Ceremony but Private Vows

You can absolutely do private vows before (maybe at your first look) and do more standard ones in the ceremony.


We actually got married 2 weeks before out wedding and did long personal vows that only our 2 witnesses and photographer heard. At the big wedding we did vows that were more standard and not personalized.

I am getting married in a month (so we haven’t executed this plan yet, but…) and we are planning on not doing personal vows. My FH is a bit emotional and neither of us like talking in front of people, so we are opting away from them. In private, we will be sharing letters with each other in the morning but no official vows.

View Quoted Comment So then what is your plan for your ceremony? Like what is the outline of your actual ceremony??

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I will start this comment by saying that everything I learned from a wedding ceremony is based on online research, haha... I do not know how "traditional" this may be, but hopefully it will help.

Here is a rough outline of our ceremony:

Welcome

Address - talk about love/wedding, our personal relationship from the start through the future

Rose Ceremony - we are presenting roses to our parents as a way to say thank you

Reading

Vows/Rings - this will be a more state and repeat situation; the neat part is you can make the vows that you repeat say whatever you want

Declaration of Intent - the "I Do" portion

Announce the new couple and exit

We're getting married in a Catholic church, and they require a standard set of vows. We're not planning to do a first look, but we are going to write letters to each other that the MOH/ BM will hand off before the ceremony. Those will be kind of like our personal vows.

You could do a first look and then read personal vows to each other, then just have a standard "repeat after me" set of vows you do for the ceremony.