Gay Wedding Vows

Gay Wedding Vows: Make Your Wedding Your Own

“For richer or poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part”: most people have probably heard these traditional wedding vows more times than they can count, but do gay wedding vows have to follow the same script? Of course not! In a way, gay wedding vows are an opportunity to reinvent the practice, since you’re not necessarily stuck with a wedding that follows the strictly regimented format of some church weddings.

There are several ways you can create gay wedding vows to personalize your ceremony, making the wedding a celebration of your relationship and the history you and your partner share.

Look For Gay Wedding Vows Online

Many officiants have shared their gay wedding vows online, giving engaged couples a variety of resources to figure out the vows for their ceremonies. While you probably don’t want to use another couple’s vows verbatim, these can help you decide what you like in vows and what you’d like to avoid. For example, a quick search shows some commonalities between gay wedding vows:

1. Whether they’re traditional or original, vows will usually have the couple promise to honor, respect, and love one another.
2. In most vows, the officiant will ask the couple about challenges. You and your partner may promise to stand by each other’s side and support one another through difficult times.
3. Finally, vows will usually involve a promise of commitment–it’s a wedding, after all, so this part of the vows is an opportunity to declare your dedication to one another as you begin your future together.

These basic commonalities can give you a strong starting point for your vows, while allowing you a lot of flexibility to work in what makes your relationship unique. Maybe you and your partner have an in-joke or a way of showing affection that can be mentioned in your vows to make them truly unique.

Discuss Your Vows With Your Officiant

Chances are, your officiant will have a script they like to use for weddings. Maybe it’s a standard script, especially if you’re getting married in a church, but even officiants who perform ceremonies outside of places of worship tend to have a standard set of vows. If they perform a lot of same-sex ceremonies, they may even have a specific set of gay wedding vows you can use in your ceremony.

If your wedding is being performed by a member of the clergy, your officiant may have a standard script that they will not deviate from:

• In a Jewish wedding, the ceremony and vows feature many traditional elements that hold specific religious significance.
• Quaker gay weddings are performed within the context of the Quaker meeting, meaning the couple makes “promises,” rather than vows or oaths, and there is no single officiant.
• In the Presbyterian church, a standard set of vows are used by the pastor, which usually involve the couple’s families and the congregation.

You don’t have to abandon the classics if you don’t want to! Many of the best-known vows are widely used for a reason, and your officiant may already incorporate some of them into their vows.

Writing Your Own Vows

If you’re feeling ambitious, you can write your own gay wedding vows. Vows written by each partner can be incredibly personal and heartfelt–no one knows your relationship better than you do. If you decide to go this route for your wedding vows, be sure to get an early start: you don’t want to spend the night before your wedding trying to think of something to say once you’re in front of your friends and families!

Writing your own vows can also be pretty terrifying if you’re public-speaking averse. You’ll probably be a bundle of nerves on your wedding day anyway, so if you get nervous about speaking in front of a large group of people, maybe it’s best to leave the talking to your officiant.

Gay Wedding Vows Make the Ceremony

By the time you get to the ceremony, you’ll have made a lot of decisions, from the venue to the food to the music. Of all the decisions leading to your wedding, the vows may end up being the most significant: what do you and your partner want to promise to each other as you start this new phase of your life together? Don’t just think of your vows as the words you repeat back to your officiant: think of them as an opportunity to celebrate your relationship’s past and future.