Amy's Vows to Mark

Mark,
I fell in love with you through our courtship over facebook, email, texting and cell phone conversations and was in love with you before our first date. I fell in love with your excel spreadsheets and the quirky things on them, your memorization of the ingredients of your favorite Panera salad, your curious questions and your answers, but mostly your sense of humor, your intelligence, your confidence in who you are, the way you ask questions and really listen to the answers and the fact that it feels like I have known you my entire life. Since those days I have continued to fall in love with you for your amazing movie knowledge, your need to make catty comments while never wanting to hurt anyone's feelings, our shared sense of sarcasm, your curiosity and interest in the world bigger than us but mostly for your intelligence, your gifts as a teacher and manager, the zeal with which you tackle a project and the way that you love me and Caleb and Foster. I fell in love with you for the qualities, abilities, and outlook on life that you have, and won't try to reshape you in a different image.

As your wife and partner I promise to respect you as a person with your own interests, desires, and needs, and to realize that those are sometimes different, but no less important than my own.

I choose you as the person with whom I will spend the rest of my life. I promise you my faithfulness. I promise that you will be the one with whom I will choose to celebrate my victories. I promise that you will be the one from whom I will choose to seek comfort in life's sorrows.

I will take time each day to find a way to connect with you and to communicate with you. I will share with you about things that are more than just the logistics of sharing a house,paying bills, raising kids. I promise to keep myself open to you, to let you see through the window of my personal world into my innermost fears and feelings, secrets and dreams.

Your sorrows will be my sorrows and your successes will be my successes. I will hold you when you cry, celebrate with you in your joy, respect you in your failures, and cheer with you for your victories.

I promise to grow along with you, to be willing to face change as we both change, as our lives change, as we grow and learn and explore.


I promise to give you the best of myself and to ask of you no more than you can give. I promise to accept you the way you are. I take you to be my husband, my partner, loving what I know of you and trusting what I do not yet know. I promise to cherish you through whatever life may bring us. I promise to love you in good times and in bad, with all I have to give and all I feel inside in the only way I know how ... completely and forever.