Why the best wedding vows aren’t original

It was perhaps impossible for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding to be anything other than a performance on a stage, complete with 20-minute personalised vows.

With 1000 celebrity guests at Madison Square Garden, that’s exactly what it was – which doesn’t mean it was insincere.

It was an extreme example of everything the modern wedding has become: a performance of authenticity. Everything must say us: the venue, the playlist, the hashtag, the doilies on the tables – and even the vows.

I am all for couples making beautiful public declarations to one another. But a vow isn’t a personalised act of self-expression. A vow is an act of self-binding.

The traditional vows used in weddings (whether in a church or not) are quite restrained. You know them almost off by heart:

I take you…

for better, for worse,

for richer, for poorer,

in sickness and in health,

to love and to cherish,

till death do us part.

The vows create the marriage, because a marriage is about what we publicly promise. A wedding is a great chance to celebrate your love for one another. Still, it is also about making the promises that will sustain you when the other person experiences deep depression, or when they put on weight, or when they are deeply annoying to you. Or when you hurt them, and you need their forgiveness.

These promises are made by both people in identical words, because marriage involves reciprocal promises: faithfulness on both sides, cherishing on both sides.

And marriage is a form of commitment that is bigger than our inner feelings. It asks us not just to express our true selves, but to become something more – to become a more patient and more faithful person than we already are.

In marriage, we are promising to become something that we aren’t yet and can’t necessarily see clearly. That’s the adventure into which these promises invite us.

We increasingly believe that authenticity must come from originality. The truest expression, we say, must come almost spontaneously from within. If I’ve borrowed it, or inherited it, or if it is traditional, then in some way we feel that it doesn’t belong to us.

That’s why we celebrate creatives like Taylor Swift, who is a master at performing her inner self for us all to see.

But when it comes to the biggest commitments we can make as human beings, we don’t usually expect ourselves to invent our own words. Citizens don’t write their own oaths. Neither do doctors, judges or soldiers. A great promise is too important to improvise.

There’s something wonderfully humbling about speaking words that millions have spoken before you. They remind us that our marriage isn’t unique. It’s a pattern of life that human beings have pursued for millennia.

The real beauty in a wedding is not when a couple speak of their feelings for one another. It comes when they can look back decades later to their promises and see how they’ve been able to keep them.