3 Things I Forgot to Include in My Wedding Vows

(And Made Sure to Add at Our 10-Year Renewal)

My husband and I recently celebrated our ten year anniversary.

We only had one thing in mind- to renew our vows in front of our children. 

When we exchanged vows in front of our family and friends ten years ago, we were promising our lives to each other. This time, we wanted our children to witness those promises. We wanted them to have a memory of us choosing each other.

There was no formal ceremony, no reception, and no guests. Just the four of us at an oceanfront Airbnb on the Sonoma Coast.

We spent our days exploring tide pools and eating clam chowder. My daughter and I made flower crowns from blooms we picked up at Trader Joe's. And at night, we let the kids veg out in front of the TV while my husband and I stole a few cozy moments together by the fire pit, watching the sun disappear into the Pacific.

As I sat down to write my vows, I found myself reflecting on the promises we made a decade before. They were sincere, hopeful, and written with the best understanding of love we had at the time. But they were also written by two people who hadn't yet held each other through the realities of marriage, parenthood, and the inevitable plot twists of life.

Ten years in, I realize there were three things missing from my original vows that I never would have known to include back then. They're things I only learned after years of showing up, messing up, repairing, and growing together. It was only through walking side by side during the last decade that I learned how important these three commitments really are. 

If you're writing your own vows right now, I hope they’ll give you some ideas and inspiration.

1.) To stay curious

The person who stood beside me on my wedding day 10 years ago is not the same man I wake up next to now. Life has changed him. And it has inevitably changed me, too. 

The question isn't whether he will continue to change. The challenge is to stay curious, to discover, and continue to love who he’s becoming. 

I've learned that genuine curiosity goes far beyond asking how someone's day was and accepting "fine" as an answer. It's about creating enough space, patience, and safety for another person to keep unfolding slowly over time. I know for me, the deepest parts of who I am have never shown up on demand after a shallow “how are you”. It only comes when I can sense genuine curiosity and spaciousness to be received. 

Curiosity comes pretty naturally at the beginning of a relationship. Everything is new, and we're eager to learn about each other. But over time, it's easy to start believing we have our partner all figured out. We stop asking, noticing, or really listening. Instead of staying present with who they are now, we listen selectively to reinforce the version of them we’ve already built in our minds.

To stay curious is to loosen our grip on the version of our partner we first fell in love with. It is to release our expectations of who we think they should be and make room to celebrate who they actually are now. It’s a daily practice of getting out of my own story long enough to truly enter his again. 

2.) To witness, not rescue 

For a long time, I thought a marriage “through thick and thin” meant helping your partner carry their burden. But one of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is that love doesn’t always mean stepping in to fix things. Sometimes it just means sitting beside someone as they struggle, and trusting they have the capacity to find their own way through it.

Loss, heartbreak, illness, and grief can’t be carried by anyone else. No matter how much we want to, we can’t take that weight from the people we love. The most loving thing we can do is stay close and remind them they are not alone. The urge to fix often comes from care, but it can take away someone’s sense of agency and their trust in their own ability to move through what they’re facing. 

What I’ve come to understand is that most people don’t need you to fix their pain. They just need to be witnessed inside of it. It takes a lot of love and strength to just sit beside someone and say, “I know this is hard. I believe you can do this. And whether you succeed or stumble, I’m not going anywhere.” Marriage is a front-row seat to another person's growth, and the messy middle is part of the show. But much like the flowers I press, it's the combination of pressure, time, and patience that reveals the essence. And sometimes, there is nothing else to do but trust the process.

3.) To notice the blooms

After the wedding, there is always something to look forward to. The honeymoon, the travels, the careers, the house, the kids, the milestones, and more chapters. There’s urgency in the air and it seems like we’re always rushing to build more…life. Forever chasing and waiting for that elusive feeling that we've finally lived it.

It's so easy to spend years looking ahead instead of looking around. But what I've learned is that some of the most meaningful parts of a marriage aren't ahead of me. They're already here. The problem is that they don't always announce themselves with a flashy entrance. They arrive quietly, like blooms on a plant you've walked past a hundred times. 

And if you're not paying attention, you can move from season to season without ever noticing your life was already flowering.

Lately, I've found myself sitting in our backyard with my husband over morning coffee saying, "Come sit with me. Let’s enjoy our gains." 

For us, our gains look like slow mornings listening to the birds, as if we have absolutely nowhere to be. They look like home-cooked midweek lunches squeezed into ordinary workdays while the rest of the world rushes by. They sound like our kids' maniacal laughter filling the house right before bed. 

None of these moments are particularly impressive from the outside. But they are the blooms of our marriage. The result of years of deliberate choices. The moves we made, the harsh winters we survived, and the times we stayed and repaired.

And just like blooms, they won't last forever. The kids will grow up, life will change and new seasons will come. But that's exactly why I want to notice them now.

I don't want to become so focused on always chasing the next chapters that we forget to stop and smell the roses. I want to recognize when our life is flowering and have the presence to actually enjoy it. 

***

When we planned this renewal, all we really wanted was to say these words in front of our kids. In my head, it was a quiet, meaningful moment. In reality though, they wiggled, wandered off, and interrupted a few times. Life has rarely given us exactly what we expected. Instead, it's given us something messier, funnier, and better than we could have planned. I have a feeling the seasons ahead still have a few surprises in store for us. And hopefully ten years from now, I'll look back on these vows and realize there were still things I forgot to include.