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About Traditional Wedding Vows

Below is an Article About Traditional Marriage Promises

by Mariano Tomaszewski. Copyright © 2006.
All rights reserved.

The exchange of wedding vows is often considered to be the most significant part of the ceremony or the heart of the entire wedding service.  Wedding vows carry a solemn and serious promise, a pledge made publicly, by which a man and a woman express their desire and readiness to commit themselves and accept each other into a new kind of permanent relationship known as marriage or matrimony. 

Just like various types of wedding ceremonies also wedding vows may have their distinctive characters.  The vows cover a vast spectrum of possibilities ranging from religious and spiritual such as “Catholic” or “Christian wedding vows” through “traditional wedding vows,” “romantic,” “unique”, “funny,” “personalized,” “original,” all the way to “modern,” “celebrity,” “secular,” “non-religious marriage vows,” etc.  The above examples illustrate that wedding vows may vary according to each couple.  It is so because marriage vows frequently reflect the beliefs, values, and cultural upbringing of the bride and the groom and also, to some extent, the makeup and the spirit of their families. 

Just as there is a correlation between the words “wedding” and “marriage” there is a deeper meaning in the expressions “traditional wedding vows” and “traditional marriage vows.”  The wedding day, and particularly the wedding ceremony, indicate the first moment of marriage for the bride and the groom.  It is at this time that they are becoming husband and wife uniting their lives for better or worse.  In popular terminology “wedding vows” and “marriage vows” are synonymous.  They are kept as such also on this website.  Yet, deep inside the two kinds of vows are a little different especially from a spiritual perspective.  Thus, “wedding vows” are the audible words or other visible forms of expression (e.g., sign language) by the means of which the bride and the groom manifest their initial acceptance and commitment to each other.  This commitment assumes the form of life-time “marriage vows” that need to be renewed on a daily basis as the couple journeys through various roads of married life.  While the “wedding vows” are basically a one-time event the “marriage vows” are a living ongoing commitment of the spouses to love, cherish, take care of each other, be loyal and faithful to each other always.  In this way “wedding vows” are the material (belonging to sphere of senses) manifestation of “marriage vows” which are a spiritual reality nurtured through committed lives of husband and wife. 

In general most of traditional wedding vows expressed during marriages officiated in churches have a religious character.  On the other hand, during ceremonies celebrated outdoors wedding vows might range from religious to secular often being a mixture of both.  Religious wedding vows, Christian or Catholic vows being examples, involve a reference to God or Jesus Christ.  This reference may point to God being a witness to the mutual commitment of the bride and the groom with such phrases as “in the name of God” or “so help me God,” “I promise God and I promise you…,” “according to God’s holy ordinance…,” “to be your faithful companion until Christ calls us home…,” “to love and to serve you as Christ commands…,” etc.  Conversely secular wedding vows omit references to God, Jesus or other religious references.  Secular wedding vows are essentially focused on the promise of love, companionship, acceptance and commitment of each other.  They are founded on great “personal promises” that a bride and a groom mutually manifest.  While religious wedding vows tend to have God or Jesus Christ as a witness to the couple’s consent and a helper on the journey of their married life, in the non-religious vows the emphasis is shifted toward the couple itself.  It is the “unconditional love” and personal integrity of the bride and the groom that in this case supply sufficient grounds for the life time commitment and the fuel for the daily faithfulness to this commitment for the next ten, twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five or whatever the next anniversary.  The above differentiation between the secular and religious vows does not imply that couple’s who choose to pronounce their vows without explicit references to God, Jesus, or other religious symbols are essentially a “godless” people.  Even, one of the official Catholic wedding vows has no religious reference and is based on the mutual promise of the spouses to be.  So the choice between a religious or secular phraseology of the wedding vows might depend on the bride and groom’s personal spiritual outlook and the matter of emphasis.  Traditional wedding vows are typically short and there is neither time nor a need to say everything that is important to the couple.  Even if you don’t include God or Christ in your marriage vows but in general your wedding ceremony has a religious character (prayers, blessing, a reading from the Bible, a clergy person for the officiant) then such references are implied. 

Spiritual wedding vows are not synonymous with religious wedding vows.  Religious marriage vows come in the context of a particular religion (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) or a specific Christian denomination (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, etc.).  Spiritual wedding vows are more general when it comes to references to God.  For example some kinds of new-age wedding vows have a spiritual character although the concept of God in the new-age perspective might be very different than the typical monotheistic view of Christianity or Judaism.  The same may be said about Hinduism, Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies and religions where there is a notion of the Absolute, eternal energy, etc., but is not a personal God as understood for example by Christians.  In this way spiritual wedding vows presuppose a Higher Power or Intelligence although avoiding precise and defined references to the nature of the Divine.

Even though there are hundreds of options for choosing and expressing wedding vows, sometimes with a modern or shocking twist, many couples look for samples of traditional wedding vows.  This is not surprising when we consider that the concepts of marriage, wedding, and matrimony are so frequently intertwined with cultural and religious traditions.  Thus traditional wedding vows carry their own depth and power because they have been expressed by millions of couples over long periods of time.  In addition, various examples of traditional wedding and marriage vows illustrate their brevity.  This laconic and terse nature of traditional wedding vows (see samples on this website) clearly suggest that they express the substance of what the marriage promises are about. 

Presently the Wedding Ceremony Center offers free samples of Catholic wedding vows and the so-called “Christian wedding vows” which are basically examples of traditional wedding vows used in various churches with Protestant backgrounds.  Sample wedding vows offered here can be either used “as they are” in a actual wedding ceremony or taken as the raw material and modified according to couple’s circumstances.  Some of the examples of wedding vows on this website come also in other languages: Catholic wedding vows in Spanish (Spanish wedding vows) and Catholic wedding vows in Italian (Italian wedding vows). 

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