Wow. Thanks for delving in to the mess that we call health care in the US and how it makes us rethink our decisions regarding marriage. We where married in a courthouse and a great selling point on why we should jump in to marriage right away as opposed to when we where “ready” was shared bennies. We have never got weddinged, so hopefully someday we will. Thank you HMO’s partaking in the decision to make our marriage a non-event. lol.

We’ve just decided to get the legal ceremony done this year due to the health of his Dad… and Nanna isn’t getting any younger. We are still going to do everything we had planned to do for our wedding next year. Most of our guests won’t even know.

ha I’m getting married this fall, simple, private, court house, (using the first ring Mr. W ever gave me, out of a gum ball machine) its nice to get the legal stuff out of the way.

and then we are getting weddinged july 09.
(the party, the friends, the real ring)

Glad to know my husband and I aren’t the only ones! It’s funny how people really do seem to be confused by the whole situation, especially because there’s not a word for ‘husband but also sort of fiance’.

Sarah- I call mine my “beyonce.” It’s kind of a shortened conjugation of husband and fiance. First he was “Husb-iance,” and it kind of organically turned into beyonce because we thought it was funny.

He also likes to say that we’re “engarried.”

We are doing this too but not for insurance, my gran has terminal cancer And I wanted her there at my wedding.

So legal stuff is happening in a few weeks with her as a witness, then a small family dinner to celebrate. Then next year we are getting ‘weddinged’ in Scotland just like we had planned all along.

We almost did this - for insurance reasons, naturally. Turned out that I was still covered under my dad’s policy, so crisis averted…but we were all ready to get weddinged. It’s a great option for people who need the legal benefits of marriage but aren’t ready for the big party - or for those who want someone important to be there who might not make it otherwise.

I’m getting weddinged in 2 months! I’m glad there’s a name for it now, I’ve been calling it the fake real wedding for the last year.

Gerlinde, to clarify: Canada has socialized healthcare. It’s only here in the good ol’ USA that we have privatized healthcare.

just wanted to leave a quick note to say how much i love your blog here. the brides that come to me for photography are usually looking for a wedding that is a bit out of the norm and i am always sure to send them here for ideas. keep up the great work!

I’m not even married yet, in any sense of the word. Its just a day. I don’t even know if I’d get weddinged, I can’t afford anything right now but I can jump ship if I have a European passport.

My husband of 5 years and I just got ‘weddinged’ as did a co-worker of mine, this year. We are all in the military and planning a wedding around our schedules is difficult to say the least. Our reasons for having a wedding later were a little different than Aaron and Jeannie’s, but came from the same tree. Money. It was scarce to say the least, but we knew we wanted to be husband and wife, and weren’t going to let that get in our way. So in a courthouse with my younger brother as the maid of honor/bridesmaid/videographer/ring bearer we said I do. And regret it? We don’t.

This is great! I didn’t think we were crazy! It’s great to see that so many other couples have done this too. We did it for reasons a bit different than some of the other couples here. We didn’t do it because of insurance. We thankfully live in California and have had each other covered for insurance just by declaring each other domestic partners. Rather we did this as a tax benefit - in the US there’s a tax break given to married people. Lastly, the timing of our legal ceremony strategically came after the Supreme Court of California declared it legal for same sex couples to get married! We have a lot of LGBTQ friends and our getting legally married and then planning our ceremony once this right was given to them was our way of standing in solidarity with our loved ones. We are so excited to get weddinged in October with all our friends back home in Albuquerque, NM. Best of luck to you all!

I’m so happy to hear other people are doing the same as me and my husband. he’s from the UK and I’m American and the only way we could be together was to get married. We’ve now been married for 3 years and finally have all the immigration stuff sorted and getting weddinged in October. I posted a questing regarding my situation on theknot.com and pretty much got tarred and feathered. They are hardcore bridezillas on that web site glad I found this one. Thanks everyone!!

We might go this route so we can keep living with our friends. There’s a limit to the number of “unrelated” adults who can live together. If filing a domestic partnership doesn’t cover it, we might go to the courthouse. I don’t know how I feel about keeping it a secret, though. People can get really hurt if it ever comes out because not everyone has the same values, including our loved ones. Then again, if we didn’t keep it a secret, our families and several friends would hate us anyway.

Hi everyone!
I’m so delighted to see this topic being aired. My man and I did exactly this - married October 2006 with just a registrar and two women we’d just met in a cafe and asked to be our witnesses. We did this so that no family or friends could feel they were excluded when others were included. Now we’re planning our ‘real’ wedding in September - a Humanist ceremony in the company of the people we love. We did the two-weddings thing for immigration reasons - the time is so short to arrange things, and we didn’t have enough money saved after spending so much flying between Britain and Brazil. Inevitably a few people have guessed or asked us straight out, and we haven’t lied, but I’m slightly apprehensive about if my family find out accidentally, and occasionally I think we should tell them before the day. However, I think they might be devastated. Somehow it’s hugely reassuring and comforting to read all the comments on this site about the issue, and you know what? We were in love when we did the first legal one, but we love each other far more now, and are both really excited and happy about getting weddinged!

I love that this now has a term! Mr. R and I are going this route as well. We wanted to take the planning of the wedding stuff slow enough that we could DIY and save up and still get what we want, but it just didn’t make sense to keep him treading the thin ice of zero health insurance in the mean time. So, married this month, weddinged next April. Perfect!

Dcoesn’t it just seem wrong that people are forced into making/timing highly personal decisions based on the availability of health insurance?

i knew there were others out there, but i had no idea how many!
hubby/fiance and i met while he was here in the US on an F1 student visa. we got engaged in Dec, did some quick math, and realized by the time we got married his F1/OPT work permit would run out. so rather than get married and have him sitting around the apartment bored/driving me nuts waiting for his green card to go thru, we got married in february (allowing enough time to get a new work authorization before the old one ran out). we’re getting weddinged in 10 days - 6 months and two days after getting married. when people look at me like im crazy, i shut them up with “he loves me enough to marry me twice”.