When a couple comes together at the altar, what exactly are they promising that they’ll “do”? Increasingly, it’s a mystery for guests, and possibly for the couple themselves. According to The Knot’s 2021 survey of its users, 47 percent of couples that year elected to write their own wedding vows. Personal vows are expected to be expressive—to sum up this particular relationship, and possibly to serve as entertainment for the guests. That’s made some brides and grooms reluctant to say them aloud.
For Nicolas Heller and Naomi Otsu, who married in April 2025, it seemed best to separate their vows from their wedding ceremony and celebration. As they told a New York Times reporter, they both “hate being perceived” and “could not imagine professing their love to each other in front of 130 guests.” They couldn’t even imagine doing it in front of each other. Rather than exchange any form of vows, Heller and Otsu wrote each other letters, which they do not plan to read for 10 years or so.
Making private vows is still unusual, but it seems to be a downstream consequence of making vows personal. After all, this is a project that couples can fail at. The jokes in your vows may not land, saucy lines may be too awkward to deliver in front of your parents, and your spouse-to-be may not cry at the part you thought would be deeply moving. Small wonder that couples who lack theater-kid energy may want to avoid the audience. The Knot suggests that couples considering private vows away from their guests exchange them the day before the wedding, to take the pressure off their special day.
For another couple who chose to make their vows privately, separating this part of the ceremony was about drawing a boundary, they told the Times. “The ceremony is for our guests; the vows are for us,” one of the grooms said. It’s an understandable impulse, when personal vows create pressure to summarize the whole of your relationship so far, or to put words to your particular love in a way that marks it as different than any other love.
But that’s not the purpose of wedding vows. Classically, the marriage vows are not about the particular couple standing at the altar—they’re about the institution the couple is choosing to enter. Classical vows (for better, for worse, etc) have lasted with only minor revisions for a thousand years. They are intended to suit every couple, uncustomized, and they enumerate the promises that must be kept for a marriage to be a marriage. But customized vows frequently mingle serious promises with ones that cannot or should not be kept.
It’s not necessary in marriage to “always laugh at your jokes,” it’s not necessarily possible to “never go to bed angry,” and it’s actively counterproductive to “pretend not to notice” a particular flaw. For the newlyweds, it’s easy for customized vows to be more backward-looking—telling the story of their relationship so far—rather than looking ahead to the sickness and health, better and worse that awaits them.
Vows are also not just pretty words that the wedding guests happen to overhear. In Vows, Cheryl Mendelson’s 2024 history of wedding promises, she draws a clear distinction between private love and the public institution of marriage. As she writes:
Every marriage is unique, but the vows do not address their unique qualities because the social world has no stake in intimate, personal aspects of the marriage that don’t affect others. The public has a stake only in the social shape of marriage, the features of marriage that have social effects and that call for others to behave in certain ways toward the couple.
In this vision of marriage and weddings, the guests are not there simply to celebrate the couple. They are also witnesses, and they need to know what they are witnessing. They don’t need to take photos, but they need to hear and understand the vows in order to help the couple keep them. When vows focus on a couple’s history and the peaks of their romantic feelings, it is unclear what exactly the couple is binding themselves to. And in a pluralistic society, it is all the more important for couples to clearly articulate what they are promising, since the guests will not be able to guess.
Without a clear, shared sense of what marriage is that goes beyond the individual couple, it is impossible for that marriage to be honored in their community. For the writer behind the Ethicist section of the New York Times, all marriages are murky. A few months ago, a letter writer told philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah that he was uncomfortable with the fact that his married lover had not told his husband about their relationship. He hadn’t met the spouse, and believed the marriage was open in some sense, but wasn’t sure secret affairs were allowed. The letter writer was operating within the rules of his own open marriage. He asked the Ethicist: “Do I have a moral obligation to a man I don’t know?”
It was possible, the Ethicist agreed, that the letter writer’s lover was breaking promises to his own husband, but he saw that as none of the lover’s business. “My sense is that their private understanding remains opaque to you; it certainly isn’t for you to reshape to your liking,” Appiah wrote. “Your own promises bind you to your husband alone.” For Appiah, marriage only operates privately. He does not see a couple’s promises to each other as binding on the members of their community, as Mendelson does. And he cannot imagine that aiding in another man’s infidelity could pose a threat to one’s own marriage. There are only private agreements, no shared institutions.
When a couple is entering marriage as an institution and can trust their community has a shared understanding of the institution, it takes very few words to vow marriage. In the opening scenes of Alessandro Manzoni’s 1827 novel The Betrothed, the protagonists Renzo and Lucia are in love, but a local lord has forbidden their priest, Don Abbondio, to conduct their marriage, since the lord has designs on Lucia. However, the couple doesn’t technically need the priest’s consent. To be married under church law, it is enough that Don Abbondio witnesses their mutual commitment, which, at that time, is as simple as standing before him and saying, in turn, “This is my husband” and “This is my wife.”
The full articulation of the classical vows is not necessary because all parties know exactly what is meant by “husband and wife.” To effect their marriage, Renzo and Lucia break into Don Abbondio’s house and begin to make their mutual declaration. Unfortunately for them, the priest throws a tablecloth over Lucia’s head before she can say the words, and sprints out of his house. And so begin their sprawling adventures.
The story of Renzo and Lucia begins with an attempt at a public, legible vow. When it is interrupted, the pair is kept apart by brigandry and plagues for hundreds of pages. But the greatest threat to their happiness is a private, personal vow made by Lucia. When she is kidnapped, she vows to never marry if she is delivered from captivity. When she is finally reunited with Renzo and they are otherwise free to marry, she sees herself as already bound.
It takes the intervention of an elderly friar, Fr. Christoforo, to release her. The friar reassures Lucia that she was not free to make her vow of celibacy, being already betrothed. And, more than that, because he acts in persona Christi, he can release her from her commitment, even if it truly bound her. It is unwise to make private, unvetted vows. On her own, Lucia was unsheltered by tradition, institutions, and witnesses who could have dissuaded her.
Making and keeping a vow is not a matter for just one person, or even two. It takes the horizontal support of your living community, and the vertical support of the institution stretching from the past to the future. For religious couples, the vertical support goes farther—God doesn’t only witness the vows, but infuses the couple with the grace necessary to keep them. For all couples, the vows of marriage should be shared—between the couple; with all their guests; and in unity with many, many other couples through the ages.
