But for official reasons, the only thing that matters is that the county and state have some kind of paperwork that says you’re married, regardless of any kind of ceremony you have gone through, and regardless of who presided over any ceremony.
And if some institution wants you to prove your marriage (such as an HMO, to get your spouse health care), they ask for a copy of the “marriage certificate.”
However, I’ve noticed that the IRS, when you fill out the I-90 or whatever that form is for payroll deductions, they say that if you’re “married” to a non-resident alien, it in effect doesn’t count, and you should consider yourself single.
So this makes me wonder: If I go on vacation to Lower Volta, and after getting drunk at some local shindig I “get married” to a local girl just because it seemed like a “fun thing to do,” and I return to California, is anyone going to know? Is anyone going to care (besides the girl from Lower Volta)?
No, the most basic part, in New York at least, is the exchange of vows before a clergy member or authorized civil official and witness (or another practice of a religious denomination). The license and all of that is just paperwork – the actual marriage is the ceremony.
There is also the whole common law marriage thing or whatever it’s called. I get the impression that in some places if you live together long enough then you sort of become married by default.
No, no, no. You’re all getting hung up on the paperwork, which is not necessarily required (though it can be very helpful).
In several US states and, I presume, in other international jurisdictions, they have what are known as “common law marriages,” which require no ceremony or paperwork at all. Under the basic common law provisions (may vary by jurisdiction), all a couple needs to do to be married (assuming they are legally able to marry) is agree with each other that they are married, live together as a married couple, and hold themselves out to the public as married. The instant they do all of that, they are legally married, just the same as if they had been through the full ceremony before the bishop at the cathedral with a thousand guests and all the I’s dotted and the T’s crossed.
If under the law of Lower Volta, all you have to do to get married is circle around each other three times and stick out your tongues, if you do do that with you Lower Voltan babe du jour, you’re legally married, and will remain so when you go back to the U.S. If the girl and her family come to the US with the video of the circling and tongue-sticking and a copy of the relevant Lower Volta marriage law, you’re stuck with her until death or divorce does you part.
On the I-9 form, that’s a immigration service citizenship/right to work issue, not a tax form. On tax forms, you just fill out your marital status and there’s no need to provide proof unless the IRS challenges you.
Edited to add: On common law marriage, it doesn’t matter how long you cohabit as a married couple. There is an urban legend that if you live together for seven (or some other number) of years, you’re married, but that’s false.
Being married for US federal tax purposes is quite a different matter. If a person subject to US tax law (a citizen or a resident alien) is married to a nonresident alien, then their spouse does not have to file a tax return, so the couple cannot file jointly. So you are single for tax purposes, but not for other purposes.
In particular, if you (as a US citizen) are married in a foreign country, and the US recognises that marriage (which it would not do if it were a same-sex marriage or a polygamous marriage, but would do otherwise), then:
(1) you can’t marry a second time unless your marriage is ended by divorce or death.
(2) you can petition for your spouse to enter the US on a spouse visa.
(3) if you have children, they will be US citizens, and you can claim them as dependents for tax purposes.
(With the first tax return that I filed in the US, since my wife had not yet joined me, I filed as a single person married to a nonresident alien. However, the immigration people very definitely regarded us as married, since she would not have been entitled to a visa otherwise).
Well, there you go: paperwork. I can’t just send a video tape of me and some girl form Lower Volta sticking out our tongues to Kaiser and say, “See, this means she’s my wife. In Lower Volta, that’s marriage.” How is some paper pusher at Kaiser to know? I’m not talking about “legality.” I’m talking about the day-to-day reality of when you need to assert that you’re married.
And yes common law marriage is becoming increasingly more difficult to certify, in California at least, because so many people live together and insist that they are not in fact married.
As for the I-9, I got that wrong, but there’s another form that says you can say you’re single if you “married” someone who is not a legal resident. Of course it’s for taxes, that’s what I was talking about. It’s just about withholding.
What happens if a couple is married in one country and then move to a country where marriage between them would not be legal? The most obvious example these days is same sex marriage but another less controversial example is first cousins.
I know first cousin marriages are legal in New Zealand and probably plenty of other places too. What would be the status of such a couple if they moved to the US?
A number of US states allow first cousin marriages. Since US states are required to respect the laws of other US states, I imagine first cousins could marry in a state where that’s legal and be recognised as married anywhere in the US.
I realise that’s not quite the same as a New Zealander moving to the US, though. I don’t know the answer to that one.
Current Spanish marriage law indicates that in order to get married, the two (can’t be more than two) spouses must be citizens of places where the marriage would be valid.
There was a case of an Indian citizen who’d been living with his same-sex partner in Spain for several years, but when they went to be married it was denied. Once the Indian becomes a Spanish citizen, they can.
OTOH, referring to the “extra” wives of the Sauds as concubines is considered impolite at the very least… but then, we don’t expect them to draw Social Security benefits or file for divorce here.
In Spain you’re officially married when your marriage is inscribed in the Civil Registry. A religious group (the Catholic church of course has done it but others can) can ask to have their ceremonies recognized as equivalent to the civil event, so that people who get married according to that group don’t even need a certificate from the pastor/priest/mullah/whatever: it’s the officiant who’ll take the signed certificate to the Registry.
Yep, I know someone who’s done that (married his first cousin in Iowa, where it’s legal - or at least was at the time - and returned to live in Illinois as a married couple).
This is decidedly NOT the case in Illinois. You can have all the ceremonies you want, but without a marriage license signed by an officiant and submitted to the county clerk’s office, you’re not married in the eyes of the state. And you have to have that license 24.001 hours before the ceremony, just like in New York. In Illinois, that license, signed, has to be returned within 10 days of the ceremony; I don’t see a specific requirement in New York, but the license is only valid for 60 days.
As an officiant myself, I have two different styles of closing lines: for a legal marriage, I have to say, “By the power granted me by the State of Illinois…” and for a non-legal one, I can’t mention the state. (I generally say something like, “By the power of your love…” or “In the name of the God and Goddess…” or whatever the couple prefers.) I do about equal number of legal and spiritual-only marriages. The legal ones get written down in one book, and the extralegal ones in another. By law, I’m only obligated to keep track of the legal ones, but for my own records, I like to keep track of all of them.
But it’s not at all uncommon in my community for people to have both a non-legal spiritual wedding and later a legal one. I, for example, had handfasting ceremony - a pagan marriage - in July of 2000 (in New York State, actually, but without a marriage license) performed by a legal minister. Beautiful ceremony, contained vows and the words husband and wife and everything. Neither New York nor Illinois cared a whit. One month later, we went to the county clerk’s office and got a license. The next day my husband came into my work at lunchtime and that same minister, who was also my boss, signed the license, making us legally married. We dropped the license off at the clerk’s on the way to lunch. That day was the date of our legal marriage, without a single witness or vow exchanged. (Actually, I think she might have jokingly asked me, “You still want him?” and I said, “Oh, I suppose so. He’s too used to return now.” We’re real romantics.) We consider our anniversary the July date, and our community views our marriage as being that day. But if I have to fill out a legal document, I have to dig out my marriage certificate and see what day we were “really” married.
In New York just like in Illinois, you have to return your marriage license, signed, before they’ll send you a marriage certificate which shows they have your marriage on file. If you don’t do that, there’s no record of a marriage for you to use if demanded for tax or health insurance reasons. So while philosophically you might be married upon exchange of vows with a marriage license in your possession (although I see no sign of that on their website), in any *practical *sense, I think it behooves you to get that marriage license in ASAP.
Ah, but there’s the rub. If people SAY they’re not married, then as Billdo says, a common law marriage is probably not enforceable.
My wife and I lived together for five years before being married. Had we broken up, either of us could likely have sued the other for divorce terms because under the laws of the Province of Ontario, we were, effectively, married. But had we chosen not to do so, and just walked away, that would have been it. The government would have had no concern over it if the “divorce” wasn’t legally contested. So in some places, you’re married because you say you’re married.’
Now, some places simply give no legal standing to common law marriages; The State of Illinois, where WhyNot has performed marriages, has no such provision. Common law arrangements have no legal standing there. So you can go to court demanding a divorce settlement but without some documentation the judge will say “tough noogies.”
I am personally more fond of the Ontario way of doing things, since I didn’t have to pay the province $130 or whatever their usurious fee is to be married. We got a quickie marriage in Las Vegas and just started saying we were married, and now the province believes we’re married.
It would just be a question of missing the evidence of the marriage. They could easily rectify the problem by getting married a second time – that’s not bigamy as long as you marry the same person a second time.
Get thee to thy nearest parish church, and ask the parson to start reading the banns – urgently. And explain to him that the eternal redemption of several souls is at stake here.
Author and Unitarian Minister Robert Fulghum describes several marriages in his book “It Was On Fire When I Laid Down On It,” including a couple who both came from horrible families and wanted the simplest legal ceremony possible, but also wanted something to remember. They discussed the legal aspects with him, got the license, met him and the witnesses one rainy Sunday, went off onto a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, stayed there a while, then came back and declared themselves married.
The wedding party went to a restaurant to have breakfast and fill out the legal forms, then the groom asked Fulghum how much he owed. Fulghum said “nothing,” because by saying nothing he had seen one of the best wedding ceremonies ever.
