Dear Prudence,
My partner of five years and I just got married after two years of extensive wedding planning and preparation. We had a very large guest list with a variety of needs that needed to be taken into account, such as international travel and physical limitations, and I feel grateful that my husband was very intentional about making sure the labor of wedding planning was split as equitably as possible between the two of us. We agreed that we wanted to write our own vows because we thought it was more meaningful than using traditional ones. As a self-admitted perfectionist and English major, I spent an immense amount of time thinking about and writing mine, and while I wouldn’t hold my husband to impossible standards, I was really looking forward to hearing what he wrote.
At the ceremony, things went off without a hitch. The vows he wrote were beautiful and made me tear up. During the reception, however, his best man gave a (I believe slightly drunk) toast where he mentioned my husband using ChatGPT to write his vows. Everyone laughed, including me, until he emphasized that it wasn’t a joke and that my husband actually did use ChatGPT to write them at the last minute, apparently to emphasize how lucky he was to find such a “creative and talented” wife since he is “lacking” in that department. My husband was laughing nervously, and I was taken aback. As soon as the toasts were over, I ran to the restroom and cried, feeling extremely hurt that not only did he use AI to write something so intimate, but mostly that he presumably would not have told me had this not been revealed during the toast. He followed me to the bathroom and apologized, saying that he felt too overwhelmed to write them himself, but he didn’t want to disappoint me. I told him that I didn’t want an apology from him but just wanted to survive the rest of the reception, which we did, although the entire time I was distracted and hurt by this situation.
That night, we continued to fight about it, and I told him that I wish he had just been honest with me and that his lying was far more hurtful to me than not writing his own vows. His best man texted me and apologized, saying that he assumed I knew he used ChatGPT and that he wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise. This was even more upsetting to me, as apparently, his friends are also comfortable lying on his behalf. Days later, my husband is still apologizing, and while part of me wants to move on, another part of me can’t stop thinking about his dishonesty. I’ve asked him whether he ever planned on telling me or if he would have taken that secret to the grave, and all he can tell me is that he “doesn’t know.” Am I overthinking this? I feel like I have every right to be upset, and I worry about what other things he might keep from me in the future, but I genuinely love him and want to move on—I just don’t know how. Help!
—Vexed About Vows