It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover

I pull the page out of my pocket and unfold it, and then grab a pen in case
I want to make any very last-minute changes.
Dear Lily,
I’m used to writing you letters that no one else will ever read, which
may be why I had a difficult time when I first attempted to write these
vows. The idea that they were going to be read out loud to you in front
of other people was a little bit terrifying.
But vows aren’t meant to be something you make in private. The
purpose of a vow is to make an intentional promise that is witnessed,
whether it’s witnessed by God, or friends and family.
It has to make you wonder, though, or at least it made me wonder
what the purpose is behind the need for a public vow. I couldn’t stop
my mind from questioning what must have happened in the past to
create the necessity for love to be witnessed.
Does it mean that somewhere along the way, a promise was broken?
A heart was shattered?
It’s disappointing if you really sit and think about why vows even
exist. If we trusted everyone to keep their word, vows wouldn’t be
necessary. People would fall in love, and they’d stay in love, faithfully,
forever, the end.
But that’s the issue, I guess. We’re people. We’re human. And
humans can sometimes be disappointing.
That realization led me down another path in my thought process
while writing these vows. I began to wonder, if humans are so often
disappointing and so rarely successful at love, what can we do to
ensure ours is a love that will stand the test of time? If half of all
marriages end in divorce, that would mean half of every set of vows
ever made have ended up broken. How do we ensure we’re not one of
the couples who becomes a statistic?
Unfortunately, Lily, we can’t. We can only hope, but we can’t
guarantee that the words we stand here and promise one another today
won’t end up in the file of a divorce lawyer a few years down the road.
I apologize. I realize these vows are making marriage sound like an
extremely depressing cycle that only ends happily half the time.
But for someone like me, that’s actually kind of exciting.