Your LGBTQ+ Wedding Community

Wedding Planning

Get tips, best practices, tools and templates for planning your LGBTQ wedding.

Traditional wedding vows can be — how should we say it — heteronormative? The process of writing gay wedding vows can be challenging as you might need to sort through a variety of templates to find some examples that work for your LGBT wedding. On the flip side, as a queer or trans couple, you have a lot of freedom to craft wedding ceremony vows that represent your identity and your relationship without a ton of worry about tradition. In fact, a majority of same-sex couples choose to write their own wedding vows compared with about a third of opposite-sex couples.

Eight years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decided that New York resident Edie Windsor’s out-of-state marriage (she married Thea Spyer in Canada in 2007) would be recognized in New York, where same-sex marriage had been legally recognized since 2011. This landmark decision immediately opened the door for the many same-sex couples who wished to seek legal partnership recognition but could not do so in their home states, and ultimately paved the way toward SCOTUS’ Obergefell decision in 2015, which embraced marriage equality nationwide. Those legal shifts, though taking place in courtrooms, ultimately had a significant impact on the wedding market and the choices of engaged LGBTQ couples.