The Hazards of Homemade Vows

By LANCE MORROW

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, Chloe 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.)

But some couples remain tempted today by the opportunity that a wedding offers for self-expression. It is a temptation that should be resisted. The vows that couples devise are, with some exceptions, never as moving to the guests as they are to the couple. Too often the phrases, words overblown and intimate and yearning all at once, go floating plumply around the altar, pink dreams of the ineffable. Friends and family lean forward in their pews. The clergyperson beams inscrutably, abetting the thing, but keeping counsel. The guests are both fascinated and faintly appalled to be privy to such intense and theatrical whisperings. John Lennon and Yoko Ono once held press conferences while lying in bed, and the effect of the self-made vows is sometimes obscurely the same.

When it departs from form, the wedding becomes a psychodrama and what the counterculture called a happening. Its symbolism grows promiscuous. Sometimes the emphasis is political rather than romantic. Earnest couples are known to billboard their environmental interests in the vows so that, say, vigilance against dioxin and acid rain may become part of the conjugal agenda. Such messages turn the wedding into a paid political message or else something like a professional tennis player's shirt, pasted here and there with the logos of products he is paid to advertise.

The logic behind writing one's own vows is not all bad. It is very American: the kids going into business for themselves and wanting to define precisely what the terms of the enterprise are to be. Good luck. The self-made ceremony expresses a kind of romantic individualism (not to say, sometimes, narcissism) that wants to reclaim the event from its bloodless institutional routine and make it mean something wondrous and memorable. Marriage is, one thinks at the start, a long journey. The couple want a bright send-off at the station to think about during those interminable stretches later on, when the landscape becomes as featureless and wearying as the steppe. To write one's own vows is to think about marriage, what it is, what one wants it to be. It is, at best, an act of self-awareness.

This nuptial theater is also meant as a gesture against anonymity and mass production: our love is special in the universe. Unfortunately, the event usually becomes the rhetorical equivalent of those incredible pastel, ruffled-and-piped rent-a-tux outfits that are becoming the uniform for American grooms and their groomsmen.

Beyond the aesthetics of the thing, writing one's own ceremony may reflect a basic misunderstanding about the event. If bride and groom repeat the same vows their parents repeated, the vows they may expect their children to repeat, and if the same tears are shed now that were shed five generations before at the same rite, then the ceremony has its continuity and resonances. The formality may be boring, but it is not meaningless.

If the bride and groom have intimacies to whisper, there are private places for that. A wedding is public business. That is the point of it. The couple are not merely marrying one another. They are joining the enterprise of the human race. They are, at least in part, submitting themselves to the larger logics of life, to the survival of the community, to life itself. They enter into a contract with processes deeper than they can know. At the moment of their binding, they should subsume their egos into that larger business within which their small lyricisms become tinny and exhibitionistic. The ceremony dignifies the couple precisely to the degree that they lose themselves therein. The mystery of what they do is more interesting than they can ever be. --By Lance Morrow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.