This is what I said to my wife during our wedding ceremony. I'd always wanted to share them on this blog, but the time around and after my wedding is when I sort of drifted from regular blogging. Things have been crazy ever since, thus the continued drift. But it's been a happy drifting.

September 9, 2004, on stage at the Neo-Futurarium in Chicago, sometime after 7 p.m., I said...

I promise, always, to make promises I intend to keep. I promise that I will never stop trying to be the best man I can be. I promise to see you as you are. I promise to remind myself constantly that you were not put on this earth to meet my needs, but that I was put on this earth to love, to forgive and to grow from every unfulfilled wish.

I promise to grow with you. I promise to change. I promise to listen. I promise to be faithful to you in every way I know how to be faithful, learning and relearning with your help and compromise, what that faithfulness means to both of us.

I promise not to quit. I promise to face with courage and endure the many deaths that our love will die over the years. And through those deaths I promise to keep my faith in a friendship that has time and again tested beautifully; that has resurrected livelier; that has re-ignited stronger; that has at its core a shared value that our purpose on earth is to throw ourselves demons-and-all into the crucible of love, so that we can finally see ourselves, demons-and-all, reflected in the eyes of another human being who loves us despite those flaws. I promise to cultivate the courage to see myself in your eyes as I am.

And I promise to seize our happier moments--to let them live unencumbered and unfiltered within me as long as I can--and to celebrate your beauty, your integrity, talent and passion, all that you’ve taught me and all that loving you has taught me.

Genevra, I expect nothing more than a life with you, a life that is sometimes exciting and sometimes dull, sometimes full and rich and satisfying, and sometimes seemingly in ruins. And in those ruinous moments I expect nothing more from you than your commitment not to quit.
I promise to look beyond this great moment in our lives as a moment of pure ceremony. And I promise to remember these vows, to recite them to myself or to you on occasion for the rest of my life; and to never regret the life that began after I uttered them.