by Melissa Zorn

Created on: August 10, 2008

Your wedding: it's one of the most important days of your life. It's the biggest commitment a person can make. It's a serious, life-changing event and a time of reflection of the journey that brought you here and a feeling of great joy and hope for the future that your partner brings to your life now. So, naturally, you want your wedding vows to resonate all of those points in a very profound and meaningful way. No pressure.

Having just married five months ago, I can tell you that our wedding was the most beautiful experience largely due to my husband's and my decisions we made while planning our own ceremony. This was not our first marriage. Both our firsts were the typical, traditional "Do you take Susie to be your lawful wedded wife. . . . ?" There's nothing wrong with that approach if it suits your personal tastes. However, as we researched wedding ceremonies looking for ideas we discovered there are typically three approaches to the wedding vows:

(1) Traditional, pre-written vows read by the minister and repeated by the couples when prompted during the ceremony;

(2) Personalized vows written by the couple. Although written by the couple, they are read by the minister and repeated by the couple when prompted. The vows are the same for the man and woman;

(3) Original vows written by the man and woman separately and shared for the first time with each other during the actual wedding ceremony.

If you happen to be planning your wedding right now, you know that while there are a million tiny details to tend to and the entire process can be very strenuous, one of the most important (and therefore, most stressful) details to plan are the wedding vows. We agonized over which way to go. Knowing ideally traditional would not be our first choice (the cookie-cutter vows didn't fit our personality), we stressed over the thought of trying to memorize vows. Heck, who am I kidding? We panicked over just trying to write something worthy of our partner that would not totally embarrass us in front of our family and friends for years to come. We vacillated between the options but finally decided that for us, original prose was the way to go. We decided to each write our own vows. Memorization was out, though: too risky. Instead, the vows were written and read by us individually during the ceremony with feeling and animation, a bit of humor and a touch of nervousness.

This is where I diverge from most. If you were planning a speech, a sales presentation or a lecture, I would

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