The Seven Vows We Never Speak: What Marriage Runs On

My cousin’s daughter got married on a beach in Florida, late morning, the heat already starting to set in by ten. The mandap had four pillars and an open rectangle above them, nothing between the ceremony and the sky, beautifully done up in flowers that had no business surviving that heat as well as they did. I remember looking at the beautiful backdrop and the sky and wondered if they checked the forecast or just took a chance.

Parking had been difficult. I had wanted to use the restroom before the ceremony started and the hotel was far enough away that I decided against it and regretted the decision for the next hour. Someone was walking around with coconut water, handing it to anyone who looked like they needed it, which by ten thirty was most of us. A cluster of bridesmaids, most of them not of Indian descent, kept hitching their pallus back onto their shoulders every few minutes. Their youth and inexperience haven’t taught them the simple wisdom on a well-placed pin.

The bride was in a sari, fully decked out, gold catching the sun in a way that made her look really lovely. The exchange and laughter between the bride and groom showed that they were good friends. At some point the priest began the seven vows. I have been to enough Indian weddings to recognize the couple circling, the chanting shifting into a rhythm I had heard many times before. To his credit, the priest kept stopping to explain in English what he had just said in Sanskrit. Most of the people there would not have understood otherwise, and he knew it. So he translated as he went, trying to make sure we understood what was actually happening.

I could not tell you a single one of the seven vows spoken that morning. Not one. I have tried, since starting to write this, to reach back for even a phrase of it, and there is nothing there. Not even the English. A man stood in front of all of us and translated the most important words of the ceremony in real time, and I still cannot produce one of them. The heat, the restroom, the coconut water, the bridesmaids with their pallus slipping, all of that stayed. The actual words a bride and groom are given to promise each other, the words the entire ceremony exists to deliver, are gone.

I do not think this is only my memory failing. I wonder if anyone remembers them. We remember the wedding. We do not remember what was promised.

The vows the priest recited that morning were beautiful. I looked them up afterward because I wanted to know what I had missed. They are good vows. They deserve to be remembered. Nourishment. Strength. Care for parents. Care for children. Friendship, for the rest of a life.

But I do not think a marriage runs only on the vows spoken at the fire. Those vows come from another time, and even when we understand the words, they do not always speak to the emotional lives we are living now.

I think a marriage runs on a second set of vows too. Nobody writes these into the ceremony. No priest recites them and no guest hears them. They are not more sacred than the traditional seven. They are simply the promises that get tested on a Tuesday, six years in, when nobody is wearing a sari, there is no coconut water, and no one is watching.

I do not make you responsible for my peace.

This is the first one because it is the one most marriages quietly break. Somewhere in the early years, a person starts handing their peace to their spouse for safekeeping, and the spouse, not knowing they have been handed anything, starts to feel the weight of it without understanding why.

I protect your dignity, even when we disagree.

Anyone can be kind when there is nothing at stake. This one gets tested in a specific fifteen seconds, the ones right after you have been hurt and the words are already halfway out before you have decided whether to say them. I have watched it happen at a dinner table, someone reaching for the exact thing they knew would land, and then not saying it. You could see the sentence sitting there unsaid. That is the whole vow, in one moment, at one table.

 I do not use your weakness against you, even when I am angry enough to.

Every long marriage collects a private map of the other person’s soft places. What a spouse knows about you after twenty years is not always flattering. I have watched a friend do this once, in an argument that had nothing to do with what she brought up. She apologized for a decade. I don’t think either of them ever forgot it, her or me.

I let you be wrong sometimes without deciding it means something is wrong with us.

A disagreement is not a referendum on the marriage. I have a friend, decades in, who told me once that the worst year of her marriage started with a wrong turn on a drive, an actual missed exit that somehow became a conversation about whether they were fundamentally compatible people. She still doesn’t know how the thing extended that far past its size. What she does know is that at some point it stopped happening, the small thing staying small again, though she couldn’t tell me exactly when that changed.

 I come back after I have cooled down. I do not let silence speak for me.

Silence feels like control in the moment. It is usually delay wearing a nicer coat. I have gone quiet on someone I loved for four days once, over something I could not, if you asked me now, fully reconstruct. I don’t remember what started it. I remember how long it took me to speak again, and how unnecessary that length turned out to be.

 I remember that you knew me before I became difficult to love.

Every long marriage eventually meets a version of each person that is harder to live with than the version at the wedding. Illness, disappointment, the particular tiredness of decades, all of it changes a person. This vow asks the other one to remember the version that came before, not to excuse what came after, but to hold both at once.

 I believe in your highest self, especially on the days you cannot see it yourself.

This is the last one because it is the hardest to keep and the one that makes the other six possible. There will be days a person cannot locate their own better nature, cannot find the version of themselves capable of any of this. The vow is that the other person keeps believing in that version anyway, holds it in trust, until the person can find their way back to it themselves.

I do not think these seven can be kept on willpower alone. A person cannot be the sole source of their own steadiness and also promise never to make their spouse responsible for it. Something has to be underneath the vow, or the vow is just a wish with better posture.

This is where I think the fire on that beach was pointing at. Long before either of them stood on the sand, the bride and the groom belonged to something prior. Not to each other, not yet, and not first. India’s spiritual tradition has long taught that the soul’s first relationship is with the Supreme. Human marriage is strongest when it grows from that first bond rather than trying to replace it. When a person draws their peace from that first relationship instead of demanding it from a spouse, the first vow becomes possible. When dignity is already something a person has been given rather than something a spouse must supply on command, the second vow stops being a strain. God does not ask a person to earn belonging. That is the room a marriage can rest in, once it has one.

I do not think the bride and groom on that beach knew this consciously, and it does not matter if they did. The fire was there either way.

I do not remember the seven vows spoken that morning. I remember the parking, and the restroom I did not use, and the coconut water going around, and gold catching the Florida sun on a woman I love. Ordinary things. The things a person actually carries out of a wedding.

Somewhere past all of that, underneath it, the real vows were being made anyway. Nobody spoke to them. Nobody had to.

About Author

Shireen Chada has been teaching Raja Yoga meditation with the Brahma Kumaris for more than three decades. Her new book, Free Your Mind from Overthinking: Discover the Power of Trust, explores how we can step out of the mind’s endless search for certainty and live with greater trust, peace, and inner freedom. She writes about spirituality, consciousness, and the inner life.