Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/83783 ... /#comment_

I don't want to submit a real correction, so I'll just leave my anecdata here. Our officiant was my stake president and he let us do our own vows in addition to the handbook vows. He was very chill and kind and respectful.

I've also seen vows done at wedding receptions or ring ceremonies after temple weddings, especially when part of the family isn't LDS.

My bro and SIL were married by my parents' bishop and he let them use their own vows. He also asked them if there was anything in particular they wanted him to say.

I've attended two civil ceremonies conducted by LDS bishops and neither of them allowed the couple to say vows, they just stuck to the boilerplate that Frere Rubik outlined.

This also seems like a good place to say that I'm roundly disappointed by the pre-fabricated and generic nature of LDS wedding ceremonies. I wish I hadn't had to be married by some guy who I met all of five minutes before the ceremony, and that I'd had the chance to say more than one word the whole time. I wish I could have been married by a person my husband and I knew and trusted who would be able to give us actual marriage advice that pertained to us. I wish I could have been able to stand before many of my dear friends and family, many of whom had traveled a considerable distance, and tell my husband how and why I loved him and thank said family and friends for supporting us in our relationship.

Clearly I have lots of feelings on this.

Slightly off-topic, but the reason my bro and SIL choose my parents' bishop to marry them is because he was pretty much the only person they approached who was able to officiate at an outdoor wedding. My brother had been inactive for at least a decade and my SIL is not LDS, so they had no particular interest in an LDS wedding. But they approached several ministers from churches my SIL had gone to in the past, and they all had church policies that they weren't allowed to perform marriages outside of a church. I thought that was interesting.

Amity, that's something I've heard people say about temple ceremonies. It is kind of sad that it is so impersonal for such an important (eternally important maybe!) event. Do you think you'd ever do something like a vow* renewal ceremony?

*PS I at first wrote "vowel renewal" and knew it was wrong, but just couldn't figure it out... vowel renewal, hehehe.

NerdGirl, that is interesting! We were really dumb about finding an officiant and only asked the stake president like a month before the wedding (because I did NOT like my bishop at all). I originally wanted to ask one of my past bishops or my grandfather (active LDS), but apparently the church strongly discourages people from performing civil weddings if they aren't currently in certain positions within the church.

If I buckle and put a ring on it, totally getting my brother to marry us. He can get one of those Universal Life things, I assume.

Mico, I'm generally not one to be the center of attention (if my husband had been down for it I absolutely would have done the Mormon version of an elopement), so probably no vow renewal for me. I could get behind a private thing with just us and maybe a trusted officiant, but I'd feel bad asking friends and family to travel to a non-wedding when they already traveled to my actual wedding.

There was actually a point in our engagement where we thought we might've had to do a civil ceremony rather than a temple sealing. My husband had to get a sealing clearance and the timeline for when that approval might come was nebulous (our bishop told us it would happen in a matter of weeks, my dad had heard of couples that waited more than a year). It was getting to the point where if we were going to pull off a wedding on our chosen date we had to start putting down deposits, so we decided we were okay with doing a civil ceremony if necessary. I don't think I would have had a Mormon bishop officiate if it had come to that--I much rather would have gone to a courthouse or had a friend get ordained or somesuch. I was actually a little disappointed in the end that I didn't get to plan out more of the ceremony and personalize it to what we wanted because the clearance came through and we did a temple sealing instead.