How the Vows Column Came About WHEN the Vows column first appeared two decades ago, it marked a sharp - even startling - break from the traditional coverage of marriages found everywhere, including in this newspaper. The Times had been reporting on marriages since its original issue in 1851. But the idea behind this column was simple: change the focus from family lineage or Junior League membership to the back story, exploring first meetings, courtships and modern dating. The stories of policewomen, firefighters and teachers would mingle with those of media stars, politicians and professional athletes. The Times's Society Desk (as it is still referred to) has watched trends evolve over the years. For much of the 1990s, for instance, women increasingly chose to keep their maiden names. After 9/11, tradition reasserted itself, with noticeably more women taking their husband's name. Sometimes verifying the facts in an announcement can be tricky. In the early 1990s, before cellphones became common, many women would duck the issue of whether they were living with their boyfriends by listing themselves, sometimes laughably so, under their parents" home telephone numbers. Inevitably the bride was never at that number. (The conversation would go: "May I speak with Prudence Jones? Oh, she's out right now. You might try this other number." ") By the end of that decade, most brides had dropped the pretense. Twenty years ago, as now, most couples told us they'd met through their friends or family, or in college. For a period that ran into the late 1990s, a number said, often sheepishly, that they had met through personal advertisements. Then came the Web. People increasingly met in chat rooms and on dating sites, and by the middle of the last decade, the number of people being introduced online was so large, it rarely warranted more than a brief mention. It was clear that readers had a voracious interest in even small details about what made each relationship work, something Lois Brady, the column's sole writer for its first decade, made her specialty. She found that nothing seemed to grab the attention of readers more than a true chance meeting. Take Maureen Sherry and Steven Klinsky, who met one rainy Manhattan night when Mr. Klinsky looked out the window of a cab and ordered the driver to stop after he spotted Ms. Sherry walking down a sidewalk in tears. Colleen Ryan and David Cleary broke the rules of probability as they kept finding each other repeatedly on buses, in bars and in bagel shops in the fall of 1996. Paula Engel and Mike Riezenman crossed paths on the same grand jury panel. Ellen Frey was sitting with friends at the Lion's Head bar in Greenwich Village when she was introduced to the twice-divorced retired teacher named Frank McCourt. He announced himself by loudly demanding to know if any ex-wives were present. They were wed on the banks of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, a day that began with Ms. Frey paddling upriver in a dusty-pink canoe to the wedding site. Six weeks later Mr. McCourt would begin writing what became "Angela's Ashes." Later, the section broadened its Vows coverage with dispatches from the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, where Lesley Friedsam and Peter Damish were married at the grave site of the explorer Ernest Shackleton. The column returned to India that month for Priya Sachdev and the hotelier Vikram Chatwal. The group producing Vows, the weddings pages and its extensions (State of the Unions, Field Notes, Registry and the Well Mannered Wedding) was so focused on expanding the ethnic and geographic scope that we initially failed to see a new wrinkle. With the advent of Vermont's civil unions statute in 2000, a handful of gay couples told The Times that they, too, wanted to be a part of the weekly weddings report. The editorial managers of The Times began debating policy on gay and lesbian couples in the wedding pages. The Times would become the first major newspaper in the country to publish notices of same-sex unions. So just how is a couple chosen to appear in Vows? Many articles have come from conversations between the couples submitting their weddings for possible publication and the writers doing the pre-interviews for the announcements. Some couples include material on the arc of their relationship. Still others distinguish themselves by being anti-bridezillas, like Elizabeth Johnson and Josh Epstein, a couple who planned what Ms. Johnson called an "aggressively small" un-Hamptons-like event in front of a handful of friends and family on a Montauk beach. As Ms. Johnson said, "If you act like your wedding day is the greatest moment in your life, it's all downhill from there." Bob Woletz has been the editor of The Times's wedding pages since 1994.