Weddingbee Blog

Musings on our visit with the priest in February:

I thought the priest was going to make me cry in the first 20 minutes of our interview. Not a good sign? I thought originally it would be a meeting, but in reality it really was more like an interview. Father John was tough, honest, and brutally frank.

Our first question as we sat down to talk was which parish did we go to, because it obviously isn’t the English mission. OK, next questions went something like this:

What is the name of the pastor at “our church”?

We don’t know, to be honest.

How many times had we been there in the last year? Be honest, was it less than ten?

Yes.

You know that there are 52 weeks a year, plus the holy days, advent, and Lent—that’s around 70 church days of the year, and you go to less than 10 of them.

~~~

Why do you want to do your marriage course here? Why don’t you do it with your local parish?

Because I want to understand the issues in English that we are talking about.

But you speak German.

Not well.

Yes you do; it’s fine. Your husband speaks German.

He speaks Swiss-German. Why should we make him speak High German and myself not understand everything? *

What? That’s ridiculous. Of course your husband speaks High German, and you understand it. So why should you do your marriage course here? Why do you even want to get married in the church? You’ve been living together how long?

I don’t know, about a year and a half.

From there, the priest really seemed to grill us about how long we had been living together, why we got married when we did, etc. He was confused as to why we got married legally last year. We explained that we didn’t want me to be sent back to the States if we were going to get married anyway, so we did the legal part early. He tried to assume that we have been living together for four years, ever since I first came to Switzerland…and that now we randomly want to get married in the church. For kicks? No. Let me explain.

While we have a kind of strange set of circumstances, everything that has happened to Mr. Funnel Cake’s and my relationship has felt completely normal and gone at its own pace. We met in 2007 when I was over here studying. I came back a couple more times before we started dating in 2008.

When I first came to live in Switzerland officially, I was not moving in with Mr. Funnel Cake. We were not at that stage yet…nor would I have wanted to move directly into a house with Mr. FC when we had just started dating. I lived with a German/Austrian family and worked as an au pair. Mr. FC and I had normal dates, and we didn’t see each other every day. At first we only saw each other on weekends, then it was twice during the week, then at some point I was seeing him every day. It went like this until I found a design job that required me to leave the country for a few months while my visa processed. So I moved back in with my parents for two-and-a-half months during the summer of 2009, but not before moving all of my things (some clothes and my computer) into Mr. Funnel Cake’s apartment. I couldn’t legally rent an apartment myself, and moreover I did not really want to. Mr. Funnel Cake’s job required him to be travelling 50% of the time, and I knew it would be a waste of money for both of us to only use our apartments half of the time while he was away and I was spending time at his place. Basically it really didn’t make sense for Mr. Funnel Cake to keep having an apartment by himself when he would just want to be in an apartment with me.

In late August 2009, we officially started living together, after a little over a year of dating. Not much time, but we were comfortable with our decision because we had already committed to each other at that point. Fairly early on, Mr. Funnel Cake let me know that he wanted to be around forever. We still didn’t see each other all the time, either…as Mr. Funnel Cake was traveling, I would have lots of time to myself still. After a few months working on my visa extension with my job, we started realising I would have a lot of problems with my visa…and that there was no way the Swiss government would renew my visa beyond 18 months. I started thinking about what would happen because I would only be able to stay in the country until my visa expired at the end of January 2011. It became clear that my only option was to either marry Mr. Funnel Cake or plan to move back to the States.

Mr. Funnel Cake was really fretful every time I mentioned having to leave. I would never force him to marry me, and I wanted him to ask me when he was ready. He was the citizen in this country, and I didn’t want to make him feel like I was pressuring him for a permit because really I just wanted to be with him and love him. He had actually already brought up this “Plan Z” in 2009 when I was searching for design jobs before my au pair visa ran out. We had talked about the possibility of getting married just so I could stay, and then marrying in the church with our families present later when we were ready to get married. It was not ideal for me to move back to the U.S. and force Mr. Funnel Cake to have the impossibility of securing a job in the U.S. because of his own visa issues. Rather than let me slip away and go back to an indefinite long-distance relationship, Mr. Funnel Cake returned from Brazil in May 2010 and decided to propose immediately because he didn’t have anything else to think about. It just made sense.

Of course we had to act pretty fast for the legal portion. I needed to secure all of my necessary documents from the United States, which included visiting my embassy in Switzerland to take an oath that I had never been married before. We needed to complete an interview and then set up a date for the union. After that we needed to apply for the permit, which took some months. All in all, I got my new unlimited permit just before 2010 ended—about a month before my single permit would expire.

Through all this, we never changed our minds about doing the civil and religious ceremonies separately, although by this point we did want to plan and hold both the civil and religious ceremonies. We thought it was only fair to do the church ceremony in the States so that my family could come, as well as Mr. Funnel Cake’s, because we had to do the legal portion in Switzerland. Only my parents would be able to fly to Switzerland at such short notice for the civil union. Even if we planned the church wedding in Switzerland next year, not all of my family would be able to afford to go, and it would have been a tremendous expense for all of them. I wasn’t that excited about picking out a random Swiss church to get married in without all my family around me.

Logistically, we did not have enough time to plan a wedding in the States either: to book my church and available venues in a few months, for me to try on and get a dress over here in less than six months would have been impossible. I would have had to compromise drastically. It would have been very stressful trying to plan a wedding in one to two months. I needed to get married legally this soon to ensure my new permit would arrive before the old one expired, but I wanted us to have the time couples normally are allowed to have to plan the celebration we intended with friends and family. Not just so we could have a “white wedding” that is perfect, but so we do not feel that we are denied any part of the celebration due to our legal situation with my permit. We did not want a residence permit to be the decisive factor in when and how we celebrate our lives intertwining.

If I were an EU citizen, or we were both Americans in the States, the residence permit would have been a non-issue. We would have just waited until we were ready to get married in the church with the legal proceedings happening simultaneously. Nobody would have complained. But because we didn’t want to rush a church wedding in two months…everybody threw a fit about the civil ceremony and wedding being a year apart. And while they did…I am happy we are taking our time to plan when we want the wedding and where it will be, and that we have the time to take our marriage course, time to think about whether we really want to get married in the church (instead of just saying yes and rushing into it), time to save up for the wedding expenses, and time to just enjoy being engaged.

OK, yes…my name has already changed to Mrs. Funnel Cake. Yes, that is kind of weird. But in 20 years when my children ask me about how I married their father, I don’t want to reminisce on the 10-minute ceremony we did quick and dirty. I want to tell them about how we planned our union with friends and family and how it was a wonderful, memorable day that I have no regrets about.

Anyway, mini-rant about our history there. Turns out the priest was just giving us a hard time to find out whether we just wanted a pretty wedding in a church or if it actually meant something to us to get married in front of God. Looks like we passed the test because we went to the course the next weekend!

Did anybody else have horror experiences with Pre-Cana? Did the priest make you feel uncomfortable?

*Mr. Funnel Cake’s High German IS awful, and he hates speaking it because his accent is horrible.