A Guide to Writing Your Own Wedding Vows

Writing your own wedding vows is a great way to make your wedding an even more intimate and personal day. Writing your own vows can also be an added stress to the already stressful process of planning a wedding. It may seem an overwhelming task at first, but if you follow the tips below, you can write your own wedding vows with more ease and less stress.

The first thing you should do when writing your wedding vows is to decide what you want to say. Just like when writing a college research paper, you may find it useful to outline some of the topics that you want to cover. Below is a list of questions that may be a good starting point to writing your own wedding vows.

What made me fall in love with my fiance?
What is my fiance's most endearing personality trait?
How did I meet my fiance?
What are some of the challenges we have overcome in our relationship?
What promises to I want to make to my fiance with regards to marriage?
What is your most cherished memory the two of you shared?
What does marriage mean to you?
What type of person had you imagined yourself with? How is your fiance like or not like the person you imagined?

These questions should help you to really focus on your relationship and your feelings on marriage. Once you have formed a list of answers to these questions, you should begin to have to idea of the things that you want to make sure to cover when writing your own wedding vows.

The next thing that you should do is sit down with your fiance and discuss the length and general feel that you want your vows to have. You wouldn't want to get up there, after spending so much time writing your own vows, and find out that one of you took a more humorous light-hearted approach, while the other took a very deep approach. You also don't want to have one person's vows be a paragraph while the other's are a page. While you are discussing some parameters for writing your own wedding vows with your fiance, you will also want to discuss any other concerns that you have about the vows.

Now that you have jotted down some ideas on your relationship and marriage, and discussed the general format of your vows with your fiance, you will want to begin doing a little research on both traditional wedding vows, as well as less traditional wedding vows. Sometimes it is best to learn from example, so reading over several different versions of vows may help you in writing your own wedding vows, especially if at some point you find yourself stumped on how to say exactly what you want to say.

While you are looking at examples of vows, you may also want to look for some love poems, famous quotes about love, listen to some love songs, you could even look up some things on Valentine's Day (cards, traditions, etc.). All of this research may help you to find some creative ways to say what you want to say when writing your own wedding vows to your fiance.

Writing is not everyone's forte, and weddings can be stressful whether or not you write you own vows, but remember that you don't need to worry about spelling or grammar, all you need to worry about is making sure that you say what you want to say how you want to say it. To make sure that this happens, once you are done writing your own wedding vows you need to make sure that you practice them several times aloud. This will help you to notice any parts of your vows that sound awkward even though they may read perfectly fine in your head. Once you have practiced your vows, and you are happy with how they sound, then you are all set to go.

One last thing, I don't recommend memorizing your vows without bringing with you a backup copy of them. Chances are, your nerves will be pretty tense on your wedding day, and nerves have been known to make people have a hard time remembering things. So, make sure that when you are done writing your own wedding vows, you take the time to write them on an index card just in case you suddenly draw a blank at the alter. After all, you don't want to have to resort to improving after you have spent all that time writing your own wedding vows.

Sources
http://weddings.about.com/od/yourweddingceremony/a/PersonalizeVows.htm