Vows, Forms and Traditions

When my husband and I got married, we both sort of felt that we wanted to use the "traditional" set of marriage vows. Not that we could have told you exactly which tradition. We would probably both have explained the idea as "You know, 'to have and to hold, in sickness and in health.' That stuff."

So we went looking for traditions to borrow.

Turns out, "that stuff" is old. How old? Well, the vows to be said by a husband and wife are some of the few English passages in the Use of Sarum, a liturgical handbook written mainly in Latin that dates from the 11th century, borrowing heavily from the French rites imported by the recent Norman invasion. Wikipedia quotes the husband's vows as follows:

I N. take the N. to my weddyd wyf, to have and to hold fro thys day forwarde, for better for wors, for richer for porer, in sikenesse and in helthe, tyl deth us departe, yf holy Chyrche wyl it ordeyne; and thereto I plyght the my trouthe.
 

The wife's vows are nearly the same, except for one additional clause.

This awes me, it really does. Nearly a millennium, and people in contexts so different as to be nearly unimaginable to one another are making vows that frame the course of their lives in almost exactly the same words.

Of course, not everyone does use these same words. Various tweaks, alterations, deletions and insertions have been made by all sorts of people over the intervening years. The first 1549 Book of Common Prayer adds in “to love and to cherish,” for example. This addition has been kept in most subsequent variations, even though (as my husband noted when trying to memorise the vows we eventually decided on) it breaks the pattern a little: it's still a pair, but it's a pair of similar things, rather than a pair of contrasting things. Speaking of pairs, the whole paired formulation is very appropriate for a marriage, is it not?

In modern times, it's common for spouses to write their own vows. This is in keeping with a more modern view of the forms in which we live. We are very conscious, these days, of the ways in which holding people to older forms can restrict their growth. Forms can deform us. They can bend us into shapes that cause us pain. But we still need forms -- our relationships still need structure, and our personalities still crave the definition of identity. Making new forms of our own is one solution to this problem.

Building a form from scratch is not the only option, though. We can shop around, make alterations, import the wisdom of our ancestors where it seems good and quietly ignore it when it seems bad.

You've probably already guessed that the extra clause to be said by the wife involves obedience, and you'd be right. The wording in the Use of Sarum is "to be bonoure and buxum in bed and at bord," which means, roughly, "to be good-natured and obedient in bed and at the table," albeit with much better alliteration. Later versions, particularly in the Book of Common Prayer (which drew heavily on the Use of Sarum when it was first written for the newly-created Anglican Church), add "to love and to cherish" for the husband, with "to love, cherish and obey" for the wife. But in modern times, couples married in the Anglican tradition have a choice as to whether to include a vow of obedience on the wife's part or not. And you won't be surprised to learn that, while borrowing heavily from Anglican versions of these vows, my husband and I chose not.

Still, disagreeing with older forms isn't the only reason people sometimes choose to write their own wedding vows, these days. Another reason is that, in modern times, borrowing someone else's words can be seen as insincere. Surely, if you meant what you said, you would say it in your own words, instead of just reciting something written by somebody else?

In my opinion, one way for a form to be a good form is if this isn't true. The wonderful thing about "for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health" is that it is a form that can be inhabited sincerely. It doesn't promise perfection. It merely promises fidelity through imperfection. In its own way, it's more modest than some of the self-written vows out there. Yet it is still bold enough for the purpose.

Explaining what marriage involves is hard. I respect people who can write their own vows, but for myself I really don't think I could do better than the traditional version in form or in content. Indeed, I am amused to note that even some parts of various traditional forms punt a little on trying to describe what a marriage really is. When asking the couple to take their vows, the Use of Sarum tells the priest to translate, from the Latin, the phrase sicut sponsus debet sponsam. That is, “as a husband ought to do for a wife.” You know, husband stuff. Husband things, that a husband would do!

As we get further from the Anglican or Catholic traditions, many versions of the marriage ritual simply have people vow to “take someone as a husband/wife” with little or no further explanation. The traditional Quaker vow is:

"In the presence of God and these our friends I take thee, ______, to be my husband/wife, promising with Divine assistance to be unto thee a loving and faithful husband/wife so long as we both shall live."
 

There are also plenty of traditions in which the husband and wife do not recite vows at all. This includes most Eastern Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and, traditionally, Jews (although in modern times many Jewish couples do choose to recite vows). The Confucian equivalent of vows is the point in the ceremony where the couple pay formal respect to their deities, their ancestors, their families, and each other.
In contrast to these simpler promises, the Hindu "Seven Steps” or Saptha Padhi is a beautifully detailed list of vows about ways in which the couple will care for one another. If that were my tradition, I would adopt it gladly.

I do not think I would have wanted to use Hindu vows without some personal connection to them, though. Which brings us to another point about traditions. Traditions can be a way to recognise community. I don't begrudge people their individualist choices, when planning their weddings – goodness knows my husband and I had a few of those, too – but we were basically agreed that while there is definitely a part of our marriage that is just between us, the whole point of a wedding is the way in which it involves the community in that relationship. We wouldn't need a party if it was just between the two of us. We're quite capable of celebrating the two of us on our own!

Forms can gain meaning by repetition. Each use echoes the previous ones. Of course, this is for some people another reason to break with old forms (if they want to declare that their marriage will not be like that of their parents, for example). But forms can also be reclaimed from bad uses in the past. And, privileged as I am to be the child of a functional marriage, for me it felt right to echo tradition while quietly tweaking things wherever I felt like it.

One of the thrilling things, for me, about the traditional Sarum-derived vows was their comparatively simple language. I liked the idea of being able to say something that I could have written myself, if only I were that clever. Something simple, and sincere, and without unnecessary ornament. This includes the wording of "tyl deth us departe." The odd-sounding modern wording ("til death us do part," or sometimes “til death do us part,” because that's how wording can change around over time!) actually came from what was once a much more ordinary-sounding sentence. "Departe" is from an old French word (Normans, remember?) that simply means "to divide" or "to part." Upon learning this, my own inclination was to re-word this phrase into a simple "until death parts us."

My husband disagreed! He liked "until death do us part," thank you very much! Just as it is possible to love a tradition for the ways in which it feels natural, so also we can love traditions for being unnatural -- for the ways in which their odd specificities mark an act as special. "Until death do us part" is one of those. It's not a phrasing anyone would use deliberately. It's a linguistic quirk that arose by historical accident, as "depart" ceased to have a sensible meaning in this context, and people replaced it with the version they were hearing as it was said.

Accident or no, it may be that we have kept this version because it really does add something. The word "do" adds emphasis. You could hear it as "until death really parts us (because nothing else will)" or even as "until death really parts us (because even death might take a while to really do so, as we mourn)."

In the end, my husband and I compromised a little bit on the wording. The main portion of our vows was lifted from "A New Zealand Prayer Book," which was assembled by the Anglican Church here in New Zealand: traditional, but local. That's as it should be, in my view. Tradition is all very well, but it needs to be able to be adapted to circumstance. And thus it was that I (atheist, but from Anglican family) and my husband (very liberal Episcopalian) were married, and vowed to take each other:

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

until we are parted by death

until death do us part (my husband's version, in the traditional words he liked).

until death us do part (my version, keeping closer to the original as the next best thing to plain language).
 

Such is marriage.