#66: How to vow

I love you forever, but more eloquent

Hello, and thank you to everyone who voted in my May comic poll! Here comes the winning topic:

When I sat down to write my vows, I thought it was going to be a breeze.

After all, I wrote about my feelings all the time. Hard feelings! Big feelings! Overwhelming feelings! Surely I could fit my love for my life partner into five tight paragraphs that perfectly summed up our six-year relationship, right?

Wrong. Big time. 

I found writing my vows to be overwhelming. At first I kept falling into cliché descriptions of love and romance. 

And then I felt stressed by the idea of promising anything on behalf of my future self, given how uncertain the world is. 

It wasn’t until I began to pinpoint specific moments in our relationship that my words began to flow. Because as true as all of the universal platitudes about love are and as impossible as it is to promise anything for a lifetime, the specific + minute details of our relationship are what make it, well, ours.

Weeks later, at the altar, I read my own words to Gideon in front of our family and friends. I cried. I even lost a false lash, which fluttered from my eyelid down to my cheek. Gideon laughed and plucked it off. 

And I cried even more as Gideon read his. 

The rest of the night was magical: we danced and sipped champagne with our friends and gave hugs to people who had traveled across countries and oceans to be there with us. 

We went home that night and fell asleep beneath a blanket of love and spicy margaritas and the dream of a future that wasn’t promised, but one we could hope for, one we did everything in our power to speak into existence. 

Because at the end of the day, every promise we could make to each other amounted to this: us, hand in hand, walking toward the unknown together, step by step by step.  

Take care of yourselves, June bugs. <3

PS: I’m teaching a live online class this month with Skillpop! More soon — it’s all about illustrating stories and feelings :) Learn more here.