Building Wedding Vows Around the 7 Intimacies Will Take You Far Toward Your Perfect Marriage

Your wedding vows are both the heart of your wedding ceremony and the foundation of your marriage. The best wedding vows are sweeping and fairly general formal statements. As we worked through the 7 Marital Intimacies and the vows that might be made around each of these, a foundational statement emerged for each intimacy:  

1. Physical Intimacy: Throughout our marriage, I will work to be healthy and strong, caring for you and for myself. I want to live with you a very long time.
2. Sexual Intimacy: My love, I will not withhold my passion from my life or our marriage. I will keep reaching for you in love that we might be always satisfied and always yearning.
3. Mental Intimacy: I will continually seek to learn with and from you. I will trust your wisdom and let it inform me. I will offer what I know to you. I find you fascinating and cannot wait to know what you will think about tomorrow.
4. Emotional Intimacy: I will hold your heart as precious as my own, caring for you tenderly and being present to you to the best of my ability.
5. Spiritual Intimacy: I will honor your beliefs and work hard to support you appropriately. I will cherish the practices and observances we share that keep each of us growing as individuals and both of us growing into a family.
6. Moral Intimacy: Together we will honor our deep reverence for (for example!) Peace and Relationship. We will live together in harmony with ourselves and with one another. We will work to keep peace at home and to make peace in our world.
7. Financial Intimacy: I will work for the financial security of our family and our old age. I will be a good steward of our resources.

I’m amazed at the depth of the vow statements that emerged from exploring each of the intimacies as a basis for wedding vows. These could be groomed a bit and put together as a vow. But I think that these promises are better used the headings for the sections in the Marriage Planning Binder. In the first part, I think they’re too long for good wedding vows. (You should always be able to remember your wedding vows.) In the second, I think they’re not general enough for your public promises. But if you have worked this hard and come through to statements that look and sound a lot like these, you now have both a working document for your marriage and a very good understanding what you mean when you say you will respect and cherish your partner.

Those are beautiful statements but far stronger for being clarified. It’s the clarity that’s going to make your marriage thrive! You will be able to eliminate the obstacles that keep you from being interested and amazed by your partner. If you’ve done the work before your wedding, your wedding ceremony will sizzle with your joy in each other. That in its turn will keep your community excited and involved in your wedding and in your marriage. Do the work. You’ll be really glad you did!