The most quoted line in the wedding vow, and the one people are most surprised to learn came out of a property deed.
“To have and to hold” is conveyancing language. In an English deed the habendum clause — from the Latin habendum et tenendum, to have and to hold — set out what the buyer would receive and on what terms they would keep it. The marriage rite took the formula wholesale.
That borrowing explains the register of the whole vow. It does not sound like poetry because it was never trying to be: it is a formula drafted to be witnessed, in the same language and cadence as the transfer of a freehold. Medieval marriage did transfer property, and the rite is honest about it — the next clause names money directly.
1662 prayer book · Common Worship · 1979 Episcopal · Methodist
I, N., take you, N., to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward …
Unchanged across four and a half centuries and the whole prayer-book family. The 1662 text places it immediately after “to my wedded Wife,” exactly where a deed would place the habendum.
Roman Catholic · United States alternative form
I, N., take you, N., for my lawful wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward …
Present in the alternative form permitted in US dioceses, absent from Form A. If the phrase matters to you and you are marrying in a Catholic church, this is the form to ask about.
Presbyterian · Lutheran · Catholic Form A
N., you are my beloved, and I promise, before God and these witnesses, to be loving and faithful to you …
Three of the mainline forms drop it entirely. The Presbyterian vow opens “N., you are my beloved”; the Lutheran opens “I take you, N., to be my wife, from this day forward.” Both keep “from this day forward” and discard the habendum — evidence that the second half of the pair is the part carrying meaning.
The clause promises both receiving and keeping. Most rewrites keep the first and forget the second, which is the half that costs something.
Secular · usable as written
I take you, and I intend to keep you — which is a different promise, and a longer one.
You are mine to look after from today, and I do not intend to hand that job to anybody else.
To receive you as you are, and to hold on when it would be easier to let go.
Freely, in a civil ceremony — and three major rites drop it already, so you are in respectable company. Nothing legally requires it. Some couples cut it precisely because of where it came from, on the grounds that the language of ownership is not what they want to promise each other; that is a reasonable objection and the phrase is not load-bearing.
Keep “from this day forward” if you cut it. That clause is short, it costs nothing, and it is the one doing the work.