Wedding Vows for High School Sweethearts (2 Minutes)

The vows

Vivienne, you were sixteen and had had your license for nine days when you offered me a ride home from chemistry. Your dad's Buick had a tape deck that ate one cassette and never gave it back. Hall and Oates, side B. We heard it maybe four hundred times that year, parked outside the Dairy Queen, because the radio didn't work either.

Most of the people in this room watched us grow up. Our parents have been going to each other's Thanksgiving dinners since junior year. People like to say we got lucky, finding each other so early.

Here's what they missed. You chose me again at eighteen, when we went to colleges six hours apart. You chose me at twenty-three, in that apartment over the laundromat where the floor was always warm. You keep choosing me. I have never once taken that for granted.

So I promise to keep earning it.

I'll still pick you up when your car is in the shop, and I won't make the joke about the Buick. I will give you the window seat, the last fry, and the final word on paint colors. When your sister calls at midnight, I'm going to put the kettle on without asking.

And I'll keep learning who you are. The woman standing here is not the girl from chemistry, and I want to know her as well as I knew that girl.

When we're old and someone asks how long we've been together, I'll let you tell it. You tell it better.

Vivienne, I'd still get in that car. Side B and all. Let's take the long way home.

Why it works: The stuck tape is the kind of detail everybody from their high school will remember, so the room is with him in the first line. The middle answers the thing people always say about high school couples, that they got lucky, by naming the times she chose him again. The ending goes back to the car and makes the old ride home into an offer.