Wallitner Weekly 41

Hello everyone!

A lot of amazing things happened recently!

I am now married! I got married on the 21st of May actually, so Im a little late in writing this. But as you can imagine, its been a busy time in the newlywed Wallitner house. In the past month or so my wife accepted a job on the west side, we toured and signed the lease on a new apartment, AND we got married.

Of course my wife also has four concerts in the next two weeks to end her school year, so there’s no time to relax quite yet. However, having the wedding over and done is a huge stress relief for both of us. And it was absolutely PERFECT.

I owe a huge thank you to my aunt and uncle who provided the venue!

I’ve got lots of plans for next week too!

Now that the wedding is done, its time to start packing for the move. Our move in date is July 17th and Im so excited! Right now we’re at least two hours away from our family and most of our friends, but after we move we will be twenty minutes away.

We have plans to become the board game house and we’ll be getting all new furniture to fit the new space. So there is a lot of work to be done in the next few weeks.

The story of my vows.

As you probably know, I write often. I write music. I write poetry. Its not grammatically correct, but it rhymes sometimes and people like it. I’ve gotten relatively good at writing something presentable on command. I know the craft.

So, on paper, writing my wedding vows should have been easy... It wasn’t.

I wrote my first draft of my vows months before we were even engaged. I knew I wanted to marry my girlfriend at the time. I new very early on that I wanted to marry her. So I wrote a poem called “Vows”. Its a very emotional poem about choosing to spend forever with someone even though you won’t live forever. And I really like that poem, but it was just a poem and that didn’t seem like it was enough.

So I wrote my second draft. Another poem. This one was called “Love” and it was technically very good. I counted the syllables. I felt clever. It was personal. I liked this poem a lot… But it was still just another poem. And I write poems all the time.

So I wrote my THIRD draft. This time it would be a story. Growing up my mom would always sing songs like “You are my sunshine” or she would say “I love you more than there are drops in the ocean.” And I would respond with, “I love you more than there are drops in the ocean PLUS ONE MORE”. And for my vows I turned that saying into a story about how there ain’t no mountain high enough. Ain’t no valley low enough. Ain’t no ocean wide enough. But then I realized that that was just a chorus to some song someone else wrote. And I wanted my vows to be original.

Then came my FOURTH draft. Another story. Still about something my mom would say, and she still does say, “I love you to the moon and back”. A pretty common phrase growing up. But it didn’t feel write to say to my soon to be wife and I figured out why. I thought, “This isn’t a love you can come back from, this is a to infinity and beyond kind of love.” So I wrote down a convoluted story explaining the meaning of the phrase “I love you to the moon and back” and how its about measuring the amount of love in distance, and the moon is really far away. So to make a round trip would be a lot of love. But again, it was a convoluted story and I wanted my vows to be perfect.

I wrote a total of probably ten or twelve different versions of my vows. A lot of them either a poem or a story with the classic “I promise to love you forever and always” Type stuff. But something about SEEING the words on the page took away the value of what I was saying. All I could imagine was me struggling to read my messy handwriting while crying tears of joy at the alter. It would have been rehearsed, and well spoken, not from the heart.

Then the week of the wedding rolls around. I have a handful of perfectly decent vows I could recite from a script at the alter if needed, but I didn’t like any of them. Everyone else would’ve thought they were great, and maybe they were, but I could find flaws in very single one.

Then it I finally found the answer. I couldn’t craft the perfect vows, because its not something you craft. Its not about the syllable count or the rhyme structor or the exposition and climax of the story. Its about love, and promising to do your best to not screw up that love.

So I took out my pen and my “Brilliant Ideas I Had While Drinking Bourbon” notebook that my best man got me, and I wrote “Don’t screw it up :)” on the first page. And then, as my wife would say, I winged it.

It wasn’t as organized as any of my “Love: In three acts” scripts that I wrote. It wasn’t as clever as some of the poems, and it didn’t rhyme. But I was finally able to speak from the heart, and not from some page with words on it.

That is the story of how I didn’t write my vows.