When are you writing your vows?

I think I started mine about a month and a half in advance.

Our officiant needed them ahead of time to prepare the ceremony and get them printed etc.

I felt a lot better not leaving it to the last minute, because I know that I would have felt a lot of pressure and that would stop me from being able to access my emotions properly lol.

I would really push your FH to write something down. Even if he doesn't use it on the day of, it will be good to have a backup. A benefit of him having something prepared is that you can ask someone (your officiant perhaps) to read over yours and his, to make sure they are similar lengths, tone, etc. Our officiant did this for us, and it helped me have piece of mind that our vows would sound cohesive, even though they were written totally separately and neither one of us knew what the other wrote until the ceremony.

I'm about two months out and I've been thinking of what I'm going to say. I'm getting ready to actually start writing things down now that I have an idea of where I'm going with my vows. I will probably write them out this week, and then keep editing a little at a time as I think of something until like the week before.

My husband and I tried to do it together on the weekends. We tried for maybe a month and even had little journals with locks on them so no one could peek. We ditched the idea because we got so used to technical writing they ended up sounding like we were writing research papers. We read each other's attempts after like a month ish of trying and ended up spending an hour laughing so hard. We asked our officiant to just do the normal thing because we suck at being emotional on paper.

The best tip I read and used, was to only make 3 drafts, and that's it, don't over analyze it. I started researching vow structure, vow prompts, and reading other vows, and poems a couple months before my wedding. My H and I wrote our vows together in one weekend; not the same vows, but sat together and worked on it together, asking if certain words made sense. especially for me since I was using too many big words 😂

Honestly, my vows were one of the first things I did when planning my wedding lol! I read them over every now and then and tweak them. But, I do agree that it's better for your feelings to be raw and emotional. I will definitely continue to edit them as we get closer, probably even re-doing them the day of!