When We Got Married - Part One
Our Backyard Civil-Ceremony Wedding
Did you know that Nathan and I got legally married in our friend’s backyard? Nate was wearing sneakers. Our witnesses and minister had about twenty hours notice, and on the morning of, Nate’s sister was called out of the shower to watch us wed on Zoom. Trusting that you’re now suitably interested I will begin to tell you the tale of Nate and I’s crinkled and rearranged wedding plans of 2020.
I’d like to begin with a few things that I have learnt whilst being engaged:
Marrying someone of a different nationality is complicated.
It is easier for a British citizen to legally marry a Canadian in Canada than the other way around.
It helps to marry in the country you’ll go on to apply for spousal immigration in, since the marriage certificate will be from that country.
You can buy a marriage licence at London Drugs (a Canadian retail chain, similar to Boots in the UK).
When wedding during a pandemic, get your witnesses to bring their own pens.
Early in 2020 Nate and I decided that it worked best for us to have a legal civil ceremony in Canada before our plans to wed later in the UK in Summer. Since we’re Christians, we wanted to wait until our Church wedding to consider ourselves married to one another (seeing this as the occasion when we’d marry in front of our friends and family, inside a familiar Church). We asked for advice from a few Vicar friends and learnt that it’s quite common for dual-nationality couples to have a separate civil ceremony before their big day. We bought our marriage licence and felt relaxed about getting it done, after all, our Pastor in Vancouver was happy to help us out after our sessions of Marriage Prep.
However, once the ambiguous threat of COVID-19 began to grow, we felt less relaxed. In March I chatted with my parents and heard about weddings being banned in the UK. We realised that it might be pretty valuable to get our marriage certificate whilst we still could, and that it might buy us some flexibility later on (which it did). On March 25th we had a Marriage Prep scheduled in the morning, and the night before we called our Pastor to see if he’d be willing to marry us then. He was! Next, we asked two close friends to be our witnesses (Ainsley and Georgie), and Ainsley offered her backyard. In less than a day she borrowed furniture to set up an outdoor living room, locating champagne, decorations and three wedding dresses that I could borrow (which I declined). We set up a Zoom call so our families could watch us legally marry.
So, on March 25th 2020, Nate and I had a civil ceremony in our friend’s backyard and got a step closer to being married to one another. Despite knowing that this wasn’t our wedding day, it all felt really special.
