On her wedding day, Vieneese Stanton didn’t glide through the sanctuary of a stately church or down a flower-lined aisle. She stood at the end of a hospital hallway in the cancer wing of the UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco, beaming in a gauzy white gown, ready to surprise her terminally ill father with the chance to walk her down the aisle to her groom.
In February 2017, Ms. Stanton’s father, Preston Rolan, was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that overproduces abnormal white cells in the bone marrow. Ms. Stanton, 35, who lives in Richmond, Calif., had hoped he would attend her wedding the following April, but then a deadly infection metastasized in Mr. Rolan’s lung. “We didn’t know if he’d make it,” said Ms. Stanton, an administrator at San Domenico School in San Anselmo, Calif. “But I couldn’t imagine that day without him.”
The couple moved their wedding to a city hall ceremony in November 2018, with a quick hospital visit planned so Mr. Rolan could see his daughter in her gown.
But the hospital staff had bigger plans. They transformed Mr. Rolan’s daily stroll around the hospital into a surprise walk down the aisle. On Nov. 16, 2018, when Mr. Rolan turned the corner during his walk, “I was standing there in my dress. He was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on?!’” Ms. Stanton recalls. “He thought I was headed to Vegas or something. He had no clue we were doing it right there.”
That touching walk together, which Ms. Stanton said lasted less than a minute, was one that she will cherish.
“I’m just grateful I could have that moment with him. He passed away just three weeks later, but he got to see the wedding,” Ms. Stanton said. “He was so happy.”
The tradition of fathers walking daughters down the aisle has patriarchal roots — once a literal handoff from father to husband in a real-time property exchange. Today, many brides see it as a way to honor the first man they loved. Some adapt the ritual to include stepfathers and siblings. Others, like Ms. Stanton, view it as a sacred passage from daughter to a life partner. Last year, 73 percent of brides surveyed in The Knot’s real wedding study shared that they walked down the aisle with their father.
“Weddings are very much about family and relationships, not just about the relationship between the bride and the groom, but really about relationships with joining families,” said Beth Montemurro, a distinguished professor of sociology at Penn State Abington, who has researched weddings and their accompanying culture.
“A lot of people modified the tradition,” she said. “So having both parents walk a bride down the aisle, for example, or having a father walk a bride partway down the aisle and then having somebody else meet her to finish the walk, is also a way to hold on to some wedding traditions and reject others that are more blatantly patriarchal.”
Although Maiysha Kai, the Grammy-nominated musician turned journalist and voice-over artist, wasn’t certain that she would ever get married, she was sure that if the day came, her father would be escorting her down the aisle.
On Sept. 21, 2024, she was a beaming first-time bride at 49, arm in arm with her 75-year-old father, Warren Simpson, who had spent the better part of the previous year recovering from a series of health challenges, including a torn ligament from an ambitious game of pickleball.
There was no grand ask, no dramatic invitation to walk her down the aisle. It was just an implied understanding, she said.
“It was always going to be me and my dad,” said Ms. Kai, 50, who lives in Chicago. And when the doors opened at the Penthouse Hyde Park in Chicago, she said, “I kept it together, but I knew that was going to be the part that got me. Not seeing my husband — seeing my dad seeing me.”
Ms. Kai said that the walk down the aisle with her father, simple and steady, represented decades of moments they have shared: from being carried as a child to being walked down the aisle as a bride to a new beginning.
Shante Jackson always knew she wanted her father, the Rev. Dr. Harold Hayes Jr., to walk her down the aisle as well. Ms. Hayes’s parents are both pastors at True Life Worship in Bowie, Md., and in his more than 30 years of ministry and leadership, Rev. Hayes has officiated dozens of weddings. “I tell people all the time, on that day, he’s not Pastor Hayes — he’s just my dad,” said Ms. Jackson, 38, a first-grade teacher who lives in Laurel, Md. “That’s it. I didn’t want him officiating. I didn’t want him working. I just needed him to be there for me.”
Their walk at her May 2015 ceremony was the first time he saw her in her wedding dress. When he looked at her, she remembered that his expression was full of awe. “His eyes got real big,” she said. “He had that look, like ‘Wow, my daughter’s actually getting married.’ There were tears, but I didn’t say anything. If he started crying, I would’ve started crying.”
Ms. Jackson, who divorced in 2021, said the end of her marriage hasn’t diminished the meaning of the walk with her father. “When I get married again — if it’s in God’s plan — I want him to walk me again,” she said. “I want that moment again.”
Not every bride keeps the tradition in its classic form. Some modify it to honor more than one father figure to reflect nontraditional family structures, or walk completely solo to the altar.
Val Monson, who lives in Brooklyn Park, Md., and works as a student behavior coach at a charter school, didn’t need to ask her father, Gene Link, to walk her down the aisle. It was simply understood. The first time, in her late 20s, he escorted her along a sun-washed beach in Jamaica with just a handful of guests.
For her second marriage in 2011, they walked down a wooden pier in Annapolis, Md., then boarded a boat to the Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse on the Chesapeake Bay. “Water is my balance,” said Ms. Monson, now 58. Both times, her father walked beside her in quiet support. “He doesn’t have to say anything,” she said. “You just know by his spirit.”
Her parents, who have been married for nearly 60 years, offered her a model built not on grand gestures, but on faith, partnership, and palpable respect, she said.
“They just make it look easy,” she said, “but I know it’s because they built it on something solid.” For Ms. Monson, being walked down the aisle was more than tradition. She said it was a symbol of devotion and hope for her own marriage.
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