Writing your own wedding vows is the ultimate expression of your love for one another. It is a pledge of a lifetime commitment. But how do you say so much in so few words? Many of us struggle to get our words and thoughts on paper so we’re here with a few of the greatest lovers of our time to get you started.

Looking for even more vow-writing inspiration to turn you into a romantic wordsmith? Browse our favourite wedding vows from famous poets here.

I choose you

I choose you

again and again

at the start and finish

of every single day

no matter the season

no matter the age

I choose you

to struggle and succeed with

to fight and wake up with

to love and grow old with

I choose you

knowing there are still trails

we must travel

knowing there are mountains

left to climb

I choose you

to always be by my side

– Tyler Kent White

Trust love

And in those moments

when you feel afraid to trust love,

remember that I have crossed

a great ocean of loneliness to find you.

Mine is not a fair-weather heart.

I was built to outlast storms.

– John Mark Green

Short and sweet

We would be together

and have our books

and at night

be warm in bed together

with the windows open

and the stars bright.

– Ernest Hemingway

Treat me like a woman

I, with a deeper instinct,

choose a man

who compels my strength,

who makes enormous demands

on me,

who does not doubt my courage

or my toughness,

who does not believe me naive

or innocent,

who has the courage to treat me

like a woman.

– Anais Nim

Simple love

I love you without knowing

how, or when, or from where.

I love you simply, without

problems or pride,

I love you in this way because

I do not know any other way

of loving but this,

in which

there is no I or you,

so intimate that your head

upon my chest is my head,

so intimate that

when I fall asleep

your eyes close.

– Pablo Neruda

The great love

I fell in love with her courage,

her sincerity and her flaming

self- respect and it’s these things

I’d believe in even if the whole

world indulged in wild suspicions

that she wasn’t all that she should

be. But of course the real reason

is that I love her and that’s the

beginning and end of everything.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Love is simple

Love is simple

It is waking up

knowing you exist

in a mind

outside of your own

It is having one heart

that carries two beats

It is you and me

spoken in terms

of us and we.

– Tyler Kent White

Soul mates

I don’t know how you are so familiar to me – or why it

feels less like I am getting to know you and more as though

I am remembering who you are. How every smile, every

whisper brings me closer to the impossible conclusion that’

I have known you before, I have loved yo before – in

another time, a different place – some other existence.

– Lang Leav

Twin flames

There was a feeling of inevitability when I met you. The sense that we would be together; that there would be a moment when you would look at me in a certain way, and we would cross the threshold from friendship into something much more.

We spoke once about lovers who kept finding each other, no matter how many times the world came between them. And I think I had to break your heart, and you had to break mine. How else could we know the worth of what we were given?

I think you were always meant to know me a little better than anyone else. And our lives were fated to converge like some cosmic dance. I know there is a terrible distance between us. But our bodies are made of celestial light, and we are hurling through space and time, toward the most beautiful collision.

– Lang Leav

Carry your heart

I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)

I am never without it (anywhere I go, you go, my dear;

and whatever is done by me is your doing, my darling)

I fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)

I want no world (for beautiful, you’re my world, my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and

whatever a sun will always sing is you

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the roost of the roost and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky and a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart.

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)

– e. e. cummings

Bonus! 

A choice

I didn’t fall in love with you.

I walked into love with you,

with my eyes wide open,

choosing to take

every step along the way.

I do believe in fate and destiny,

but I also believe

we are only fated to do things

that we’d choose anyway.

And I’d choose you;

in a hundred lifetimes,

in a hundred worlds,

in any versions of reality,

I’d find you

and I’d choose you.

– Unknown

For more inspiration for writing your vows, click here!