Natasha's Vows

Here are the vows that we wrote for one another as a portion of our ceremony. Feel free to make them your own.

Today they would like to publicly dedicate themselves to a life-time of deepening their love and commitment and to balancing and supporting each-other.

Shawn, do you vow to love Natasha forever, support her unconditionally and always be her partner no matter the circumstances? To be her best friend, her biggest fan and her honest and helpful critic when needed?

Do you promise to keep perspective, focus on what’s important, be the best person you can be and always strive to achieve more together than you could apart?

Finally, do you promise to try to see things from Natasha’s perspective, to treat her with kindness and respect and to always split the difference on the thermostat?

(Shawn: I do.)

Natasha, do you vow to love Shawn forever, support him unconditionally and always be his partner no matter the circumstances? To be his best friend, his biggest fan and his honest and helpful critic when needed?

Do you promise to keep perspective, focus on what’s important, be the best person you can be and always strive to achieve more together than you could apart?

Finally, do you promise to try to see things from Shawn’s perspective, to treat him with kindness and respect and to always split the difference on the thermostat?

(Natasha: I do.)

The rings that will now be exchanged are a symbol of the unbroken circle of trust that you have chosen to enter.

Natasha, do you now take Shawn as your husband, to love and to cherish from this day forward?

(Put ring on Shawn)

Shawn, do you now take Natasha as your wife, to love and to cherish from this day forward?

(Put ring on Natasha)

Witnessed by this gathering of friends and family I now pronounce you husband and wife.

You may kiss the bride.

Shawn and Natasha may you go into the world and fulfill your lives. Hold fast to your ideals and spiritual pursuits, give to each other new experiences of joy and challenge one another so that you may continue to grow.

May the love you hold for each other, now sealed in marriage, continue to mature so that your life together is a source of strength and inspiration to those around you.

And finally may your life together be a blessing to you both!

beautiful! and personal. I love them!

Here's a good tip for those of you who are getting married in a month. Everyone else that's further out - you won't understand why you shouldn't try to do this now, but trust me - wait until you're one month out as your perspective on marriage will mature when you're looking down the barrel of it...

Shawn and I were stuck in the car for 2.5 hours. We started talking about why marriage. Of course, we'd had that conversation countless times over the last 8 months, but this was a real "why marriage and what it means" thing. We delved into what it meant to us. What we think happens when marriages go bad. We also talked about what we were going to contribute as individuals, what we would do for ourselves as individuals, what we thought our personal strengths and weaknesses were vs. the other person, what partnership means, etc.

Anyway, then we got to whatever family event we had to attend. That night, as we were getting ready for bed, we each repeated to the other person the top 5 things that came to mind from the conversation - those were what we thought really stood out as the most important and most immediately available to us both as they were top-of-mind.

Then, we did the same top 5 things I remember thing a week or so later. After that, Shawn distilled it into the words you see above while I wrote the rest of the ceremony.

So, yes ladies, my husband wrote our vows.

Beautiful and personal Natasha- this is what I hope to achieve when we write our vows. I like the idea about making him vow to split the difference on the thermostat- this is almost as important as love, honor, and obey (hehe)!

They're beautiful Natasha! Thanks for the tips too!

Natasha,

I love your vows & your perspective on your partnership. I feel like my FI & I had a lot of those conversations in the begining of the stage of our relationship when we knew we wanted to get married. Now here we are just going thru everyday life...we need to take the time to reconnect with the reasons why we decided being together was a great idea!

OK - that was my husbands. It is the vow that we refer to the most frequently so far.

Here's the catch - how do you define "split the difference?" You see, you can try to game the system and put it up to 80 if you want to settle at 72.

HAHA - the controversy won't even go away when you VOW it!

Those were great!!!