The Perfect Wedding Ceremony Script, Vows, and Toasts

There are three main types of wedding speeches: vows, ceremony scripts, and toasts. For decades, couples, officiants, and their guests have written these by aimlessly searching online with 17+ tabs open, or leaning on clergy to take the lead. 

Today, however, the majority of couples are having a friend or family member officiate, they are writing custom vows, and they are prioritizing having their weddings be a true reflection of themselves.

We’re guessing you don’t want to have a cookie-cutter wedding, and you also don’t want the stress of creating your entire ceremony from scratch. There are steps you can follow, which we’ve outlined below. 

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In this article:

• How to write a ceremony script?
• How to write your vows?
• How to write a toast?

How to write a ceremony script?

STEP 1: Align on key details

How long do you want your ceremony to be? What’s your preferred tone? What do you want to make sure your officiant includes (or avoids)? There are many basic questions that go into crafting a ceremony script, and so it’s important to make sure you and your partner are on the same page (and that you share these critical details with your officiant).

The Provenance Ceremony Builder guides you through these important questions (and more), offers tips, and helps you every step of the way. The tool thinks of the little details so you (and perhaps the person who you asked to officiate) don’t have to.

STEP 2: Select (or create) Wedding Rituals and Readings

Do you want any religious or non-religious readings and rituals in your ceremony? Perhaps you want to incorporate a tradition from your culture, while adding a special twist that better resonates with you and your partner. 

The Provenance Ceremony Builder addresses the above with a library of 300+ non religious and religious rituals and readings for you to filter out, select from, and even add your own. It gives you advice on how to incorporate these moments into your ceremony script, while having easy ways for you to incorporate them and their significance into your script.

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STEP 3: Share your love story

There’s more that goes into your love story than you and your partner both swiped right and then eventually said “I do.” There are times you’ve shown up for each other in special ways that brought you closer together, there is that moment you knew that they were “the one,” and there are those quirks they do that always make you laugh. 

The Provenance Ceremony Builder has expertly curated questions that are designed to bring out unique characteristics of your relationship, memories, and moments of love. These prompts are crafted to inspire you to express your unique love story in a personal and authentic way.

STEP 4: Decide on the wording for your Declaration of Intent and Pronouncement

Whether you want a traditional “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer […],” something more modern and custom for your declaration of intent, or you want an option in between, there are a variety of ways that these sections can be included in your ceremony.

The Provenance Ceremony Builder includes a range of options for you to choose from.

STEP 5: Put it all together, review, and edit

After completing steps 1-4, the officiant (or the couple) used to sit down and stare at a blank page for longer than they’d like to admit, before wondering “now what” and researching script templates to try and hack together a cohesive ceremony.

Today, with the Provenance Ceremony Builder, you, your partner, and/or your officiant can click a button and watch as your answers from steps 1-4 get turned into a first draft of the wedding ceremony script that can be edited up until the big day. And, after speaking to countless wedding planners who facepalmed when key blocking was messed up (and after making our own mistakes with our earliest officiating gigs), every Provenance script automatically includes the important ceremony blocking cues infused throughout the script.

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How to write your vows?

STEP 1: Set your length and tone

We heard from many couples, and observed ourselves as experienced officiants, that they were anxious that their partner’s vows would be drastically different from theirs in length and tone. And so, we included within the Provenance Vow Builder a way for you to view your partner’s vows’ relative length and tone without revealing the content of their speech.

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This is the feature that went viral on TikTok (linked here). Couples were excited to find that they can finally avoid that awkward “I poured my heart out for 6 minutes and they only said 2 sentences?!” risk. 

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Get started writing your vows with the Vow Builder today.

STEP 2: Reflect on your love story (past, present, and future)

Additionally, couples we interviewed had shared that the hardest part of writing their vows was simply staring at that intimidating blinking cursor on the blank page. 

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The Provenance Vow Builder has curated questions to help you overcome writer’s block, remember the moments you want to share, and the promises you want to make.

STEP 3: Put it all together, review, and share with a trusted person

It’s completely normal to have swirling thoughts and ideas of what you want to say, but no idea how to structure them into coherent vows. 

That’s where the Provenance Vow Builder comes in. It takes the seemingly disparate ideas, thoughts, and memories you want to include, and organizes them into a solid first draft. 

Unlike other AI tools (that typically would require you to take the AI output at face value or copy the answer to be pasted elsewhere), our tools are designed  for couples, officiants, and their guests to be able to edit and iterate your speeches until the final show time. You can edit the speech directly, as well as control whether you’d like to (or not!) share its contents with other collaborators. And finally, once ready, we enable you to download and print before heading to the altar.

How to write a toast?

Provenance simplifies the process of inviting your wedding party and family members who will be delivering speeches, by allowing you to effortlessly manage and track everything from our centralized dashboard.

STEP 1: Get on the same page about speech length and “no-go’s”

Since you’ve planned every detail of your wedding to a T, the toasts can unintentionally be stressful due to the lack of control. To help de-risk that, couples can invite the Father of the Bride, Mother of the Groom, Maid of Honor, Best Man, or anyone who is holding a mic to use the Provenance Toast Builder. When inviting them, they’ll get alerted to how long their speech can be and anything you want them to mention (or steer clear of. Yes, like that story). From there, you can see the status of the speech and the estimated length, so if you fear that groomsman #4 is going to wing it, or bridesmaid #2 is going to go way over time, you can avoid surprises and check in ahead of time.

STEP 2: Help ensure the speaker acknowledges both partners 

A big speech taboo that happens way too often is when the person giving the speech only talks about the partner they’re closest with, unintentionally making the other partner feel left out and unimportant. To help remedy this, the Provenance Toast Builder gives you the option to either talk about each partner 50/50, or to talk 70% about your person and 30% about the other person (which is a good rule of thumb). It also has thoughtful prompts to encourage you to share why they’re both 1) good people and 2) a great match for each other.

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STEP 3: Put it all together, review, and edit

Similar to the AI generation in the other tools above, the Provenance Toast Builder helps take the stress out of the speechwriting process. If any of the people you want to give a toast aren’t professional writers or speakers, chances are they’re feeling anxious about writing and giving a speech at your wedding. Encouraging them to use this tool as a starting off point can help alleviate a lot of that stress.

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