It was 2002, and I was sitting in premarital counseling with my fiancé and our pastor. We were a young, idealistic couple, and we were going through a workbook to reveal the expectations we had for each other and our marriage.
One of the questions, I remember, asked if I planned to work outside the home. We were ready. We had already talked about this. I would work until we had kids, we confidently said, and then I was excited to be a stay-at-home mom. We even had a financial plan for this scenario. It was all decided.
Our pastor nodded and said it was good that we were on the same page. Then he paused and gathered his thoughts. “One thing I want you to keep in mind,” he said carefully, “is that it’s okay to change your mind.”
I bristled a bit at the idea that he’d question our planning, but he continued. “What I mean is, you may like being a stay-at-home mom. That’s great! You may struggle with it more than you anticipated. That’s okay too,” he advised. “It might always work financially, which is great. Or there might be circumstances outside of your control, and you might have get a job to help out.”
His point, he said, was that while it was wise to talk about expectations, marriage is not a commitment to a plan. We would make promises not to our scenario but to each other and to God.
Those words have been an encouragement to me these past 22 years, and I think back to them often. I also can’t help but connect them to our wedding vows. Though writing your own vows was then starting to come in vogue, we said the traditional words—“for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health”—which date to the Protestant Reformation and were part of one of Martin Luther’s reforms. And of all the things we’ve done wrong in our marriage, I think that’s one thing we did right.
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In the years since, I’ve heard custom vows at many a wedding. I understand this now feels normal and it’s intended to be romantic. But it strikes me as naive for couples to write their own vows when they’ve only seen marriage from the outside.
Maybe I’m just getting old. But I wish younger couples could see the value and freedom that traditional marriage vows bring. I don’t say this to push some agenda about ideal roles within marriage. On the contrary, I say it because I see younger generations burdened with reinventing every wheel, with treating every choice as some definitive expression of identity. Self-invention has become a constant grind.
This is especially true of weddings and especially for brides. Granted, these ceremonies have always made statements about family status and wealth. But now it’s not enough to show what your parents can afford; a wedding is also a declaration of identity, an announcement of what kind of person you are and what sort of marriage you will have. After an adolescence and young adulthood spent displaying individual identity online, the wedding is where you debut your new, unique identity as a couple. It sounds exhausting.
Christian couples, in my observation, do this as much as their secular neighbors, albeit sometimes with a theological spin. I’ve heard personalized vows that assert a theology of marriage and gender roles expressed by divvying up chores: She vows to always do the dishes. He vows to always keep her car in working order.
It reminds me of a former pastor who cared for his wife with multiple sclerosis. Was their marriage somehow diminished because she couldn’t do her chores anymore? Was she less his wife? The chores vows are played for laughs, but I wonder if these couples know that one day they too will be old or ill and unable to care for themselves, let alone the dishes.
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Another strand of vows I’ve encountered veers in the other direction: The promises aren’t too small and pointed, but ephemeral or missing altogether. These custom vows sound more like public love letters, explorations of each party’s feelings, on how each sees the other as the ideal partner, with no mention of what will happen when the ideal stumbles.
The time-honored script these couples have eschewed is honored for a reason. By comparison, the old vows look like a respite, a chance to simply commit for whatever comes, “for better, for worse,” in humility and love.
And when I say “traditional,” I don’t mean marriage vows from the 1950s. I mean vows from the 1550s, for the standard Christian marriage vows we all know are a product of the Protestant Reformation.
In the 1500s, marriage was in a crisis as people as young as 14 could consent to marry one another in secret, without an officiant (though they might later seek a blessing at church). If a couple married this way and conceived a child the husband did not want to raise, he could simply deny the marriage ever happened. Or a couple might want to get married, but some other man could claim that he’d already married the woman in secret. It was his word against hers.
Church courts were overrun with marriage dispute cases. Divorce was not permitted, so the Catholic church often resorted to annulling marriages—denying they’d ever happened.
Once the Reformation was underway, Martin Luther began to require that couples say their marriage vows publicly. It was a safeguard for women, and it forced minors to secure their parents’ permission to get married. Beyond this, Luther said the church should allow for divorce and call the thing what it is—vows broken—instead of pretending these marriages had never occurred. Call out the sin boldly, he taught, but give grace lavishly.
Luther also took to task men of his time who thought of marriage as a way for women to use, emasculate, and tame them for a life of domestic drudgery and dependents. Against this idea, he said, the Christian faith honors the ordinary responsibilities of husbands and fathers:
[Christianity] opens its eyes, looks upon all these insignificant, distasteful, and despised duties in the Spirit, and is aware that they are all adorned with divine approval as with the costliest gold and jewels. It says, “O God, because I am certain that thou hast created me as a man and hast from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with thy perfect pleasure. I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? O how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labor, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in thy sight.”
And for those who would mock men who took the duties of marriage seriously, Luther had a stern rebuke:
Now you tell me, when a father goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other mean task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool, though that father is acting in the spirit just described and in Christian faith, my dear fellow you tell me, which of the two is most keenly ridiculing the other? God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling, not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith. Those who sneer at him and see only the task but not the faith are ridiculing God with all his creatures, as the biggest fool on earth. Indeed, they are only ridiculing themselves; with all their cleverness they are nothing but devil’s fools.
This is Christian marriage. It is not about chores or personal identity. It is not only about affection for each other. It’s about service and love, a love to which you remain committed even as you grow, as you change, as you celebrate, as you grieve, as you age, until you die. Marriage is a way God uses us to love others with a sturdy, generous love that mirrors God’s love for us.
That is what is expressed in the marriage vows Luther wrote, which were close to our standard vows today. Luther’s script quickly crossed over to England and was adapted by Thomas Cranmer to the English lines that were included, with slight adjustments, in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
You likely know the words “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 till death us do part.” And if you are in a good marriage, you know that these words grow to be a comfort—that love isn’t just about maintaining an image. It’s not just for the highlights and prosperities of life, but for life’s deepest sorrows as well.
Gretchen Ronnevik is the author of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted and cohost of the Freely Given podcast.
