The only vows that stuck.

One of the hats I wear is wedding coordinating. I’ve helped execute over 50 wedding visions for couples over the years which means I’ve roughly witnessed:

50 first dances.

50 cake cuttings.

50 drunk best-man speeches.

50 bouquet tosses.

And 50 vows exchanged.

These events blend into each other in my memory—the flower arrangements, the dresses, the formalities. While every couple and their celebration is quirky and cute in their own ways, many of the details get lost in the shuffle of off-white tulle, boutonniers, and sparkler send-offs.

But there’s one wedding I’ll never forget.

It will forever stick with me because the groom’s vows articulated love in one of the most meaningful ways I’d ever heard. This wedding happened in 2020 and I hadn’t thought about it until I watched the final season of This is Us a few months ago where

- SPOILER ALERT -

Kate and Toby’s marriage is imploding.

As an audience, we see it coming over the course of the entire season. With the show’s whiplash of flashbacks and flash-forwards, we have a pretty strong idea that all the couple’s counseling and work they were doing to stay together doesn’t succeed in the end. Nevertheless, the slow burn plays across the screen like a car wreck you can’t look away from, especially in episode 9, “The Hill.”

In one scene of the episode, Kate and Toby’s relationship comes to a boil and they’re engaging in a multi-layered argument about family, life, careers, money, and the resentment they’ve let fester in a petri dish of judgment on how one another has handled it all.

At the height of it Kate says, “You know, sometimes I look at you Toby, and I don’t even know who you are anymore […] You’re not the […] goofy guy from our first date, the old Toby, the guy that I fell in love with. I miss him.”

Toby retorts: “You know what I’d love to say to old Toby, Kate? He was a mess. He was miserable and insecure and self-loathing. And all of that goofiness and the loud jokes, that was out of self-defense. Kate, you fell in love with a coping mechanism. What is so terrible about me right now?”

This scene in particular brought that 2020 wedding back to memory.

I remember the groom giving his vows second. By the time he began, he was already crying.

I’m paraphrasing based on my hazy memory but they went something like, “Today I know I’m not only marrying the woman you are right now [insert some gushingly specific things he listed about his bride], but I’m marrying every person you will become in the future. I know who you are today is not who you will always be, and I vow to fall in love with every version of you that evolves over the course of our lives.”

Both the story of Kate and Toby and these vows communicate a concept I find fascinating, utterly romantic, and universal:

To love someone well is to allow space for their personal evolution.

Life is not stagnant. People change. And life changes people—for better or worse.

For a partner to vow to remain beside you “for richer or poorer” and “in sickness and in health” is one thing. But for a partner to vow to continually fall in love with the versions of you that those circumstances create is next level.

I’m convinced that this is one of the most stunning ways to love someone—to embrace how they change through the ebbs and flows of life and for your love to evolve accordingly.