How to renew your wedding vows

The six decisions, in order

1. 1. Settle why you are doing itEverything else follows from this and nothing else can be decided until it is. A tenth anniversary in a garden, a marriage that came through an illness, a courthouse wedding nobody got invited to — those are three different events, with three different guest lists and three completely different vows. Say the reason out loud to each other before you book anything.
2. 2. Pick the date, and don't overthink the numberRound anniversaries are the obvious hooks and the 10th, 25th and 50th carry the most weight. But there is no rule, and a renewal held for a reason that isn't a number — a recovery, a move home, a last good summer — usually produces a better ceremony than one held because the digit was round.
3. 3. Decide who leads itNo licensed officiant is required, because nothing legal is happening. That opens up options a wedding doesn't have: an adult child, the friend who introduced you, a parent, or nobody at all. Couples lead their own renewals routinely. If you want it in a church, that is the one case where the answer isn't yours — talk to the minister early.
4. 4. Decide the size, which decides the costThis is the only decision with real money attached. Two people and a walk costs nothing. Sixty people and a sit-down meal is priced exactly like a wedding, because it is one. Almost every figure you will see quoted online is really an answer to this question rather than to the renewal itself.
5. 5. Write the vows before you write anything elseNot the invitations, not the playlist. The vows are the entire event and everything else is staging. They also take the longest, because a renewal vow is genuinely harder to write than a wedding vow — it has to be about something that actually happened rather than something hoped for.
6. 6. Write the ceremony around them, and keep it shortTen to fifteen minutes, start to finish. Renewal guests are usually people who were at the wedding and know how this goes; there is no suspense to build and no formalities to observe. Welcome, why we're here, the vows, optional rings, done.

Eight questions that produce a renewal vow

Answer these separately, in writing, without showing each other. Answer them badly and at length — the editing comes later. Almost every good renewal vow is three or four of these answers, cut down and put in an order.

1. What did you promise the first time, in your own words — not the wording, the substance?
2. Which of those promises turned out to be the hard one?
3. Name the worst year. You do not have to say what happened, only that it happened.
4. What did they do in it that you have never properly thanked them for?
5. What is the smallest, most specific thing they do that you would miss most?
6. What did you not know about them on the wedding day that you know now?
7. What has changed about what you want from the next twenty years?
8. If you could only say one sentence, and it had to be true, what is it?

The trap in a renewal vow is the summary. “We’ve had our ups and downs but we got through it” is true of every marriage in the room and therefore says nothing about yours. Questions 3, 4 and 5 exist to force the specific detail that makes a vow land, and the specific detail is almost always small.

One worked example

Raw answers first, unedited and unimpressive, which is how everyone’s start:

Now the same four answers, cut down and ordered. Nothing has been added — the writing is entirely in the choosing and the trimming:

Note what was cut: everything general. No “you are my best friend”, no “I love you more every day”. The flask and the crossword do all the work those lines were trying to do, and they can only be said by one person about one marriage.

Next

If a blank page is still a blank page, start from something finished instead: there are twenty-four complete renewal vows to adapt, and five full ceremony scripts to drop them into. The vow builder turns answers like the ones above into a draft without you having to do the cutting.