The marriage system in England is largely governed by a part of the government known as the General Register Office, part of HM Passport Services. They are responsible for the registration of births, deaths and marriages in England and Wales.
They are the gatekeepers of the legal part of the marriage.
And they are really goddamn anal about paperwork.
SO in order to be able to get legally married in England and Wales (please note, this isn't true of all of Great Britain - the marriage laws in Scotland and Ireland are independent, and I'm not aware of the full details for them) you have to give a minimum of three weeks notice of your intention to marry. To do this you have to go to the Registry Office in the parish you live in (or the nearest one if there isn't one in your immediate town), with proof of address from the last three months, a valid passport and £35 each for the privilege. If you want to get married in a church, you need to bring a letter from the vicar saying that it's all good.
THIS is where it gets complicated.
If you want to have a civil wedding - i.e. not religious at all, in a hotel or a golf club or a theatre etc. etc. that is absolutely fine, so long as the venue is licensed for weddings. You can go anywhere in the country, no-one will care from a legal perspective. You are fine and dandy.
If you want to have a Church of England wedding, you are also fine. If the church is outside the parish you live in, you simply have to prove some connection to the church - i.e. baptised there, grew up in the parish, have a family member who attends the church, and check that the vicar is okay to marry you. He or she will need to write a letter for you to take to the Registry office for you to give Notice of your Intention to Marry, but it's all golden otherwise.
However if you want to get married in a religious institution other than the Church of England outside of the parish you live in? Well. You can't. UNLESS it is your regular place of worship, or there isn't a place of worship for your religion within your parish.
Here's the thing - the church we are getting married in is a Catholic church. I grew up in the Parish. I was baptised there. My mum's a Eucharistic minister there. I attend mass there when I am home.
For the Registry Office, my only attending mass there when I am home would be absolutely fine for it to fall under my 'Regular Place of Worship', even if I only go at Christmas and Easter. Funnily enough, though, the church also requires me to attend mass regularly, and for some odd reason they feel that perhaps I should be going more often than twice a year for it to count as 'regular' worship.
So I have been attending the church around the corner from my office, every week, in order to meet the church requirements for regular attendance. But in doing so, I have then invalidated the legal perspective that the church I want to get married in is my regular place of attendance.
If it were a Church of England church, our getting married there would be no problem.
The laws which are causing all this kerfuffle? Were written in
1830 and haven't been changed since then. The registry office lady who we met the first time cheerfully told us that it was written by the churches, but lady, if it was 1830, the Catholics won't have had anything to do with writing that law. It would have all been written by the Church of England. Who are, oddly enough,
the only religion exempt from that stupid law.
Anyway, this is what we discovered in our first visit. We regrouped. The priest wrote a letter stating that, by the Registry Office definition, the church we want to get married in is Jon's stable place of worship, because he doesn't go anywhere else. Which, you know, doesn't defeat the object of the exercise at all, but apparently counts because it follows the letter of the law, so whatever.
Once the paperwork hoop has been jumped through, you are then separated, and asked questions one at a time to make sure that this isn't a sham marriage.
Unfortunately this section didn't go so smoothly for Jon, who after being quizzed on whether or not 'PhD Student' could count as his occupation, then managed to forget the time and date of the wedding, and the address of the church. Apparently the woman got a little snippy with him, which caused him to get more flustered and forget more things.
I was in and out in five minutes - Jon was in there for at least twenty.
However, somehow we passed! Our intention to wed is listed on the Registry Office website in case anyone wants to make a legal objection to the marriage, and in 20 days we will be sent the forms which say 'YES YOU CAN BE MARRIED'.
Are things this complicated pre-wedding where you guys are from? I'd be interested to hear the different legal routes required in different places!
