my only regret is that we didn't play the imperial march
I feel I might be getting back into my journaling groove. I hope this keeps up even after I’m no longer sick.
You may remember my post from, huh, almost two years ago, about how I wanted to get married and N didn’t. I was going to leave it at that and not push him, but it kept bugging me. I sat on it for several months, waiting for the annoyance to go away, but when it didn’t, I finally brought it up with N in October. I figured I would get it out there, clear the air, and maybe that would help.
I sat him down on the sofa, and said that I wanted to tell him something. I specifically avoided the phrase “we need to talk”, but he still immediately got that deer in headlights look. Is it a tone thing? Anyway, I told him that I wasn’t going to push the issue, but that he’d made me feel bad, because from the sound of things he expected something to change, me to change, if we were to get married. I was expecting that to be it, but instead he said that he’d been thinking about it and talking to a friend of his, and he didn’t mind anymore.
So, we decided to get married.
But because we’re us, it took us a while to get started on any arrangements. My first step (in April 2015, only six months later!) was to travel to Brighton to get my dress made, though I didn’t tell N that just yet. I’d come across the company, Dig for Victory (the name is a reference to British WWII posters) on Etsy a while back, and I thought their 40s and 50s style vintage dresses were gorgeous. They sell ready-made, but also do tailor-made, and I figured I could splurge a little for my wedding dress (though I probably shouldn’t say that, since the whole thing cost me less than £200).
They took my measurements and we looked at fabrics together, but they didn’t have what I wanted. I had in my mind something in a classic dove grey, and understandably most of their fabrics were colourful patterns. Eleanor, the owner of the shop, recommended to me a couple of fabric shops in town, and I went perusing. It took me a while, but eventually with the help of the very nice shopkeeper, I managed to find my fabric. It wasn’t grey, but instead had a pattern in navy and white that somehow still managed to look grey. The shopkeeper was very excited about the fabric, which was apparently by a very famous British menswear designer (I think Paul Smith), and was flabbergasted that I’d never heard of him.
I left Eleanor to work on my dress, and returned home to wait for the results. I was nervous, because I’ve never been very good at visualising, so even though the fabric looked nice on its own, I couldn’t picture how it would look as a finished dress. But when I picked it up four weeks later, this time with N in tow, it looked perfect!
The dress looks light blue in this light, but it's not.
Next were the rings. I may not care about public recognition, but I sure wanted my ring and I was going to make N get one as well. He’s never worn any jewellery, not even a watch, and so he was somewhat reluctant, but I gently bullied him into saying yes. I already knew which one I wanted, and N agreed to get it. In amusing turn of events, the goldsmith was actually Finnish. We still needed to buy one for N, though, and he wanted a carbon fibre ring. We scoured the web for somewhere he could’ve tried some on, but apparently carbon fibre rings are almost exclusively an Internet thing. Eventually, he found one on Etsy, and we placed the order.
Oh, and can’t forget the actual getting married part. At first, we thought we’d do it here in the UK, and I thought it would’ve been cute to do it at the end of June on Midsummer, which is our anniversary (well, the anniversary of the first time we held hands, because it’s the only date we can remember), but we’d left it too late, and our council was fully booked with weddings. Also, we would’ve had to pay to get married, and that seemed like a whole lot of nonsense.
So we decided to get married in Finland in July instead. And that’s when the red tape hell started. We found out that because we’d been living abroad for more than a year, we’d need proof that we weren’t married to anyone else. Which, how do you prove a negative in the first place? In the UK, you do that with a Certificate of No Impediment, but they only give those to UK citizens. Okay, so we contacted the General Register Office (and I spent a good 30 minutes on the phone spelling my name, N’s name, our places of birth and the names of our fathers to one of their clerks) to get a No Trace Letter (as in, no trace of a marriage), but it turned out that their registers lag behind by about 12 months, and the Finnish Register Offices said they can’t accept anything older than 4 months.
By this time I’d spoken to to the General Register Office, our council, the Register Offices, and I was starting to wonder if any of this was really worth it. I finally called the Finnish Register Offices with my tale of woe, and asked what could we possibly present to them as proof. They hemmed and hawed and finally suggested we get an affidavit saying that we’re not married, and have that witnessed by a notary public. And then we had to send the affidavit the the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to get an apostille on it, because things hadn’t taken enough time yet.
We finally had all the required documents put together, and posted them to the Register Offices. N helped a great deal in dealing with them, as my sanity was starting to fray. I now 100% get why the profession of wedding planner exists. I can’t even imagine how stressful organising an actual wedding must be. We just wanted to get married!
The Register Offices carried out their investigations on possible impediments, which took a week, and we got the all clear just 2 days before the ceremony… Well done, Team Procrastination! It didn’t all go exactly according to plan, though. N’s ring didn’t arrive by the time we left for Finland, and we had to get him an emergency €1 ring from Glitter. And the morning of the ceremony, my hairdresser put my hair up in exactly the style I didn’t want it, so I had to pull it all down and ended up with some random curls that thankfully looked okay with the style of my dress.
We didn’t tell anyone about getting married, because we didn’t want everyone to make a fuss. We needed two witnesses, however, and I though it would be nice to have photos, so we asked N’s sister and our friend L to come join us for lunch that day and dress nicely. N’s sister figured us out (possibly helped by the fact that I’d had to have my ring delivered to her, as we weren’t sure it would get delivered to the UK in time), but L was blissfully ignorant of our plans until we got to the Register Offices doors. She’s advocated us getting married for years, though she was probably hoping for a ‘proper’ wedding.
The trappings of the ceremony weren’t glorious, but they were efficient. The Register Offices carries out weddings two days a week, every fifteen minutes. We arrived a little before our slot, and got to see the previous couple exit. From there, it all went really fast. They checked all of our identities and ushered us in. N and I settled in front of the registrar, and she spoke a few words about marriage, about how its purpose is to start a family and be forever, but it was literally two sentences. She then asked us the traditional questions, and we exchanged rings.
Sorry for the silly photo. I wanted to show off the dress because I really, really like it.
That was it. We got our certification of marriage, and moved back to the waiting room to take a few photos. Afterwards, we got some real lunch and coffees, before heading back to N's mom’s place to tell her the news. I’d told my father the previous day, and the next time I saw him, he surprised me with a bouquet of beautiful pink roses. It was very uncharacteristic, and he did admit that a friend had told him to buy them. *g* It was still very sweet, and I hope he wasn’t hurt that he hadn’t been invited. We also told our friends, and eventually (after some prodding from N’s mom) made the whole thing facebook official.
N’s ring eventually arrived 3 weeks after the wedding, but was just a smidgen too small, so he never did end up wearing it. He’s still got his €1 ring, which I hate, but he can’t be bothered to do anything about getting the real ring resized. My ring I love, but unfortunately just a couple of weeks after we got back, I developed some sort of skin condition on my palms, and haven’t been able to wear rings since. Oh, and work gave us a £100 gift card that we, after over an hour of wondering around John Lewis, decided to spend on a Le Creuset. Since it was a wedding gift, sort of, we wanted to make it something permanent, and well, nothing says permanency like cast iron.
And that is the tale of how we got married.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth. You can also comment there using OpenID.
You may remember my post from, huh, almost two years ago, about how I wanted to get married and N didn’t. I was going to leave it at that and not push him, but it kept bugging me. I sat on it for several months, waiting for the annoyance to go away, but when it didn’t, I finally brought it up with N in October. I figured I would get it out there, clear the air, and maybe that would help.
I sat him down on the sofa, and said that I wanted to tell him something. I specifically avoided the phrase “we need to talk”, but he still immediately got that deer in headlights look. Is it a tone thing? Anyway, I told him that I wasn’t going to push the issue, but that he’d made me feel bad, because from the sound of things he expected something to change, me to change, if we were to get married. I was expecting that to be it, but instead he said that he’d been thinking about it and talking to a friend of his, and he didn’t mind anymore.
So, we decided to get married.
But because we’re us, it took us a while to get started on any arrangements. My first step (in April 2015, only six months later!) was to travel to Brighton to get my dress made, though I didn’t tell N that just yet. I’d come across the company, Dig for Victory (the name is a reference to British WWII posters) on Etsy a while back, and I thought their 40s and 50s style vintage dresses were gorgeous. They sell ready-made, but also do tailor-made, and I figured I could splurge a little for my wedding dress (though I probably shouldn’t say that, since the whole thing cost me less than £200).
They took my measurements and we looked at fabrics together, but they didn’t have what I wanted. I had in my mind something in a classic dove grey, and understandably most of their fabrics were colourful patterns. Eleanor, the owner of the shop, recommended to me a couple of fabric shops in town, and I went perusing. It took me a while, but eventually with the help of the very nice shopkeeper, I managed to find my fabric. It wasn’t grey, but instead had a pattern in navy and white that somehow still managed to look grey. The shopkeeper was very excited about the fabric, which was apparently by a very famous British menswear designer (I think Paul Smith), and was flabbergasted that I’d never heard of him.
I left Eleanor to work on my dress, and returned home to wait for the results. I was nervous, because I’ve never been very good at visualising, so even though the fabric looked nice on its own, I couldn’t picture how it would look as a finished dress. But when I picked it up four weeks later, this time with N in tow, it looked perfect!
The dress looks light blue in this light, but it's not.
Next were the rings. I may not care about public recognition, but I sure wanted my ring and I was going to make N get one as well. He’s never worn any jewellery, not even a watch, and so he was somewhat reluctant, but I gently bullied him into saying yes. I already knew which one I wanted, and N agreed to get it. In amusing turn of events, the goldsmith was actually Finnish. We still needed to buy one for N, though, and he wanted a carbon fibre ring. We scoured the web for somewhere he could’ve tried some on, but apparently carbon fibre rings are almost exclusively an Internet thing. Eventually, he found one on Etsy, and we placed the order.
Oh, and can’t forget the actual getting married part. At first, we thought we’d do it here in the UK, and I thought it would’ve been cute to do it at the end of June on Midsummer, which is our anniversary (well, the anniversary of the first time we held hands, because it’s the only date we can remember), but we’d left it too late, and our council was fully booked with weddings. Also, we would’ve had to pay to get married, and that seemed like a whole lot of nonsense.
So we decided to get married in Finland in July instead. And that’s when the red tape hell started. We found out that because we’d been living abroad for more than a year, we’d need proof that we weren’t married to anyone else. Which, how do you prove a negative in the first place? In the UK, you do that with a Certificate of No Impediment, but they only give those to UK citizens. Okay, so we contacted the General Register Office (and I spent a good 30 minutes on the phone spelling my name, N’s name, our places of birth and the names of our fathers to one of their clerks) to get a No Trace Letter (as in, no trace of a marriage), but it turned out that their registers lag behind by about 12 months, and the Finnish Register Offices said they can’t accept anything older than 4 months.
By this time I’d spoken to to the General Register Office, our council, the Register Offices, and I was starting to wonder if any of this was really worth it. I finally called the Finnish Register Offices with my tale of woe, and asked what could we possibly present to them as proof. They hemmed and hawed and finally suggested we get an affidavit saying that we’re not married, and have that witnessed by a notary public. And then we had to send the affidavit the the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to get an apostille on it, because things hadn’t taken enough time yet.
We finally had all the required documents put together, and posted them to the Register Offices. N helped a great deal in dealing with them, as my sanity was starting to fray. I now 100% get why the profession of wedding planner exists. I can’t even imagine how stressful organising an actual wedding must be. We just wanted to get married!
The Register Offices carried out their investigations on possible impediments, which took a week, and we got the all clear just 2 days before the ceremony… Well done, Team Procrastination! It didn’t all go exactly according to plan, though. N’s ring didn’t arrive by the time we left for Finland, and we had to get him an emergency €1 ring from Glitter. And the morning of the ceremony, my hairdresser put my hair up in exactly the style I didn’t want it, so I had to pull it all down and ended up with some random curls that thankfully looked okay with the style of my dress.
We didn’t tell anyone about getting married, because we didn’t want everyone to make a fuss. We needed two witnesses, however, and I though it would be nice to have photos, so we asked N’s sister and our friend L to come join us for lunch that day and dress nicely. N’s sister figured us out (possibly helped by the fact that I’d had to have my ring delivered to her, as we weren’t sure it would get delivered to the UK in time), but L was blissfully ignorant of our plans until we got to the Register Offices doors. She’s advocated us getting married for years, though she was probably hoping for a ‘proper’ wedding.
The trappings of the ceremony weren’t glorious, but they were efficient. The Register Offices carries out weddings two days a week, every fifteen minutes. We arrived a little before our slot, and got to see the previous couple exit. From there, it all went really fast. They checked all of our identities and ushered us in. N and I settled in front of the registrar, and she spoke a few words about marriage, about how its purpose is to start a family and be forever, but it was literally two sentences. She then asked us the traditional questions, and we exchanged rings.
Sorry for the silly photo. I wanted to show off the dress because I really, really like it.
That was it. We got our certification of marriage, and moved back to the waiting room to take a few photos. Afterwards, we got some real lunch and coffees, before heading back to N's mom’s place to tell her the news. I’d told my father the previous day, and the next time I saw him, he surprised me with a bouquet of beautiful pink roses. It was very uncharacteristic, and he did admit that a friend had told him to buy them. *g* It was still very sweet, and I hope he wasn’t hurt that he hadn’t been invited. We also told our friends, and eventually (after some prodding from N’s mom) made the whole thing facebook official.
N’s ring eventually arrived 3 weeks after the wedding, but was just a smidgen too small, so he never did end up wearing it. He’s still got his €1 ring, which I hate, but he can’t be bothered to do anything about getting the real ring resized. My ring I love, but unfortunately just a couple of weeks after we got back, I developed some sort of skin condition on my palms, and haven’t been able to wear rings since. Oh, and work gave us a £100 gift card that we, after over an hour of wondering around John Lewis, decided to spend on a Le Creuset. Since it was a wedding gift, sort of, we wanted to make it something permanent, and well, nothing says permanency like cast iron.
And that is the tale of how we got married.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth. You can also comment there using OpenID.