When I posted my ceremony script last week, the thing that I was most nervous about sharing was the vows. I am embarrassed that my vows aren’t as good as Collin’s. To make matters worse, when written out, mine are DRAMATICALLY shorter than Collin’s too. In case you missed them, here are our vows again:
ROBIN: Collin, I want to marry you because being in love with you makes me love everything else in the whole world a little bit more. The joy you take from every second of your life, the total satisfaction you get out of tiny pleasures like kneading StuKitty like dough or sitting in your kitchen chair or waking up next to me. And you’ve been so amazingly, awesomely supportive of me through trials, and me freaking out over tiny little things that do not really count as trials.
Even though I’ve lived through some hard things in my life, I will never feel unfortunate, because I get to marry you. So I vow to love you faithfully for the rest of our lives, to try to support you as much as you support me, and I vow to live joyfully with you.
COLLIN: I’ve thought long and hard about what my vows to you will be and the more I thought about them the harder it was to condense them within our 200 word limit. I call you more than 200 made up words like CLAMP, FRLINK, PaTINK and SORNT on a regular basis to express how crazy I am about you, so there is no way I can keep
my vows under 200 words. I could spend hours talking about how much I love you and all your little quirky ways but I think all that’s been said before and will be said a million more times over the course of our lives, let alone the next few hours!
The bottom line is this: You, Robin Hitchcock, make me happy! I love being with you. I wake up happy next to you, I’m happy when I come home from work and I
get to squeeze you. I’m happy sleeping next to you. I’m happy just being in the same room as you. You’re basically my happy drug that makes me the obnoxiously smiley
person that I am today. I hope that I can help make you as happy as you make me. I view these vows as my promise to you, and to us, to help us be the happiest couple
we can be over our lifetimes.
I VOW to always be there for you… no matter what! I vow to support you through the really hard times as well as the happy ones. I promise that you will always be
able to lean on me through your depression and your anxiety. I will never let up and we will beat them together. In doing so I vow to help you see what an amazing
person you are even when you are convinced otherwise. I vow to hug you when you need a good squeeze. I vow to kiss you when you need kisses. I vow to be your
mirror whenever you need it… NO MATTER WHAT! I PROMISE. You are my best friend. Cuuns for goods!
For those of you playing along at home, that’s 338 words in Collin’s vows and 143 in mine.
I knew all along that Collin’s vows were going to be better than mine. Collin is so charming, and speaks so genuinely from the heart, and that is all there is to really good vows (other than, you know, actually loving the person you are marrying, but hopefully that is a given). Plus he had an ace in his hole in that he could shout out “CLAMP” whenever he stumbled and no one would think anything of it. I knew Collin’s vows were going to go over better than mine, and I was resigned to it, so I simply demanded that I go first.
Also, what you see above are not exactly the vows that I wrote. it is a transcription of the vows I said at our actual ceremony. I could not find a saved copy of the vows I wrote. Looks like I just wrote ‘em and printed them. Given I did it at the absolute last minute before leaving my house the last time before the wedding, this isn’t that surprising. Still, it is disappointing, because my written vows were better than what I actually said, transcribed above.
The written version had a bridging section before the last sentence of the first paragraph explaining how Collin has shown me that he gets strength through his joy for life. It not only gave the vows a little more flow, but made the last part of my actual vowy-vows (the promises) more poignant. I’m so sad that I skipped over it in the heat of the moment! I wish I had read my vows off a sheet or worked harder to memorize them.
All this being said, even though it hurts my pride as a Writer to admit this, I’m totally ok with Collin’s vows being better than mine. I’d rather be disappointed in myself than with the person I marry when it comes to our final declaration of love before getting hitched.
Vows are so, so loaded that I’m frankly astonished it has become so popular for couples to write their own. Did you write your own vows? Did you worry about them measuring up to your partner’s?
