Christian wedding vows — a first draft in two minutes.
You already know what you want to promise. The hard part is the register, the order, and the blank page. Choose a voice, pick the promises you mean, and get prose you can actually speak.
Build a first draft you can actually edit
Choose a voice, pick the promises you mean, and get continuous prose you can speak — not a list to reassemble.
Four or five is usually right. More than six and it stops sounding like a vow.
Your draft
[their name], standing here in front of the people who love us, I promise you this: to stay with you on the good days and the ordinary ones, and on the days neither of us saw coming; to be faithful to you — in what I do, where I look, and what I keep private; to keep choosing you, on the days it's easy and the days it's a decision; and to pray for you — by name, out loud, and when you'll never know I did. That's what I'm promising. I mean every word of it. "Where you go, I will go; and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God." — Ruth 1:16
Check with whoever is officiating before you finalise anything. Many churches and registrars require specific legal wording alongside personal vows, and some have their own liturgy you'll be adding to rather than replacing.
Start here
The problem is never the promises. It's the blank page.
Almost nobody struggles to know what they want to promise. Ask anyone about to marry and they can tell you in a sentence: I want to stay, I want to be faithful, I want to keep choosing them when it gets hard. The difficulty is that saying it in front of a hundred people requires a register most of us never write in, under a deadline, about the most important thing we'll ever say out loud.
So this builder starts from the promises and does the assembly. You choose the commitments you actually mean, pick the voice they should be spoken in, and it composes them into continuous prose — because vows are spoken, and a bulleted list doesn't survive contact with a microphone.
Treat what comes out as a first draft, not a finished text. The thing that will make your vows land is one specific detail nobody else could say — the thing you noticed on the third date, the promise that only makes sense given what you've been through. Put that in the middle. The structure the tool gives you is there so you have somewhere to put it.
How it works
Three voices, and they're genuinely different
Traditional
The register of the Book of Common Prayer — 'to have and to hold, for better, for worse'. Formal, familiar, and carrying four centuries behind it. Right for a church wedding with an older congregation.
Plain-spoken
The same promises in the words you'd actually use: 'to stay with you on the good days and the ordinary ones'. Reads warm rather than casual, and it's the register most people are reaching for.
Poetic
Heightened but not purple — 'to hold you when the light is easy, and to hold you harder when it isn't'. Works well when one or both of you writes, and badly when neither does.
Before you finalise
Four things worth knowing about vows
First, check with whoever is officiating. Many churches have set wording that must be included, and in most jurisdictions there are specific legal declarations that have to be said regardless of what else you write. Personal vows are usually added to those rather than replacing them, and finding that out a week before is a bad way to find it out.
Second, keep them short. Vows that run past a minute lose the room and — more to the point — become hard to say when your voice goes, which it very likely will. Four or five promises is the shape that works. A sixth rarely adds anything the first five didn't already carry.
Third, decide together whether you're writing separately or matching. Both work; the failure mode is one person writing three sentences and the other writing three paragraphs, which is uncomfortable for everyone and entirely avoidable with one conversation.
And fourth, print them. Not your phone — a card, in a pocket, and a spare with someone else. You will not remember them, and that's completely normal. The vows are a promise, not a recital, and nobody has ever thought less of someone for reading the most important sentence of their life off a piece of paper.
Add the part only you could say.
Describe what you've come through together and what you want to promise because of it. It stays private; create an account to keep going.
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Questions people ask
About the christian wedding vows
What are traditional Christian wedding vows?+
The best-known English form comes from the Book of Common Prayer: 'to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.' Most Protestant liturgies are a variation on it, and the builder above offers that register as one of its three voices.
Can we write our own wedding vows in a church?+
Usually yes, but check first — practice varies enormously by denomination and by minister. Many churches ask that the set liturgical vows are said and allow personal vows to be added alongside; some have required legal wording that can't be replaced. It's a five-minute conversation and it's worth having early.
How long should wedding vows be?+
Under a minute each, which is roughly 100–150 words. Four or five promises is the shape that works. Longer vows lose the room, and they become genuinely difficult to deliver once your voice goes — which it very often does.
What Bible verses are good for wedding vows?+
Ruth 1:16 ('where you go, I will go') is the most quoted and reads beautifully aloud despite originally being said between a woman and her mother-in-law. Ecclesiastes 4:12 ('a cord of three strands is not quickly broken') is the classic for a Christian marriage. 1 Corinthians 13:7 and Song of Solomon 6:3 both work well as closing lines.
Should we write our vows together or separately?+
Either, but decide together which. The common failure is one person writing three sentences while the other writes three paragraphs — an easily avoided mismatch. If you write separately, agree on a rough length and whether you're both including a scripture.
Is anything I type here saved?+
No. The whole thing runs in your browser — names, choices and generated text — and nothing is transmitted or stored. Use the copy button to keep your draft somewhere that will still exist tomorrow.
Vows are a beginning, not a finish line.
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