Wedding Vows

I got married to Karen McGrane on November 4, 2022 in a beautiful ceremony officiated by Janie Porche at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Many people know that Karen and I first got to know each other online, via a close group of mutual friends, but were never in the same physical space until the day I moved into her house. (Now our house.)

All credit goes to Karen: She slid into the DMs first. I kept finding ways to get her to come back there, but she was the one who was brave enough to openly declare her crush. She saw our whole future together while I was still trying to figure out if she liked me or like-liked me. (She was already in love with me.)

Our wedding ceremony was in the planetarium, which was frankly perfect: the right size for our compressed guest list, and thematically just right. We had one of the technicians display the night sky from the day we met (February 7, 2021) until the day we got married a little over a year and a half later.

Instead of exchanging rings (which we’d done earlier that year), we did a handfasting ceremony, an old Celtic tradition which involves wrapping the couple’s joined hands in cloth. We did this just before we exchanged vows.

Karen and I wrote our vows ourselves. (Technically, I wrote and she suggested changes and revisions. I am the COO of our relationship; she is the CEO.)

I don’t think I’ve put the text of the vows online anywhere, but I really like them, so I want to do so now, so they can live beyond our memories and a .docx file on my laptop.

Here they are.

Handfasting declaration:

Today, Karen, I give you my hand and my heart, my home and my hearth, all that I am and all that I will become.

I love you for who you are and for who I am when I am with you. I love you for what you have made of yourself and for the life we are making together.

Wedding vows:

I promise to be a true and faithful partner, from this day forward, in all life’s challenges, as we face them together.

I promise to share my whole self with you: your friends will be my friends, your enemies will be my enemies, and our families will become one.

In our joys and sorrows, in good times and bad, in sickness or in health, I will always be there for you and open to what our life has to offer.

I will respect and encourage you, comfort and support you, all the days of my life. It’s a big, big love.

For almost four years of being a couple, we’ve kept those vows together.

One running gag we have from before we met is that if we were lucky, we could spend forty years together. Every year that passes, we say “ok, here’s to forty more.” No matter how many years pass, we’re always signing up for forty more.

Here’s to forty more years.