Tips to help write your wedding vows!
Before we start, we wanted to give a shoutout to the folk at Unbridely and our own epic celebrant Rach Calvert as we’ve taken huge inspiration from them in order to put together the top tips that helped us write our own vows!
thx to our epic photographer Will & Co for this pic from our wedding xx
One of the most memorable parts of any good wedding should be the ceremony! Maybe other than the speeches later in the night, it’s the part of the day that’s most likely to have your family and friends in tears. As you probably know by now, the most personal part of the ceremony is most often your vows! While there’s a short bit of legal stuff your celebrant will let you know about that has to be said, what happens beyond that is actually largely up to you to decide. The most common approach that we see personally is that couples will write their own personalised vows to make to each other during the ceremony, these can vary from 4-5 minutes long to as short as 30-45 seconds - the world is your oyster.
All of that is great, but unless you’re a professional public speaker then the idea of having to make a 2-3 minute speech in front of a bunch of people probably doesn’t thrill you, but don’t worry - we’re gonna drop a few handy tips below that will hopefully guide you in the right direction to writing an awesome set of vows that you’re happy with!
Tip #1 - Content
The hardest part of this whole process is starting, that’s why we would 110% recommend starting by making a big list of dot points of memories, things you love about your fiancé, funny stories etc. etc. - personally, we both used the notes app on our phone. This is an easy way to quickly jot something down when a random memory pops into your head…. maybe just don’t call it “vows” just in case anyone is looking over your shoulder at your notes app or something 🤣.
By writing this list you’re effectively giving yourself a head start on juicy content to include in your vows and it will make it heaps easier to figure out what you do and don’t want to include once you’re ready to start writing!
If you’re having a mental blank and are having trouble coming up with things to add, maybe dive back through old messages and/or photos for funny or cute moments you might have forgotten about - it’s crazy how much a message or a photo can prompt your memory!
Tip #2 - Mood & Length
One of the things that we both struggled with personally when we first started trying to write our vows was making sure we were heading in the same direction as far as the mood of our vows were concerned. We were a bit stressed that one of us would come out of the gates and drop a 3 minute emotional masterpiece, and the other (Lochie) would present a very politely structured 15 minute banter-filled recollection of our relationship. Fortunately, we had the beautiful Rachael Calvert as our celebrant and she dropped a mega-useful resource written by the folk at Unbridely, which is essentially a vow-writing goldmine.
One of our favourite tips from said guide was to also decide on a rough length that you’re working towards, whether this is going off a word-count (you can use this website to calculate word count easily) or aiming for a certain range of sentences, this is super helpful to make sure that one of you doesn’t have a 5 minute speech followed up by 10 seconds from your partner! This doesn’t have to be exact - if one of your sets of vows ends up being a little longer than the other, just let the person with the shorter vows go first! This way, people tend not to focus on comparing whether one set was shorter than the other.
You can also use this approach to make sure that you’ve got a similar number of “promises” in your vows, if that’s your jam! For us, we just had something like 4 or 5 each and tried to have a good balance of cute ones and funny ones.
We won’t go into much more detail about the content of your vows, there are much more qualified people to help with that! You can download Unbridely’s aptly named “How to write wedding vows that don’t suck”, here - they provide a range of prompts and suggestions to get you stuck into writing some kick-ass vows!
Tip #3 - Structure
Now that you’ve got a bit of a working list of some moments and memories you’d love to include in your vows, you and your partner have agreed on the mood/length of your vows and you’re ready to start writing! You might find that it helps to come up with a rough structure for your vows before you start writing that first draft, for example:
Intro
maybe include a funny or cute little memory, this could be how you met, when you realised that they were the one, why you were attracted to them etc.
Why you love them/things you love about them
Promises
I promise to…
The future!
Finish things off nicely by telling your partner what you’re looking forward to - this is the spot to drop some of your life goals or maybe a cheeky comment or two.
This is just a rough example - you might not vibe with doing it this way which is obviously perfectly okay, our main piece of advice would just be to keep it simple and don’t over-complicate it!
Tip #4 - Make use of your celebrant!
You’re paying a celebrant to officiate your ceremony for you, but this is also the one person involved in your wedding day whose literal day job is re-telling epic love stories and listening to couples say what they love about each other! They’re SO qualified to give you advice or proof-read your vows for you - for us, we both sent our vows through to our celebrant separately, so that she could read through them, let us know if we had hit the right vibe and made sure we weren’t heading down two completely different roads! She also made recommendation on which of us should go first due to the length of our respective vows (shortest first!).
Tip #5 - Done is better than perfect
At the end of the day, your vows are important and you want them to be great, but pouring over them endlessly, writing and re-writing them over and over and stressing yourself out about them won’t get you anywhere. Write a draft and work on it until you get something you are happy with - there is no perfect relationship, so don’t put pressure on yourself to write the perfect vows - just get yourself up in your feels and write from the heart, your partner loves you and will love your vows ❤️.
Tip #6 - Practice!
Last but definitely not least, this might seem obvious but we would say this is hugely under-rated, practice reading your vows out loud to yourself!! This is the easiest way to identify what works and what doesn’t! If you’re anything like us, you’ll probably also end up an emotional mess, crying happy tears in your bedroom on your own BUT, it works! It’s quite easy to write the perfectly structured sentences and paragraphs that read great, but often we verbalise things quite differently to how we write. Give it a test run and you’ll no doubt identify a thing or two that you can polish for the final version!
