Weddingbee Blog

Since we are residing in Switzerland, we will definitely be relying on Mama Funnel Cake to organise most of our wedding in the US. With this large task, it’s perfectly understandable that she would want as much time to plan as possible. Nevertheless, when she started emailing a list of possible wedding dates the same day we told her about the engagement we were a bit overwhelmed.

(Drawing by Charles Schulz)

As we began to banter about which dates would work for a wedding, I explained to Mama Funnel Cake how we were currently more focussed on preparing the documents for the legal union. I also explained that while we had to do the legal portion first, we wanted to use this period before the Catholic wedding as an engagement period and at the time it wasn’t something we wanted to explicitly publicise to our family. At some point she would need to explain this to our priest who might wonder about how to coordinate the legal portion of the event.

(Personal drawing)

Mama Funnel Cake was instantly confused why we didn’t just want to do the civil ceremony and church ceremony in Zürich at the same time. She thought it seemed a bit silly to be married on two different days in two different years. She even started brainstorming ideas about how to fly some of that large family I told you about over to Switzerland. Mama FC was tossing around ideas with flexible dates in October, November, December 2010.

She was a bit surprised when I informed her we needed to get married in the next several weeks, not months. (I did say ASAP…) And she was even more surprised when I told her that it is impossible* to get married legally and religiously on the same day in Switzerland. You see, there is quite a different format to marrying in Switzerland than in America. Religion and State are completely separate for one thing.

This table roughly illustrates the differences between the format of American and Swiss Catholic weddings. (Of course, any couple can make changes in either country that would not reflect this format.)

(Personal Graphic)

The main difference is that a church WILL NOT marry you if you have not been legally married at the registry office first. The priest does not have the power to marry people in front of the law. Another big difference is that it’s not a big faux pas for the Swiss to invite friends to the wedding, but exclude them from the private dinner following. Civil unions themselves are often small private affairs, while church ceremonies tend to include everyone. (Even more than Americans with tight guest lists).

Neither Mr Funnel Cake nor I wanted to plan a quickie church wedding in Switzerland however. There were sooo many things wrong with this idea, mostly dealing with time and money and not having enough of either.

The thought of settling for whatever random church was free with an unfamiliar priest was not exactly ideal. We wouldn’t have had to worry about a honeymoon because we had already used up all our holidays for 2010. If we wanted rings in time for a summer wedding, we would have had to pick them out immediately, and you could forget about saving up to buy what we wanted. In fact, when I thought about desperately finding a used wedding dress that would fit in the next few weeks so that I could walk down the aisle with most of my nuclear family missing, it REALLY depressed me.

We didn’t want to whip together the most important day of our lives in a rush of stress, anxiety and resentment. So I explained to Mama Funnel Cake how the marriage process works in Switzerland and what circumstances we were dealing with. Mostly, I think Mama Funnel Cake was concerned that I was going to elope and get hitched legally without inviting her. But she didn’t have anything to worry about. How could I exclude my loving parents from such an important day?

With this culture confusion out of the way, we started planning our “Zivilstand” application immediately.

Are you a multiple-wedding bride? How did your family react when they found out you would get married legally (or spiritually) first?

*near impossible. In some rare cases, couples are able to coordinate a religious ceremony the same day of their Zivilstand, but there are limited English days at the registry office, limited time slots that fill up, limited church slots and very little advanced notice about choosing dates in the application process.