As the officiant concluded the ceremony, she introduced the couple, who are both in their late 20s, as “Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds,” and proclaimed, “No power in the verse can stop them!”

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Another couple, Matt and Michelle Marovich, agreed to love each other in sickness and in health, but also swore that “in the event of an apocalypse, human, vampire, zombie or otherwise, I promise to fight and die by your side.”

In the same way that couples of the 1960s and 1970s began looking outside religion to contemporary culture and music as inspiration for their vows, some couples today are influenced by the misty (and perhaps invented) past, the fictional future and even lurid apocalyptic fantasy.

For instance, the 2008 wedding of Mr. and Ms. Marovich in San Pablo, Calif., details of which were later posted to Offbeatbride.com, was not the first to contain references to zombies. But it highlighted something of a trend among a certain subset of couples who are looking outside (sometimes way outside) accepted custom.

Ms. Marovich, 35, said she received several e-mails from people who wanted to copy her vows, and the Offbeatbride site has since featured dozens of zombie-themed weddings. So many that the site’s founder and publisher, Ariel Meadow Stallings, said she recently cut back on them, for fear of overexposure.

“It’s being used in ceremonies in ways that aren’t just gimmicky,” she said. “It’s actually kind of a powerful cultural metaphor that people are tapping into.”

The zombie reference was not meant to be trendy, said Ms. Marovich, who for the ceremony wore a red silk gown trimmed in white lace, hardly a “Night of the Living Dead” wardrobe. What appealed to her, she added, was the idea that “if the world was ending and every social structure crumbled, our marriage would still be the most important thing.”

The couple’s officiant, Leslie Light, brought that idea a little closer to home. “They vow not to allow the other to become a zombie when they aren’t looking: slipping into apathy, numbness and a maddening hunger,” Ms. Light said.

The wording for traditional marriage vows can be traced to religious texts of the Middle Ages. The Sarum Missal, translated from Latin in the 11th century, has some of the earliest recorded vows in English, said Dr. Ruth Karras, a history professor at the University of Minnesota and the author of “Unmarriages: Women, Men and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages.”

Vows from that period were as simple as, “I take you as my husband, and I take you as my wife,” Dr. Karras said.

The Rev. Jonipher Kupono Kwong, pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, said that people who consider themselves solidly secular still yearn for the transcendent, particularly in a wedding, and sometimes find it in science fiction.

“This has a way of giving them the bigger picture and seeing the universe as one that supports them,” said Mr. Kwong, who once presided at a wedding with a “Star Trek” theme. “It’s a more universal way of showing what it means to make a commitment in front of something bigger than you,” he said. “It’s spiritual in that sense.”

And some ceremonies that are said to have their origins in remote antiquity, like handfasting or stone oaths, have no prescribed vows or strong ties to a particular faith and can be molded or reimagined to fit many points of view. That perhaps is one reason wedding officiants and planners are also seeing new interest in them.

Jamie James liked the oath stone idea and went to the New River in North Carolina, near where she grew up, to find the proper rock. “I’m only 4-foot-9, so I was having to bob,” said Ms. James, now 41. “My foot came across one that I kept tiptoeing on. I immediately knew it was the one.”

She said that at the ceremony in Baton Rouge, La., her groom, Paul James, now 40, made a vow to her three daughters as well as to her: “He told them that: ‘As your stepdad, I want you to know that I’m going to honor your mother, and treat you as my own. To do so, I’m giving you a ring that binds you to me.’ He had bought them each a little silver ring for their middle finger.”

The stone is now displayed on their mantel.

With relatives who were Baptists, Buddhists, Muslims and Roman Catholics, Halima Sykes and Bert Dumas had plenty of religious traditions to draw upon when they were married in New Orleans in June. But Ms. Sykes, 28, and Mr. Dumas, 29, chose handfasting, said to be an ancient Celtic practice, in which the couple’s hands are bound together. She and her fiancé then wrote vows independently of each other. As they recited them, the maid of honor, the bride’s sister, tied their hands with ribbon.

Ms. Sykes’s vows included fairy-tale touches (“You came into my life like Prince Charming and swept me off my feet”) and thoughts of home and family. She thanked Mr. Dumas for loving her son “like he was your own.”

Some couples still see God and church as integral to the promises they make, though they may want their own variation on the traditional ceremony.

When Mary and Ray Albrecht were married in 1977, they wanted to draw from the traditions of their strong Roman Catholic faith as well as say something personal. They fulfilled both needs by trading standard vows for words from the Book of Ruth.

Reading from the couple’s wedding book over the telephone at home in Sugar Land, Tex., Ms. Albrecht recited a portion of her vows: “Ray, wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you live, I will live. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

“It meant more to use that, than the regular ‘honor and obey,’ ” she said.

Mr. Albrecht agreed. “It was something that was both scriptural and meaningful,” he said, “and sort of a covenant.”

Wedding theme possibilities can seem headspinningly boundless. J. K. Rowling did not write a wedding scene for Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley, but some of her readers want Potter-style weddings. Ms. Stallings described a ceremony in which the ring box was a hollowed-out Potter book that opened to a chapter called “The Unbreakable Vow.”

Neither wizards nor zombies nor sacred stones figured in the July wedding of Lily Shedd and Nathan Scott in Worthington, Mass. The couple, who are both 29, put together a ceremony with their own words and chose the groom’s sister, Elizabeth Barber, to officiate at the home of the bride’s parents. Ms. Barber recited a “charge,” outlining marriage, and asked the guests for a declaration of their support. The couple said that writing those parts of the ceremony gave them a way to highlight their relationship not just to each other, but to their friends and the larger community.

“We enjoyed tailoring that to the relationships we have with these people,” Mr. Scott said. “You’re able to make it personal when you can choose your own language, and you can say how you want them to support you.”