The Staying Power of the Traditional Wedding Vow

Sometime in the 1970s, after two decades of rising divorce rates, a group of professionals had the bright idea of offering marriage education to the young. The courses were to go beyond engaged couples to public high school students in the throes of first dates and the rapture of first romances.

It was—and still is—a good idea, in principle. Divorce rates remain high (though not as high as they once were)—hovering around 41% for first marriages. Providing the models and skills that encourage marital stability fulfills a fundamental public good.

Around the year 2000, I evaluated a number of marriage education curricula for an Institute for American Values report (the Institute for American Values was a non-partisan think tank on family and social policy, founded by David Blankenhorn, that has since closed its doors). I came away with the impression that most curricula concentrated far more on communication and conflict resolution skills than on marriage as a spiritual, moral, and civic vocation. And this seemed to me to be ill advised. Indeed, research by then had shown that commitment to the institution of marriage was a far more important predictor of marital success and happiness than simply knowing how to resolve disagreements. The “communication” approach to marriage education, while important, seemed to overlook the uniqueness of the marital relationship and its place in the fabric of society.

I wish that I had considered filling the pedagogical vacuum at the time. However, Cheryl Mendelson’s new book, Vows: The Modern Genius of an Ancient Rite (Simon and Schuster, 2024), does just that. It expertly teases out the cultural richness of the most treasured of all wedding ceremonies—namely, the one from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer that forms the basis for most civil ceremonies in America. By putting America’s most cherished wedding vows in an historical and cultural context, Mendelson helps us to understand both the profundity and the exceptionalism of the marital bond. 

Ms. Mendelson is well known as the author of the best-selling Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House. (Scribner, 1999) But her position in American culture as a guiding spirit of domestic organization is just one of her accomplishments. She is also a lawyer, philosopher, and novelist—all professional skills that contribute to her superb ability to peel the layers off the well-worn address, “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together…” as if they were the leaves of an onion. 

Mendelson rather disarmingly begins with an unexpected and bracing personal narrative. It is the story of her failed first marriage—a marriage, 50 years ago, that she labels as undertaken in a state of near "hysteria" and that she now sees as fundamentally illegitimate in that neither she nor her husband were mature enough to take either their wedding vows or the institution they had entered into seriously. At the time, she observes, there was a general atmosphere of “social hostility” toward marriage among young people, along with a suspicion of the grand promise of ‘troth… til death do us part.’ Getting married today, she suggests, may be somewhat more fashionable for young people than it was then, but distrust (not to say fear) of the traditional ceremonial promises abides and results in many young couples preferring to write their own vows.

It turns out, however, that winging a marriage ceremony might miss the entire point of a wedding, which is a public declaration of a social contract endowed with specific ideals and purposes. The Anglican-based marriage vows hold deep, distilled cultural meaning and import, having evolved from the ceremonial oaths of fealty in medieval Western culture. These oaths, Mendelson tells us, were promises of “faith” and mutual service undertaken voluntarily by both parties, who typically swore to them on holy objects. They involved reciprocity of loyalty and protection, and they were meant to be formal and permanent contracts.

While fealty oaths certainly assumed a dominant and submissive partner—a lord and a vassal—apparently early marital vows in Anglo-Saxon England were “identical for man and woman—vows, almost, of mutual marital homage.” It was only in the 14th century that the word “obey” came into the ceremony for women. A woman’s voluntary consent to marriage was imperative. And though promises of service at table and in bed were present in many versions of women’s wedding vows, in return for these, men offered “gifts” that were substantial: the ring, their worldly goods, and their bodily “worschipe.” 

Mendelson’s walk through the history of the wedding ceremony culminates with the story of Thomas Cranmer (the secretly married Archbishop of Canterbury who served Henry VIII). Cranmer brought the vows pretty much into their current form by adding their most salient words: the promises to “love” and “cherish.” And starting with these words, the rest of Ms. Mendelson’s book is taken up with an elegant unpacking of the relevance of the wedding vocabulary to the modern couple. She explores what “love,” “comfort,” “honor,” and “keep” actually mean in the context of both the intimacy of the marital relationship and its broader social and economic functions, as well as offering compelling discussions of the importance of the exclusive sexual contract in marriage and the special status attributed to married couples as interactive units in society.

Upon reaching the end of her book, I found myself reflecting on those words of the Anglican ceremony that remind us not of what we are promising in marriage, but what the institution of marriage promises us. To paraphrase the ceremony: A foundation for the procreation and raising of children; a remedy against sexual incontinence; finally, “mutual society, help, and comfort… both in prosperity and adversity.” I hope that’s the place where Ms. Mendelson intended me to be. But even if that wasn’t her intent, it’s a nice place for those of us who, in the process of a long marriage, get occasionally consumed with quotidian preoccupations and forget what we promised our spouses and why we ever promised it.

I, for one, cannot imagine a better marriage manual. I would have liked to have gifted copies of the book to my daughter and three nieces on the occasions of their betrothals, but they are all long since happily married, and I don’t want to seem presumptuous. As an aging grandma with still very young grandchildren, grand-nieces, and grand-nephews, I will have to content myself with leaving a few copies behind for the progeny. 

Dana Mack is the author of The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family; The Book of Marriage: The Wisest Answers To The Toughest Questions, and a recent novel, All Things That Deserve To Perish.