We're getting married then having the ceremony...?

June 25, 2013 3:13 PM

My fiance and I are signing our marriage license well before we have the ceremony. When is our anniversary? Is the exact date important?

For finance reasons, Fiance and I are thinking of getting what we call "legally married" (marriage license/officiant/witnesses) about 8 months before and in a different calendar year than we are having our family & friends ceremony. We are fine celebrating our anniversary on the annual ceremony date and for most intents and pruposes, consider that our wedding date.

Is our legal wedding date very important to remember for future paperwork or government goings-on? For what purposes will we have to supply the date or year of our marriage?

posted by thewestinggame to Human Relations (20 answers total)

I had to supply the date of my marriage to sign my husband up for my employer group health insurance, outside of the open enrollment period. But I also had to supply a copy of my marriage certificate, which has the date on it anyway.
posted by muddgirl at 3:16 PM on June 25, 2013

I can't speak to the legal question, but it is surprisingly common for guests to mark wedding dates as recurring events on their calendars so they'll remember to wish you a happy anniversary in future years. If you choose to mark the date between the two of you on the legal anniversary, you should expect to be celebrating two "anniversaries" for many years to come.
posted by telegraph at 3:17 PM on June 25, 2013 [2 favorites]

We did this. We usually mark the occasion with something small on our legal anniversary, but our anniversary-anniversary is the date of our wedding, almost exactly 6 months later.

For anything official, you were legally married on the earlier date. It does come up.
posted by supercres at 3:22 PM on June 25, 2013 [5 favorites]

You will not-infrequently have to provide the legal date of marriage on your marriage certificate (once a year?). And in any genealogy records that's what will show up since that's what in the public records.
posted by amaire at 3:23 PM on June 25, 2013

Why can't you just celebrate twice? Sounds like a fun excuse for going out to dinner twice in one week!

When asked to supply, give the signing date.
posted by discopolo at 3:23 PM on June 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

This is extremely common. I did it because I had the ceremony abroad but I've been to a number of weddings where this was done just for convenience. We all celebrate the ceremony anniversary.

The wedding date is not at all important. If you need to change a name you'll just need a certificate from the registrar. Otherwise it has never come up.
posted by 2bucksplus at 3:23 PM on June 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I've been married for 4 years and I don't think I've had to give our anniversary date to anyone other than a restaurant that wanted to send us an anniversary coupon.
posted by gatorae at 3:24 PM on June 25, 2013 [2 favorites]

My wife and I had a civil ceremony, just me and her and a judge, partially for financial reasons, partially because it was important to us. Then three months later we had all the grandmas and friends over to a non-denominational church where my minister father performed a Presbyterian "Blessing of the Union" ceremony, which is for all intents and purposes, a wedding ceremony, but with the understanding that the couple are already married. We celebrate both days, but usually in small ways. As a bonus, the second date is way easier for me to remember.
posted by mccreath at 3:27 PM on June 25, 2013

Best answer: We got legally married the day before the ceremony, and we've always considered the ceremony date our official anniversary. We've been married for 15 years and never, not once, have I had to supply our marriage certificate or anniversary date to anyone. The only issue has been that my mother, for some reason, always seems to feel the need to point out that there is this other, "legal" date every time our anniversary comes up.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 3:28 PM on June 25, 2013

You might want to look at this recent thread on a very similar topic: Getting married after getting married: the insurance-panic edition.
posted by wsquared at 3:36 PM on June 25, 2013

One alternative would be to turn the license-signing into its own little ceremony, and then throw a party afterwards where everyone's invited. Just a thought...

(It's what I did when I got married in Germany back in 1995. There was no such thing as a secular ceremony over there, so we turned the registrar's office into an event with 40 people crammed into an office, we had readings, etc. It was lovely. Alas, we split up three years ago, and now I'm living with my college sweetheart, and we plan to get married under a tree with close friends and family, then throw a party afterwards with a whole bunch of people. That will be even lovelier.)

Another idea -- maybe plan the friends and family ceremony to coincide with your first anniversary? Since you have to wait 8 months, if you wait just a couple months more, then voila, problem solved.

Regardless of what you choose to do -- congratulations! Because yay love.
posted by flyingsquirrel at 3:42 PM on June 25, 2013 [2 favorites]

Since getting married, I've been kind of surprised at the number of people who ask "how long have you been married?" It comes up almost every time we meet someone new. So I guess you might want to decide which date you go with so spouse 1 doesn't say "a year and a half!" while spouse 2 says "just under a year!"
posted by charmcityblues at 3:48 PM on June 25, 2013

In the State of Georgia, you have to get courthouse married before you can get wedding ceremony married. We did it about a week or so before our actual family members and friends wedding--mostly because we needed the wedding certificate before I moved to Canada with my Canadian husband--and only told one set of friends.

It's great! You get TWO wedding anniversaries! But again, I would withhold the info if you think someone in your family is going to be hurt.
posted by Kitteh at 3:51 PM on June 25, 2013

Best answer: My understanding, from being married a little over a year, is your legal marriage date is important for things like taxes, loans, insurance, and any other legal/money based things. Your marriage licence is also important for things like name change or other legal things like being on each other's bank accounts or something.

So yes, the year in which you got married is important when you plan to file taxes, etc.

How you celebrate your anniversary or what you tell people socially it is completely up to you. Legally you probably need to have the correct year/date for paperwork. Usually this doesn't matter after everything is changed over and people know you are married.
posted by Crystalinne at 3:52 PM on June 25, 2013 [2 favorites]

Best answer: My wife and I were legally married five months before our wedding ceremony. For the first couple of years we celebrated both anniversaries, but we eventually settled on the wedding date as the main one. So far, the only time I've been asked for the legal date was when we were applying for an immigrant visa. Now that we're in the US, no one else (including employers, banks, and car insurance) has asked for any information about our marriage.

Don't listen to the super uptight people in the other recent marriage thread linked to by wsquared -- there's absolutely nothing wrong with getting your marriage license before your wedding day.
posted by bradf at 4:54 PM on June 25, 2013 [2 favorites]

My husband and I quasi-eloped and then we had a big wedding party eight months later, but we'd originally planned to get married over Thanksgiving weekend, which is when we got together, so we just consider all three of these times an excuse for cake.

One of them is the legal date we married, but all of them are anniversaries of a sort. Only my mother-in-law and the government seem to be occupied with the formalities.
posted by padraigin at 8:05 PM on June 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

We have 3 "anniversary" dates; our first roadtrip alone together to see a concert at an outdoor amphitheatre, our wedding ceremony 10 years later, and our actual legal marriage a couple of months after that. The first one holds the most meaning for us, so that's usually the one we remember and mention, but it varies year-to-year, and it usually isn't important that we do anything on that specific day as we don't like to feel pressured to do something "special" just because it's been x lunar cycles since y. Celebrate each other year-round and let the other couples keep Hallmark in business!

The only time that I can remember needing to reference one of these dates btw was doing taxes for the first time after we were legally married, and that was just to make sure we were filing correctly that year. Never since then.
posted by bizwank at 9:53 PM on June 25, 2013

The only time in the past 7 years I've needed to provide the exact legal date of my marriage was when I added my husband to my health insurance at work. If you did the legal & religious ceremonies in different years, you'd need to be sure to file taxes appropriately for the year it was legally done. Other than that, nobody has cared.
posted by belladonna at 7:12 AM on June 26, 2013

One more thing to think about: in 50-ish years, which date will you want the local newspaper to print about your amazing long-lasting marriage?

Best wishes!
posted by CathyG at 9:08 AM on June 26, 2013

Best answer: We got married one December and had the wedding the next spring. We celebrate our anniversary, and count the length of our marriage, since the spring wedding, since that's the point at which we feel that we got married. The December thing was just to make our taxes for that year easier, since we bought a house the same year, and doesn't have the same emotional meaning for us.

When we need to supply the "official" date of marriage, which has so far only been for rearranging our health insurance, we use the December date.
posted by telophase at 11:10 AM on June 26, 2013