Wedding Vows That Grow with Your Marriage
Wedding Vows That Grow with Your Marriage
Exchanging vows are a nice lovely, sentimental moment, but they're not usually much use once the diaper changing starts and the bills begin to pile up. Let's fix that, shall we?
Written by Liz Bayardelle, PhD | See Comments | Updated 06/18/2016
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168 Questions to Ask Your Spouse
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Mawiage is what bwings us twogether today.
And for those of you who don’t speak Princess Bride, let’s talk about marriage. I can hardly claim to be an expert on the topic after my two-and-some-change years of personal experience, but I can call myself a lifelong marriage observer.
My Childhood Image of Marriage
When I was four or five my parents let me go on “The Alpine Slide” all by myself. It is (probably was, given how dangerous it sounds in hindsight) a giant slide down the mountains of Winter Park Ski Resort that made it a tourist attraction in summer as well as winter. This was a place our family went regularly, but this was the first time my parents had let me go down without an accompanying “grown up” on the sled with me. (There was a track that was nearly impossible to jump, so it probably was safer than most grocery carts, but to my young mind it was a cross between NASCAR and a rocket ship.)
Anyway, halfway down the mountain I realize that this was the first time in my life I could ever remember being truly alone (not just in the shower or my bedroom). Immediately on the heels of this realization was the question “what do I think about now that I’m alone?” (because clearly, thoughts aren’t private the rest of the time). The thought that flitted into my mind next, to the affront of feminists everywhere, was “hmmm, who am I going to marry?”
Suffice it to say, I have been excited about becoming a wife for quite some time now. I have observed as nagging wives in church belittled their mysteriously tolerant husbands. I have watched as my parents learned to handle each other when they were repeatedly late to things or couldn’t for the life of themselves remember to turn off lights or shut drawers (not naming names). And I watched the real relationships around me with an eye toward how various dynamics would play out on a long-term stage.
Then I actually got married.
Marriage in Reality
If I say to you that as someone who had dreaming about being someone’s wife since the tender age of five I still knew less than nothing of what marriage would be like, I would still be making an understatement of magnanimous proportions. It’s cute that I thought I could understand this massive, life-altering concept without partaking of it. So cute.
Anyway, on to the topic at hand: wedding vows. (Or as my ten-year-old still calls them, “wedding vowels”.) Our vows were pretty creative. We did the whole love honor and cherish thing, but we also wrote our own. He promised he would hug me even when he didn’t understand why I was crying and I promised that he wouldn’t have to fold laundry ever again. Things like that.
I am immensely proud of the fact that we have lived up to our vows quite well. He has not so much as folded a single towel since I tossed my bouquet, and I have been the beneficiary of many confused-yet-sympathetic huggings when I’ve had hard days.
The Great Vow Project
However, as we neared our first year’s anniversary, I began realizing that the vows we had written didn’t cover half of what needed to be covered in terms of actual “real” marriagey stuff. So, in my card to him on our first anniversary, I wrote part two. Here they are, unedited:
- I promise to attempt to know when you need space without getting offended or having to ask.
- I will try my best to find a way to show you I love you without giving you diabetes. (But seriously, food = love in my head, so it’s hard.)
- I vow to look at the big picture you paint with your actions a little more and the little details that worry me a little less.
- I promise that we will start doing little adventures and actually enjoying our lives now that year one is over.
- I will do everything I can to get you back to New York [his home town where we met, but no longer live] more often.
- I will do a better job at cleaning regularly because I know how happy it makes you.
- And finally, I promise to let you know how much I appreciate the little things you do for me everyday.
These were good. Much “realer” than our originals. I actually printed them out and put them in my closet so I could remind myself what I was supposed to be doing on the wife front every morning when I got dressed. Now, as we approach our next dating anniversary (I missed year two of marriage, but I had just given birth, so I’m giving myself an extension), here are my additions for year two:
- I vow to try not to start conversations when you’re concentrating on something else, walking from room to room, or in the hour before you leave for work.
- I promise to bring up the little things that are bothering me when we are both in a good mood, not exhausted, and ideally before they grow into big worries.
- I swear I’m going to get you back to New York more regularly. This time I mean it.
- I promise to try to get better at articulating why I’m experiencing an emotion, not just letting you know which emotion I’m feeling.
- I will work on having our “quality time” be actual activities, not just going about our usual routines in the same room.
- I promise to keep learning more about I want and accepting that my thoughts and preferences are okay instead of trying to guess what you want all the time (and getting everyone all confused in the process).
- And one more very important one, I vow that we will finally find you a good barber in California. There just has to be one somewhere.
So that’s it for the end of year two. I don’t pretend to know everything about marriage, but as a personal trainer I do know a heck of a lot about goals. The first thing is that you’ll never achieve them if you don’t make them, so I definitely think it’s a beneficial exercise for spouses to do at least once a year. We have annual reviews at work, our kids get report cards, our cars get check-ups…it’s only fair that our marriage duties get a regular dusting off.
And that’s it for me. Give it a go and let me know if you come up with any funny ones.
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About the Author
Liz Bayardelle, PhD
Founder | Contributor
Liz (or Dr. Mommy, as her toddler started calling her after learning what a PhD was) is the happily sleep-deprived mom of a toddler (and professional raccoon noise impersonator), a sparkle-clad kidnado, a teenage stepdaughter, 200 cumulative pounds of dog, and herd of dustbunnies (if daily vacuuming doesn't occur). During nights and naptimes, she uses her PhD in business psychology as an author, speaker, and consultant. She also serves as an executive and principal for three companies, two of which she co-founded with her very patient (and equally exhausted) husband.