Marriage vows

Wedding ceremony at Kiuruvesi Church in Kiuruvesi, Finland

Marriage vows are promises each partner in a couple makes to the other during a wedding ceremony.

Background

In the time of the Roman Empire (17 BC - 476 AD) the lower classes (proletarians) had "free" marriages. The bride's father would deliver her to the groom, and the two agreed that they were wed, and would keep the vow of marriage by mutual consent. Wealthy Romans, though, would sign documents listing property rights to publicly declare that their union was legalized and not a common law marriage. This was the beginning of the official recording of marriage.

The oldest traditional wedding vows can be traced back to the manuals of the medieval church. In England, there were manuals of the dioceses of Salisbury (Sarum) and York. The compilers of the first Book of Common Prayer, published in 1549, based its marriage service mainly on the Sarum manual. Upon agreement to marry, the Church of England usually offered couples a choice. The couple could promise each other to "love and cherish" or, alternatively, the groom promises to "love, cherish, and worship", and the bride to "love, cherish, and obey".

Christianity

Roman Catholic

Couples wedding in the Roman Catholic Church essentially make the same pledge to one another. According to the Rite of Marriage (#25) the customary text in English is:

I, ____, take you, ____, to be my (husband/wife). I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.

In the United States, Catholic wedding vows may also take the following form:

I, ____, take you, ____, to be my lawfully wedded(husband/wife), to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.

The priest will then say aloud "You have declared your consent before the Church. May the Lord in his goodness strengthen your consent and fill you both with his blessings. What God has joined, men must not divide. Amen."

Anglican

The law in England authorises marriages to be legal if properly carried out and registered in the Church of England and some other religious bodies (e.g. Jewish, Quakers): other men and women who wish to marry can be married by a local official authorised to do so (civil ceremony). Circumstances may result in the same partners having both ceremonies at different times, though this is rare. The vows, presence of witnesses, and civil registration are absolute requirements under the law.

Civil ceremonies often allow couples to choose their own marriage vows, although many civil marriage vows are adapted from the traditional vows, taken 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."

They were first published in English in the prayer book of 1549, based on earlier Latin texts (the Sarum and York Rituals of the medieval period). An older version of the final phrase is " until death us depart" where "depart" means "separate". "Until death us depart" had to be changed due to changes in the usage of "depart" in the Prayer Book of 1662. In the 1928 prayer book (not authorised) and in editions of the 1662 prayer book printed thereafter "obey" was retained (in the 1928 book an alternative version omitted this). The 1928 revised form of Matrimony was quite widely adopted, though the form of 1662 was also widely used, though less so after the introduction of the Alternative Service Book.

The original wedding vows, as printed in The Book of Common Prayer, are:

Groom: I,____, take thee,_____, to my wedded Wife, 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, according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth.

Bride: I,_____, take thee,_____, to my wedded Husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part, according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I give thee my troth.

Then, as the groom places the ring on the bride's finger, he says the following:

With this Ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

In the Alternative Service Book (1980) two versions of the vows are included: the bride and groom must select one of the versions only. Version A:

I,N, take you, N, to be my wife (or husband), 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, according to God's holy law, and this is my solemn vow.

Version B is identical except for the clause "to love and to cherish" where the groom says "to love, cherish, and worship" and the bride says "to love, cherish, and obey".

Since 2000 the service in Common Worship the normal vows are as follows:

I,N, take you, N, to be my wife (or husband), 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, according to God's holy law, in the presence of God I make this vow.

However, the bride and groom may choose to replace the clause "to love and to cherish" with "to love, cherish, and obey" when the bride makes her vows.

On September 12, 1922, the Episcopal Church voted to remove the word "obey" from the bride's section of wedding vows. Other churches of the Anglican Communion each have their own authorized prayer books which in general follow the vows described above though the details and languages used do vary.

See also

• Bride price
• Dowry
• Marriage
• Promise
• Vow
• Wedding

Further reading

• Daniel, Evan (1948) The Prayer-Book; its history, language and contents; 26th ed. Redhill: Wells Gardner; pp. 491–96: The form of solemnization of matrimony
• Warner, Diane (2006), Diane Warner's Complete Book of Wedding Vows: Hundreds of Ways to Say "I Do", Career Press, ISBN 978-1-56414-816-2
• Macfarlane, Michael (1999), Wedding Vows: finding the perfect words, Sterling Publishing Company, ISBN 978-0-8069-0639-3