That makes sense, right? I am a writer by trade. I have spent thousands of hours putting pen to paper, writing everything from research papers and essays, to news articles, to fiction. Outside occasional writers block, I don't find writing to be a struggle. Yes, the process can be ugly sometimes, and yes, sometimes I get frustrated trying to find the right words, but it's always been the thing I come back to over and over again and there are few things I find more satisfying than telling a great story.
But sitting in the living room with a blank Google Doc staring back at me, I didn't know where to begin.
It wasn't so much not knowing what to say, though.
I look relaxed. Trust me, I was not.
Photo: James West Photography
I had mixed feelings about writing personal vows at first. Contrary to popular belief, I am not an extrovert. I would not say I am shy but I don't enjoy being the centre of attention - which is an inevitable thing on your wedding day, it turns out.
Don't get me wrong - I was excited to marry Jeff and I was excited to celebrate with our friends and family. We had a beautiful day and I could not be happier with how everything went. But those who know me well know it was never about the wedding for me. It was - and remains - always about the marriage.
The combination of those two things made the prospect of penning vows overwhelming to me at first. I wasn't sure which part made me feel more anxious: the idea of standing in front of a big group of people and sharing aloud some very personal thoughts, or coming up with something to say that accurately reflected my thoughts on marriage.
So I did what I always do when tackling a difficult writing project. I wrote two sentences, paused to re-read them, then deleted them and started again.
And again. And again.
I was probably making a stupid face at him at this point.
Photo: James West Photography
Clearly, it was a super productive and not-at-all frustrating time.
Truth be told, I would probably still be writing my vows eight months later had it not been for our pre-marital counselling sessions. Along with our sit-down sessions with the pastor, Jeff and I read Timothy Keller's The Meaning of Marriage in the lead up to our wedding. Keller's passage on vows was so significant both Jeff and I incorporated it into our vows.
Wedding vows are not a declaration of present love, but a mutually binding promise of future love. A wedding should not be primarily a celebration of how loving you feel now - that can be safely assumed. Rather, in a wedding you stand up before God, your family, and all the main institutions of society, and you promise to be loving, faithful, and true to the other person in the future, regardless of undulating internal feelings or external circumstances.
Thinking about vows from that perspective changed my entire approach to writing. It helped me think beyond the day and, as a result, draw my focus back to determining what realistic promises I could make that day.
In the end, I came up with this: to keep choosing to love Jeff - when I want to, when it's hard and especially when I don't want to and to always commit to our marriage in a deliberate and intentional way.
I'm not naive enough to think either of those promises will always be easy to keep - and that's why it was important to me to find a way to keep those promises in fresh in my mind.
That brings me to my only tip for remembering your wedding day promises:
Keep them in a place where you can review them regularly.
It's not an entirely original tip. The summer before we got married, I went to a LOT of weddings. At one of these weddings, the pastor suggested doing this for when you need a reminder of why you're doing the marriage thing to begin with.
Not if you need a reminder. When. Love might not be inevitable, but times of conflict in marriage? You can count on that.
The means of display will look different for everyone. In our case, after returning from our honeymoon, we purchased two plain black photo frames, stuck those two folded sheets of paper inside and nailed them to the wall above our bedside tables. Much like my wedding band, it is a reminder of the promises we made to one another at the front of that little wooden chapel in Upper Gagetown that October afternoon.
I am not a perfect wife and Jeff is not a perfect husband. What we are is committed to our marriage - to being loving, being faithful and being true to one another, for better or for worse.
Photo: James West Photography
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