Essay: The Hazards of Homemade Vows

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Gina," the minister intoned, "do you agree to love Peter more than you love chocolate?" The bride said, "I do."

After that touch, Peter's promise fell a little flat. "Peter," the minister asked, "do you agree to love Gina more than the morning newspaper?" The bridegroom looked into his bride's eyes with a smile of insufferable whimsy: "I do."

It is high marrying season. The Gina-Peter ceremony was performed not long ago by the Rev. Bart Gould of the Second Unitarian Church of Chicago. The Rev. Mr. Gould has a taste for the fun nuptial. At the conclusion of his own marriage ceremony in 1977, he turned to his bride, before the assembled guests, and said: "Thank you for choosing an outrageous cuss like me." He was overcome. He broke down and wept. His bride burst out laughing.

Despite Gould's exertions, this June cannot compete with certain earlier hymeneal splendors. The '60s and the '70s were the great epoch of the improvisational, personalized wedding ceremony—preferably performed in a sun-shot meadow, the bride barefoot and vaguely pagan, Chloë going to Daphnis.

The vows concocted for those weddings seem period pieces now. They were oppressively poetic, gushily confessional. They were sweet and intimate and profound and occasionally metaphysical, like a Hallmark card. They were illuminated by moonbeams of Kahlil Gibran ("Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone") and drenched with fragrances of Rod McKuen. At one wedding of the time, the bridegroom rhapsodized: "It is therefore our glorious and divine purpose to fly mountains, to sow petalscent. . . to glorify glory, to love with love." His bride answered: "We hereby commit ourselves to a serenity more flamboyant and more foolish than a petalfall of Magnolia." And the bridegroom came back thus: "This is the purest double helix of our us-ness."

Only occasionally do weddings in 1983 approach that standard. The stunt wedding remains common enough, of course. It is usually performed with traditional vows, however, for the same reason that a dancing dog generally does the foxtrot; the bizarre does its best work in conventional forms. There are the hobbyist enthusiasms: the nudist nuptials, for example, and the ceremonies for skindivers performed underwater. In April a couple were married while circling above California's Santa Monica mountains, scrunched down with the minister in a single-engine Beechcraft Sierra. The rest of the wedding party, including the mother of the bride and the maid of honor, flew alongside in a second Beechcraft four-seater, then-faces grimacing merrily and soundlessly in the little windows.

The stunt wedding has a certain goofball exhibitionist charm. The ceremony in which the couple write their own vows is more problematic. It is probably just as well that couples have been returning to the traditional formula, wherein the dearly beloved are gathered and the old familiar take-this-man, take-this-woman deal is struck. Couples only occasionally tinker here and there. (Most brides are careful to make sure that the vows are equivalent; the word obey is vanishing.)