Wedding Vow Advice: Don’t Let AI Take Over
With AI quickly becoming part of our everyday lives, it’s easy to lean on AI for some of the most intimate parts of our lives. Review our contribution to The Knot’s article, “Are AI Wedding Vows Taking the Romance Out of Weddings?” and here are full two cents here.
As environmentally-conscious small business creatives, we generally believe that the limited use of AI would be better for the state of our world and the health of our planet. We don’t yet know the magnitude of AI’s impact to us and future generations, but what we do know is daunting. Researchers and analysts confirm that the negative impacts of AI will surely hurt poor and marginalized communities of color first and foremost.
All that said, we get it!
These days there are so many AI tools to choose from right at our fingertips. Since this technology has developed so quickly to have a human touch, it’s become easy to use for anything and everything, including wedding vows.
In a society that puts a lot of pressure on wedding vows, it makes sense that many feel nervous that they won’t get the sentiment quite right. This societal pressure to say the “perfect” instagrammable thing during a meaningful moment has surely led countless to heavily rely on AI. Besides, using AI to help write your wedding vows is free and easy. That convenience is hard to beat especially when you have a lot on your plate with life and wedding planning. Likeeee….we get it!
If you do use AI, please consider that:
Open communication in relationships is essential for the health of your marriage. Period. Our unconventional wedding vow advice is to talk about what you want to include in your wedding vows together, as a couple, and either voice record yourselves having this conversation or take notes. We recommend making it a date night and diving into the values you hold and the aspects you appreciate about your relationship that you’d like to continue in your marriage.
Talk about the future and the dreams you want to manifest. Reminisce on those funny moments that made you realize you found your forever person. In doing so, you can alleviate that current of anxiety around writing your own vows and have a ton of inspiration to begin putting pen to paper. Review our Vow Do’s and Don’ts!
Given that that’s our go-to advice, if either partner needs additional support from AI, definitely be transparent about that. Ask each other about your feelings around using AI in writing your wedding vows. Maybe your partner doesn’t care or is even intrigued by the idea, so go for it! Maybe instead of AI writing the entirety of your vows, you want something specific created that hasn’t quite clicked when you’ve tried writing it yourself. We get it. What you want to avoid is any feelings of dishonesty, secrecy, or inauthenticity so get on the same page and all will be okay.
AI is NOT you
No shade to those using AI to write wedding vows but we definitely believe that the act of writing your own wedding vows is more romantic than leaving the task to a series of brilliant code. Vows written by AI may sound more romantic than anything you think you can come up with, but the effort always counts.
The greatest con to using AI to write your wedding vows is that it won’t be a genuine snapshot of your love, your sentiments, your story written in your voice. We live in a fast-paced world as it is, so the act of sitting down and thinking about what you want to say, crossing out sentences, deleting paragraphs, rewriting phrases, rearranging sentiments, is in and of itself a long lost form of art.
It can be frustrating and anxiety producing but at the end of the day, YOU created this work from the heart. Besides, wedding vows don’t have to be poetic or overly romantic. They can be funny, honest, real, and most importantly a genuine snapshot of your love for your partner!
What are wedding vows anyway?
At their core, wedding vows are your promise to one another for your married lives together. As long as you make a promise, you’ve got yourself vows. To decide who says their wedding vows first during the wedding ceremony, you can discuss who is more comfortable going first or second. Traditionally though, in cis-het relationships, the husband-to-be shares the wedding vows first. Patriarchy, ya know!
Photo: Tanya Isaeva | Officiants: Karla + Dani of Once Upon A Vow
Ask your wedding officiant to help write your wedding vows!
We highly recommend you ask your wedding officiant to support you in writing, editing, or reviewing your wedding vows. As bilingual (English and Spanish speaking) wedding officiants, based in NYC and Boston, we write custom ceremonies which means we get to know you really well!
Our introspective questions give us a solid sense of your personalities, values, journey, and even speaking rhythm. Ask us for help! We’ll be right there to review the vows you’ve written, edit them so that it flows more naturally, and add to them so that they feel especially meaningful to you both.