New Yorker, a physical therapist in her mid-30s, why she’d omitted these vows, she responded that “you don’t need words” for those things. A slight tension in her voice made me wonder if the real reason was worry that things could go downhill. Her vows promised to “work on the relationship.”
A lot of self-written vows are not actually vows at all. Instead, they are heartfelt declarations of mutual love and admiration, or describe the couple’s hopes and history. One recently married young professional in Boston talked about being understanding and supportive. His graceful “vows” were mostly statements, not promises, which he described as explaining “who my wife is to me and to the world, her tenderness and grit, joyfulness and wonder in living life.” Surprisingly, neither he nor his wife knew before the ceremony what the other would say—a fact that underscores that they weren’t trying to state the terms of their marriage.
Other “vows” aim to amuse: “I promise to share my food, never go to bed angry, and always honor your passion for the Red Sox.” Or: “I promise to never stop singing my own made-up songs, although I know you wish I would.”
Many aren’t marriage-specific: “I promise to encourage you to follow your dreams. I promise … to challenge you to be the best version of yourself … I promise to love you unconditionally … I will continue choosing you forever.” You could make these promises to your sister or to your best friend. Promising love “unconditionally” doesn’t mean “’til death.” And “I will continue choosing you forever” doesn’t say “marriage.” Dolly Parton’s song “I Will Always Love You” is about leaving someone you love.
Many couples write their own vows because they want to express the unique and wonderful nature of their bond. No rote formula, they feel, no words recited for centuries by millions of others, could do this job. But the traditional vows have a unique power that comes from the very fact that millions of others, over the centuries, have recited them.
All wedding traditions—Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, and more—strengthen marriages with words that carry the weight of long usage. Those that survive longest are those flexible enough to change for the better. Way back in the 1920s, the Episcopal Church voted to remove the woman’s vow of obediences. Jewish grooms traditionally said, as they put the ring on their bride’s finger, “With this ring, you are consecrated unto me in accordance with the law of Moses and Israel.” Now many brides also say these words, continuing and bending the tradition. Tradition doesn’t ignore the unique good in each couple’s love; it honors it.
Self-written vows, however, seem to me only to diminish a couple’s special feelings, and risk turning them into entertainment. Contemporary weddings increasingly resemble shows starring a bride and a groom, featuring intimate dialogue about their relationship, as though the couple were on stage enacting themselves. Guests applaud and laugh—an audience, not witnesses whose presence validates the couple’s bond. When guests can leave a wedding uncertain whether the marriage is open or monogamous, or whether the partners don’t know if they will stay together forever or simply aren’t saying, the whole ritual ceases to make sense.
Society needs lots of strong, happy marriages, and so it has a huge stake in knowing just what a couple’s relationship is and in supporting it. Which marriages are most likely to be strong and happy? Marriages built on commitment and fidelity. And, according to psychologists and economists, promising something makes people more likely to do it.
Traditional vows create an intense moment of quiet speech that heightens the exuberance of the toasts, drinking, and dancing that follow. Replacing them with sentimental or jokey words turns the vow-taking into an ironic performance of something the couple is implicitly disavowing. One of my friends regards taking vows other than the traditional ones as “like being on the witness stand and answering the questions you wish you had been asked.” He and his wife wanted “no irony” or attempts at wit in their vows, and “redacted” theirs from a church rite.
Cynics about marriage are always with us, and there’s plenty of tragedy for them to point at. Many people suffer loveless lives, and relationships often end in divorces or affairs, after lapses of respect or care, and false or broken promises. But these failures don’t change what we wish and strive for, and what couples in impressive numbers actually make happen. The persistence over so many centuries of the ancient vows reflects that they embody what love and marriage still mean for people from every segment of a fractured society: a deep pool of sustaining common culture.
