Casting aside the common "Is it okay if we are privately married before having a public ceremony/reception wedding?" question and sharing with us how offensive it would be in your opinion, I am actually wondering if anyone has done it? Could you please share your experience (the invitations, ceremony, reception, etc.)?
The FH and I are planning our wedding for May 2015 and having his grandmother officiate at the ceremony. Recently we have been discussing getting married BEFORE our wedding in a private ceremony at the courthouse, but still have the wedding. There are a lot of good, practical reasons we could think of to support this idea (the biggest one explained below under Background Information)--such as health insurance. Also, the whole we love each other to death and all that. Ha.
Anyways, I am wondering if anyone has done this? I have tried doing a search on Google, but a lot of results were of brides asking if it was "acceptable" and all that. What I want to know is if you get married at a courthouse, what is the wedding "ceremony" going to be like? You obviously can't have anyone sign a marriage certificate. What if only a few people (i.e. parents and wedding party) know that you have already been married?
For anyone concerned that it is a "ploy" to just get gifts, we have no intention of even starting a registry. If anyone insists, we have already decided to ask them to donate to our charity of choice and/or just continue to politely let them know it is unnecessary to give us one.
If anyone would please share the details of their ceremony/reception after they were married, I would greatly appreciate it!!
Background Information: I recently moved in with my FH to cut down on expenses. Just for your information, we have been pretty much attached at the hip since day one and his place cuts my commute time to work in half so it seemed rather silly to pay rent for a place that I, literally, never spend time at. The problem with this is that he is currently in the military, we live on base, and a notice was just issued that "dependents" must be validated. Meaning, since I am living with him, I am considered a dependent; but because we are not married and not on his lease, I really shouldn't be living here and we could both be kicked off base.
TLDR: FH and I want to get married before our real wedding. We still want to have the wedding. If we are not married and base officials as him to validate my "dependent" status and he will be unable to and we will be kicked off base (he'll still be active duty and all, but we will be unable to live on base and may lose BAH). How would we go about having a wedding ceremony after our courthouse/ marriage? What would the officiate's script be like?
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UPDATE:
I appreciate everyone's messages, although it is obvious I have offended a lot of women. Obviously I'm new, not really sure how long or number of times I need to have been a member on The Knot to learn the etiquette. Anyways, it wasn't my intention to offend. I just happened to read a lot of people were doing the whole court marriage now, wedding later for a number of reasons and wanted to receive some feedback.
A vow renewal sounds like a grand idea. I think if we do decide to go through the marriage now, "wedding/party" later route we could push it to our five-year anniversary celebration. I feel like it would be even more significant and worth celebrating at that point (I'm not saying a one year, two, three, or four isn't significant either. I just have a preference for the number five).
As for insulting my maturity, not having the wedding sooner isn't a matter of finances or acting like child. I have a pretty good job/health insurance, I was just trying to state an example of why we or others might want to get married early. I also have no intention of blatantly lying to everyone. I was looking for advice as to how I might address our invitations or have the officiant script the ceremony (I read somewhere you could say "In celebration of our marriage" but I wasn't sure if that would get the message across).
Also, I wasn't trying to tell people how to spend their money. I'd rather they didn't spend anything at all if I could help it. I just figured it would be a nice suggestion in lieu of gifts.
Again, thanks for the input and I apologize for my ignorance... or as someone so blatantly called it, my "stupidity".