Love and marriage

[liv]

Ages ago when jack and I first started talking about getting married, we couldn't decide if we wanted to have a cool anniversary or if we wanted to get married during a summer weekend. jack facetiously suggested we could do both, and the more we thought about that, the more it seemed like actually a good idea. So yesterday we invited our immediate families and jack's best man to the registry office where we declared that we wanted to be legally married to eachother. Now we are married according to the English legal system.

Having made the odd decision to have a completely separate legal wedding from the ceremonial wedding, we thought quite a lot about how this could work. We decided that if the ceremony with all our friends is going to be meaningful, we should play down the civil wedding. So we took just yesterday off work, and only asked immediate family (rather than trying to figure out who counts as a "close" enough friend that they should be there), and asked the registry office for the absolute minimum ceremony that would be legally valid, and dressed in smart but regular clothes. I also started to feel echoes of the long-obsolete Jewish custom of having a separate "betrothal" when you become committed to marry eachother and aren't allowed to marry anyone else without a religious divorce, and "marriage" when you actually start married life together. I can't now marry anyone else without first divorcing jack (note: I have no plans to do this!), but I don't really feel married to him exactly.

Keeping things as simple as possible actually worked really well; we didn't have to stress about logistics beyond making sure to get to Shire Hall on time. We turned up, we got married. There was no stage managing or worrying about whether things would go smoothly. We were able to spend a pleasant day surrounded by our loved ones. It just felt right.

For various, mostly practical, reasons, I ended up getting married almost "out of" my parents' home. I hadn't thought of that as something I wanted, but in hindsight that also seemed symbolically right. I travelled up from Stoke, via a visit to my family's lawyers to make a will. The lawyer congratulated me heartily, of course, but he also kept repeating that my status was about to change. I hadn't quite internalized the idea that there are a whole bunch of laws, even things as mundane as the tax system, that treat me completely differently just because I decided on a particular relationship configuration. Also the lawyers' office is in the small town where I lived between the ages of 5 and 15, so going there was like walking into one of my recurring dreams where the town seems familiar but isn't quite right. Turns out it's only half a mile from the station to the town centre, too.

Then I arrived at my parents' house, to be gradually joined over the course of the evening by all three of my siblings and Thuggish Poet's partner. When Screwy finally arrived, we sat down to a supper which soon turned into a raucous philosophical argument about piebald unicorns and whether parents should default to presuming that babies are cisgendered when they are too young to express their own gender identity. The sibs teased me about spending my "hen night" sitting at the kitchen table with my family, but I can't think of any better way to spend my last hours of legal singlehood!

I was quite nervous on the day. I'm not sure what about; I've been lucky enough to take about a year and a half to contemplate the decision to get married, so it should have been straightforward. I think I still have some niggling doubts about going against my previous firm decision never to marry, though none at all about marrying jack specifically! And it's quite hard to get my entire family through the front door, sometimes, we all tend to get distracted or try to finish tasks at the last minute, so I think I was a bit nervous we'd be late. In fact everybody, including all jack's party, arrived at almost exactly the same time, 10 minutes before the registry office was ready to deal with us. The two families milled about introducing themselves to eachother, so jack and I didn't particularly have to play host or make an effort at social lubrication.

When we first booked our slot at the registry office, we discussed with the registrar that we wanted to change the script slightly so that the officiant wouldn't keep going on about "vows". I really don't like the idea of making open-ended, ill-defined vows, and indeed would prefer not to make any vows at all. And honestly it's not actually part of what makes it a legally valid marriage, just the sections where the officiant welcomes the guests to the wedding etc. And the wording is there purely because the English civil ceremony is basically an Anglican wedding with the explicit Jesus references taken out. This had seemed fine, but we discovered at the last minute that this discussion didn't count as "official", so we hadn't given enough notice to make changes. I am a little unbalanced by this, because I have a bad conscience that I may have accidentally vowed something, but it doesn't really matter since obviously I intend to keep the commitments I made anyway.

Still, the registrar and officiant respected our wishes to keep things simple and to the point, and didn't introduce any unnecessary frills and furbelows. I think the whole process of turning us from two individuals who happen to like spending time together into a Married Couple took little more than 10 minutes! I didn't "walk down the aisle"; I was just wearing an ordinary work suit, so there was no stunning DRESS to show off. We just stayed in the room after checking our details and receiving our pep-talk from the registrar, and our families came in from the waiting area. Actually one thing that threw me a little was that during the declarations that formally enact the wedding, we had to say I take thee to be my lawful wedded &c; my brain went haring off trying to consider the question whether it is appropriate to call jack thou. And we had to be identified by our fathers' occupations, which nowadays seems so archaic as to be practically weird.

Then we signed the register and posed for photos while pretending to sign a blank register (there's some bizarre byelaw that prohibits photographing the actual register). And fishpi and Screwy and Thuggish Poet and P'tite Soeur all signed as witnesses, and there was a minor awkward moment when they explained that the Rules say you have to use a fountain pen (not a ballpoint), which Screwy doesn't really have the dexterity for, but it was ok. The mood seemed to be quite ebullient, we were sort of half-joking with the officiant and registrar but not to the extent that the important parts of the ceremony would be disrupted. Screwy tried to ask linguistic philosophy questions about the instant of time between jack marrying me and me marrying him, which led to more hilarity than enlightenment, but thankfully after the point where the act of marriage was undeniably complete.

And then we went back to my parents' and ate a huge celebratory dinner that Mum had prepared in advance. Two kinds of soup, and chestnut pie and salmon for the gluten-intolerant people and vegetables with mint jelly and sweet-and-sour red cabbage and jacket potatoes with cheese and crème fraiche, and lemon soufflé and chocolate roulade and fruit salad and a cheeseboard, and champagne and red wine and white wine. jack and I had to sit side-by-side at the head of the table! I am never going to object to tasty food, but the really lovely thing was the two families getting to know eachother. The two relatives who are least comfortable with large social occasions seemed to get on very well with eachother, and jack's people were not too alarmed by my family being very voluble. I have in-laws now! Another thing I hadn't really thought of as a consequence of this getting married thing, but I am very pleased, because they are excellent in-laws. Also, some of jack's second-degree relatives, whom I see when I spend Christmas with his family, had sent us completely unexpected presents.

Then I got on a train and headed back to Stoke, cos I had a grant deadline and some teaching commitments today. The rumour is gradually leaking out at work, and my colleagues are almost more excited vicariously than I am!

Oh, and I have a ring. It's pleasingly annular:
. Basically it's silver and garnet, made by a random Israeli designer I found on Etsy, and it's very pretty, but probably not very durable, so I'm planning to wear it as a "betrothal" ring until the main wedding when I will switch to a plain wedding band.

Also, you know what's really lovely? Making things legally official led my geeky, grammar snob husband to make a post with HTML hearts and multiple exclamation marks. So I reckon that's a win.