What to write when your wedding is a week away

Your wedding is seven days away and you have not written a word. This is extremely normal, and it is fixable in about ninety minutes of real work. Here is the fastest honest path.

Day one: twenty minutes of notes, not writing

Do not open a blank document and try to be eloquent. Answer these out loud into your phone instead:

• When did you first know?
• What is a small thing they do that you would miss most?
• What is the hardest thing you have been through together, and what did they do?
• What do you want an ordinary Tuesday to look like in ten years?
• What are three things you can promise on a bad day?

Talk, do not type. You will say better sentences than you would write, because you will stop performing.

Day two: shape it

Take what you said and put it in this order:

1. Who they are to you, one or two lines.
2. The moment you knew.
3. What you have been through, briefly.
4. Three to five promises.
5. One line about the life you are walking into.

Aim for 200 to 300 words total. That is ninety seconds to two minutes out loud, which is the right length.

Day three: cut

Read it aloud once and cut three things:

• Anything true of most couples. "You are my best friend" describes half the room. "You drove four hours to sit with me in a hospital parking lot" describes one person.
• Any promise you cannot keep on a bad Tuesday. "I will never let you down" is lovely and impossible.
• Any sentence you stumbled over. Your mouth is telling you something.

Days four to six: read it out loud, five times

This is the part people skip, and it is the part that decides how the day actually goes.

Read it standing up. Read it holding the card. Read it once to another person. Time every run. If you are over two minutes, cut something rather than speed up, because nerves will speed you up on the day anyway.

Day seven: print it

On a card, in large type. Not your phone. Give a spare copy to your officiant or your best person.

If you have one day, not seven

Do the twenty minutes of talking, put it in the order above, cut once, read it out loud three times, print it. That is genuinely enough.

A short vow said clearly beats a long one being read for the first time in front of everybody.

What not to do with a week left

Do not go looking for a template to fill in. Under time pressure, borrowed vows are the easiest thing in the world to reach for and the easiest thing in the world to hear. Your specific details are what make this work, and you already have all of them.

Do not swap drafts with your partner either. Agree on a rough length so you are not wildly mismatched, then leave each other alone until the day.

The honest reassurance

The vows people remember are almost never the most beautifully written ones. They are the ones where somebody said a true, specific thing about the person in front of them, out loud, and meant it.

You can do that in 200 words, and you can write it this week.