Some examples of vows (further down examples of readings)
I take you as you are, loving who you are now and who you are yet to become. I promise to listen to you and learn from you, to support you and accept your support. I will celebrate your triumphs and mourn your losses as though they were my own. I will love you and have faith in your love for me, through all our years and all that life may bring us.
- - - - - - - - - -
I love you unconditionally and without hesitation. I vow to love you, encourage you, trust you, and respect you. As a family, we will create a home filled with learning, laughter, and compassion. I promise to work with you to foster and cherish a relationship of equality knowing that together we will build a life far better than either of us could imagine alone. Today, I choose you to be my husband/wife. I accept you as you are, and I offer myself in return. I will care for you, stand beside you, and share with you all of life’s adversities and all of its joys from this day forward, and all the days of my life.
- - - - - - - - - -
Today, I promise you this: I will laugh with you in times of joy, and comfort you in times of sorrow. I will share in your dreams and support you as you strive to achieve your goals. I will listen to you with compassion and understanding, and speak to you with encouragement. Together, let us build a home filled with learning, laughter and light, shared freely with all who may live there. Let us be partners, friends and lovers, today and all of the days that follow.
- - - - - - - - - -
Alex, you are my best friend. I promise to laugh with you, cry with you, and grow with you. I will love you when we are together and when we are apart. I promise to support your dreams and to respect our differences, and to love you and be by your side through all the days and nights of our lives.
- - - - - - - - - -
Do you, Sam promise to be a loving friend and partner in marriage, to talk and to listen, to trust and appreciate, to respect and cherish Alex’s uniqueness? Do you promise to support, comfort, and strengthen him/her through life’s joys and sorrows? Do you promise to share hopes and dreams as you build your lives together, and to grow with Alex in mind? Will you strive to build a home that is compassionate to all, full of respect and honor, filled with peace, happiness, and love? Do you promise to always be open and honest with Alex, and cherish him/her for as long as you both shall live? - - - - - - - - - -
I, Alex take you, Sam to be my husband/wife. I promise to always be your biggest fan and your partner in crime. I promise to create and support a family with you, in a household filled with laughter, patience, understanding, and love. I vow not just to grow old together, but to grow together. I will love you faithfully through the difficult and the easy. What may come, I will always be there, each one believing that love never dies. As I have given you my hand to hold, so I give you my life to keep.
- - - - - - - - - -
I, Sam, take you Alex to be the wife/husband of my days, the companion of my house, the friend of my life. We shall bear together whatever trouble and sorrow life may lay upon us, and we shall share together whatever good and joyful things life may bring us. With these words, and all the words of my heart, I marry you and bind my life to yours.
- - - - - - - - - -
I, Alex, choose you Sam to be no other than yourself. Loving what I know of you, trusting what things I will discover. I will respect you as a person, a partner, and an equal. There is little to say that you haven’t already heard, and little to give that is not already freely given. Before you asked me, I was yours and I am devoted to you in every way. I marry you with no hesitation or doubt, and my commitment to you is absolute. Do you take me to be your lawfully wedded husband/wife?
- - - - - - - - - -
I choose you. To stand by your side and sleep in your arms. To be joy to your heart and food for your soul. To learn with you and grow with you, even as time and life change us both. I promise to laugh with you in good times and struggle alongside you in bad times. I promise to respect you and cherish you as an individual, a partner, and an equal, knowing that we do not complete, but complement each other. May we have many adventures and grow old together.
- - - - - - - - - -
Today, surrounded by people who love us, I choose you Alex to be my partner. I am proud to be your wife/husband and to join my life with yours. I vow to support you, push you, inspire you, and above all love you, for better or worse, in sickness and health, for richer or poorer, as long as we both shall live.
- - - - - - - - - -
I take you to be my spouse. I promise to choose you every day, to love you in word and deed, to do the hard work of making now into always. To laugh with you, cry with you, grow with you, and create with you. To honor the divinity in you, of you, and around you. To be your kin and your partner in all of life’s adventures. Loving what I know of you and trusting what I don’t yet know, I give you my hand. I give you my love. I give you myself. Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?
- - - - - - - - - -
I, Alex, do pledge you, Sam, my love, for as long as I live. What I possess in this world, I give to you. I will keep you and hold you, comfort and tend you, protect you and shelter you, for all the days of my life.
- - - - - - - - - -
You are my husband/wife. My feet shall run because of you. My feet shall dance because of you. My heart shall beat because of you. My eyes see because of you. My mind thinks because of you. And I shall love because of you.
- - - - - - - - - -
I promise to encourage us to try new and unusual things. I vow to invest in loving you daily and to snuggle you as often as possible. I vow to be the best parts of me that fit perfectly with the best parts of you. Although I will be imperfect, I pledge to be sensitive and respectful of your unique talents, abilities and quirks. I pledge to lend you strength for all of your dreams. Through our union we can accomplish more than I could alone. I believe in you.
- - - - - - - - - -
I would rather share one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone.
- - - - - - - - - -
I wanna make you smile whenever you’re sad, carry you around when your arthritis is bad, all I wanna do is grow old with you. I’ll get your medicine when your tummy aches, build you a fire if the furnace breaks, oh it could be so nice, growing old with you. I’ll miss you, kiss you, give you my coat when you are cold. Need you, feed you, even let you hold the remote control. So let me do the dishes in our kitchen sink, put you to bed when you’ve had too much to drink, oh I could be the man (woman) who grows old with you, I wanna grow old with you.
- - - - - - - - - -
I love you. Very simple. Very truly. You are the epitome of everything I have ever looked for in another human being. There isn’t another soul on this planet who has ever made me half the person I am when I’m with you. I am forever changed because of who you are and what you’ve meant to me.
- - - - - - - - - -
You are my best friend. I love you with all my heart and stand here before all of our friends and family, sharing the happiest day of my life. I want nothing more than to share my future with you – my triumphs and my challenges, my joys and my sorrows. Together, I know we can accomplish the life we both dream of living.
- - - - - - - - - -
Jamie Marie, from this day forward I promise to be worth it. Worth the time. Worth the trip. Worth the energy. Worth the embarrassment. Worth your love. I promise that you will always count. You will always come first, and of course, if you don’t for whatever reason, I will buy you some shoes. From the moment you entered my world, you have filled it with life, colour and energy like never before … like kool-aid in a mud puddle … or a cupcake in a salad … or a rose garden in a junk yard. You are my rose, Jamie Marie, and I promise to devote my life to being your dirt.
- - - - - - - - - -
Here in front of everyone we love, I give you everything that I am. My dreams and my fears. My triumphs and my failures. I trust you, and will always endeavour to be worthy of your trust in me. If we face times of struggle and hardship, you can depend on me to support and protect you, no matter what the cost.
- - - - - - - - - -
When I say, ‘I love you’, it’s not because I want you or because I can’t have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I’ve seen your kindness and your strength. I’ve seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are. You’re a hell of a woman/man. You’re the one.
- - - - - - - - - -
You are my inspiration and my soul’s fire. You are the magic of my days. You help me laugh, you teach me love. You provide a safe place for me, unlike I’ve ever known. You free me to sing my own song. You are more of an amazement to me, each day I rediscover you. You are my greatest boon. I am yours. You are mine. Of this we are certain. You are lodged in my heart. The small key is lost. You must stay there forever.
- - - - - - - - - -
From the moment our paths crossed, you’ve captivated me, challenged me, frustrated me and improved me in ways no person has done before. And I have fallen in love with you again and again. I promise to be true to you, to support and encourage you and to challenge and frustrate you. I truly believe we are good for each other and that we will continue to grow stronger together.
- - - - - - - - - -
You know that there are some things I don’t believe in. But today, I want to tell you about some things I do believe in. I believe in sunrises and sunsets. I believe in hikes in the woods and walks on the beach.… I believe in all the beauty, the mystery and the wonder of life, and I believe that these joys, like all joys, are multiplied when you have someone to share them with. And I’m here because I want you to be that person. There’s no one else I’d rather spend my life with. I love your shy smile, your sweet laugh, your sense of humor, and your adventurousness. And most of all, I love the way you make me happier than I thought anyone ever could. That’s why I’m here, and that’s why I’m marrying you today.
- - - - - - - - - -
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride. So I love you because I know no other way than this. Where I does not exist, nor you. So close that your hand on my chest is my hand. So close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
- - - - - - - - - -
I love you without knowing how, or when or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride. Loving what I know of you, and trusting what I do not yet know. Home is wherever you are. I love you not for what you are but what you are when I’m with you.
- - - - - - - - - -
Today, as I give myself to you, my mind is clear and my commitment is strong and without reservation. I take you to be my life’s partner. I will never leave you nor forsake you; I will spend all my days at your side. We will share a lifetime of eternal, immeasurable love.
- - - - - - - - - -
I used to be afraid of falling in love, of giving my heart away. How could I trust a man/woman to love me? To give me all that I wanted to give to him/her? But when I met you, I realised how much we could share together. You have renewed my life. Today I join that life with yours.
- - - - - - - - - -
There are three words that are stronger than I love you. Today I stand in front of you to say ‘I choose you’. I choose you over all others. I choose you to share happiness with. I choose you to care for. I choose you to have a family with. I choose you to grow with. I choose you to love forever.
- - - - - - - - - -
I love you, with everything I have. Today I am so proud to call you my husband/wife. Words will never be enough to show the love I have for you. When I’m with you my heart beats so fast. I feel like it may explode if I let myself feel just how much I love you. The extent of your beauty is overwhelming, both inside and out. I could not possibly live without you. I promise to be there for you and our family, and I will never let you down. I look forward to growing old with you. You are my best friend, and my soulmate, I have loved you since the day I met you, and I will continue to do so until forever.
- - - - - - - - - -
... and some examples of readings
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed "My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love. … Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word ‘love’ to the people you love so when it matters most to say it, you will. We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime."
- - - - - - - -
Every Day by David Levithan "This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be."
- - - - - - - -
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey "What I’m feeling, I think, is joy. And it’s been some time since I’ve felt that blinkered rush of happiness. This might be one of those rare events that lasts, one that’ll be remembered and recalled as months and years wind and ravel. One of those sweet, significant moments that leaves a footprint in your mind. A photograph couldn't ever tell its story. It’s like something you have to live to understand. One of those freak collisions of fizzing meteors and looming celestial bodies and floating debris and one single beautiful red ball that bursts into your life and through your body like an enormous firework. Where things shift into focus for a moment, and everything makes sense. And it becomes one of those things inside you, a pearl among sludge, one of those big exaggerated memories you can invoke at any moment to peel away a little layer of how you felt, like a lick of ice cream. The flavour of grace."
- - - - - - - -
Delirium by Lauren Oliver "Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That’s what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side."
- - - - - - - -
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway "At night, there was the feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a woman wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together."
- - - - - - - -
A History of Love by Nicole Krauss "Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered, and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword, a pebble could be a diamond, a tree, a castle. Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was queen and he was king. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls, and when the sky grew dark, and they parted with leaves in their hair. Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."
- - - - - - - -
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green "‘I am,’ he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. 'I'm in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.’"
- - - - - - - -
Blue-Eyed Devil by Lisa Kleypas "I no longer believed in the idea of soul mates, or love at first sight. But I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together."
- - - - - - - -
Wild Awake by Hilary T. Smith "People are like cities: We all have alleys and gardens and secret rooftops and places where daisies sprout between the sidewalk cracks, but most of the time all we let each other see is is a postcard glimpse of a skyline or a polished square. Love lets you find those hidden places in another person, even the ones they didn’t know were there, even the ones they wouldn’t have thought to call beautiful themselves."
- - - - - - - -
This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks by Jarod Kintz "With my last breath, I’ll exhale my love for you. I hope it’s a cold day, so you can see what you meant to me. "
- - - - - - - -
Allegiant by Veronica Roth "I fell in love with him. But I don’t just stay with him by default as if there’s no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me."
- - - - - - - -
South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami "Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything."
- - - - - - - -
This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen "No relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater … The love we have for each other is bigger than these small differences. And that’s the key. It’s like a big pie chart, and the love in a relationship has to be the biggest piece. Love can make up for a lot."
- - - - - - - -
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak "Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people’s songs. They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the ‘blaze of passion’ often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did."
- - - - - - - -
Jazz by Toni Morrison "It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together nevermind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher’s palm asking for witnesses in His name’s sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love."
- - - - - - - -
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo "The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite. Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven."
- - - - - - - -
The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman "I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again… I’ll be looking for you, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me."
- - - - - - - -
Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos "Now, I’m not going to deny that I was aware of your beauty. But the point is, this has nothing to do with your beauty. As I got to know you, I began to realise that beauty was the least of your qualities. I became fascinated by your goodness. I was drawn in by it. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. And it was only when I began to feel actual, physical pain every time you left the room that it finally dawned on me: I was in love, for the first time in my life. I knew it was hopeless, but that didn’t matter to me. And it’s not that I want to have you. All I want is to deserve you. Tell me what to do. Show me how to behave. I’ll do anything you say."
- - - - - - - -
The Road by Cormac McCarthy “Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.”
- - - - - - - -
Your Personal Penguin by Sandra Boynton "I like you a lot. You’re funny and kind. So let me explain What I have in mind. I want to be your personal penguin. I want to walk right by your side. I want to be your personal penguin. I want to travel with you far and wide."
Just Kids by Patti Smith "Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves … 'What will happen to us?' I asked. 'There will always be us,' he answered."
- - - - - - - -
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James "It has made me better loving you… it has made me wiser, and easier, and — I won’t pretend to deny — brighter and nicer and even stronger. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I didn’t have them. Theoretically I was satisfied, as I once told you. I flattered myself I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid, sterile, hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better." 24. The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Onesby Neil Gaiman "Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life … You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. "
- - - - - - - -
The Princess Bride by William Goldman "Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches… I have stayed these years in my hovel because of you. I have taught myself languages because of you. I have made my body strong because I thought you might be pleased by a strong body. I have lived my life with only the prayer that some sudden dawn you might glance in my direction. I have not known a moment in years when the sight of you did not send my heart careening against my rib cage. I have not known a night when your visage did not accompany me to sleep. There has not been a morning when you did not flutter behind my waking eyelids… I love you. Okay? Want it louder? I love you. Spell it out, should I? I ell-oh-vee-ee why-oh-you. Want it backward? You love I."
- - - - - - - -
Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell "Holding Eleanor’s hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive."
- - - - - - - -
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer “I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.”
- - - - - - - -
Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins "For the two of us, home isn’t a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.
- - - - - - - -
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez "He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs."
- - - - - - - -
This is Water by David Foster Wallace "The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."