On Eloping Before Getting Married
Date Posted: September 22nd, 2010
The second part of Many Bad Business Ideas is being postponed for a week because this post needed to be up today. Enjoy!
Ahoy Mateys! There be a weddin' happnin' here.
One year ago today, me, Aaron and some of our local friends gathered at the entrance to Nichols Arboretum. We walked to the riverfront in full pirate regalia singing sea shanties. When we got to the right spot Aaron and I said some words, got spaghetti thrown at us, and then signed some rather serious papers. Yes, Aaron and I got married a year ago. Also, yes, our wedding was in June.
The story starts last fall when I got my job at the University. As with all University jobs the benefits were fantastic. Excellent retirement plan, excellent vacation plan, and of course, excellent health-care plan. Aaron was still working for the start-up company, and his benefits were… less excellent. We did the math and figured out that we’d save money by having him be my dependent on my plan. He’d easily qualify as an Other Qualified Adult since we’d been domestic partners for two and a half years. Our plan was to go with that until the wedding in June and switch to spouse afterward. Then for kicks we figured out how much we’d save if we were married…
Between tax and insurance we figured we’d save around $700. That was a pretty amount significant for us. Was waiting until June worth $700? We’d been engaged for 9 months already, been living together for two and a half years…
After a few days of mulling it over we decided that, no, waiting until June was not worth $700. We also decided that we’d keep the “wedding” a secret. We’d know, the government would know, and no one else. That was the plan..
Then we found out that our friend was already an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church. Meaning she could marry us. For free. Unsurprisingly we let her in on the secret. Our friend agreed to marry us with the condition that the wedding be a Pastafarian ceremony, we agreed as long as the people present kept it a sekrit, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I wish that was the end of my post, but a lot of things happened afterward that I didn’t expect. Things that would have made me think twice if I had known about them. Below I’ll share some of those things.
It ended up being more meaningful than we intended it to.
We’d intended for the first ceremony to just be play acting and paper signing. No one would need to know about the “wedding” because effectively nothing had changed. Sure we saved a bit of money and would file our taxes differently, but other than that had anything significant happened? We were already living together.
But the “wedding” was in the Arb, a place that has special meaning to us and where we would have loved to have had the June wedding.
And then three months later (exactly) we bought a house. If we hadn’t been legally married we wouldn’t have even considered buying a house together.
Between the wish fulfillment and the house buying, the September “wedding” ended up meaning more to us than we expected/intended it to. Oops.
This wasn’t a bad thing or a good thing. It just wasn’t anticipated.
It’s hard to keep secrets.
I think I enjoyed having a special little secret for about a week. After that it was frustrating. People I cared about would talk to me as if I was signing the papers in June and I wasn’t. It was weird. And uncomfortable because Aaron and I weren’t the only people at the “wedding”. Were the people at the Sekrit Pirate Wedding better than the ones that weren’t? I didn’t like thinking about that question.
Clearly I wasn’t going to be able to keep this thing secret for the next 9 months. We needed to reevaluate our position, so we asked ourselves, “Why are we keeping the secret wedding a secret?” There were two reasons: 1) we didn’t want people to take the June wedding any less seriously and 2) we didn’t want people to feel bad about not being at the secret wedding.
When we looked at the first reason, we decided that reasoning was flawed. Keeping the September wedding secret meant that the people who came to the June wedding would be there under the false pretense that we hadn’t signed the marriage license yet. We’d be lying to them so they’d believe a lie. Um… not so wonderful. As for the second reason… that’s their problem, not ours. The point was to save money, not to exclude people. That should be fairly obvious.
So we decided to tell people if the subject came up in conversation. No official announcements because we felt that that would be making a big deal out of the elopement.
This was, again, more unanticipated than bad. I didn’t think I’d have a hard time keeping it secret since nothing had changed for us, but the topic kept coming up. Mostly people would ask if our June officiant was ordained, and of course, he didn’t have to be anymore since we’d already had the papers signed. Our choices were lie or tell people. *Sigh*
Some people took not being at/knowing about Secret Wedding Really Hard.
A lot harder than I expected. Not everyone, but some.
I was totally blindsided by this. A true wedding, to me, is about a public commitment. This “wedding” was about saving money on taxes and insurance.
This was decidedly a negative thing, and is something I’d have paid more attention to if I were doing it again. There were a few people I left out of the loop that I shouldn’t have.
People didn’t know how to interpret the June wedding.
This wasn’t very surprising given that we didn’t know how to interpret the June wedding. Which one was real? Was the June one just for show?
There we were, two people who’d been living together for 3 years, signed the marriage license 8 months ago, and the ceremony wasn’t even in a Church. The only things the June wedding had going for it were elaborate costumes, food, dancing, and cake.
I suppose it’s appropriate that my wedding ended up being an exercise in thinking about “what makes a wedding a wedding”, but appropriate is not the same thing as fun.
This was another neutral thing, although this one I saw coming. We’d planned to keep the confusion to ourselves by keeping the September wedding a secret, but when that didn’t work… oh well.
We could buy a house.
Getting married earlier meant we could get the house we’re living in now. If we’d waited until June we probably wouldn’t have it.
This was a major advantage that we hadn’t considered in September. 
It was a Huge emotional stress relief.
I remember right before the September wedding I spent a lot of time thinking about what getting married meant. Signing papers meant breaking up would be a legal mess, so I took the time to think things through. Also I knew that in June I wouldn’t have the time for contemplation, and even if I did it’d be hard to be detached when we’d spent all that time and money on the wedding.
If I had to guess, I’d say the lack of time to digest what’s happening is a major reason why brides (and maybe grooms too?) freak out right before their wedding. I remember a feeling of uncertainty right before and after the September wedding. That would have been extremely unsettling in June, but since the damage had already been done I was very calm and happy.
This was undoubtedly a nice side effect of eloping first.
The June wedding had a special meaning.
And the September one did too for that matter. Unfortunately I didn’t figure out what these meanings were until June.
The September wedding was about me and Aaron. No one else. The people that were there were 100% spectators. I think it’d have been a similar experience if none of them had been there.
The June wedding was less about us and more about the communities we love and are a part of. The wedding was made possible by our communities. Without them it wouldn’t have been the same wedding… at all. It was us saying “Yes, we love you. We’re here to stay!” It was also the place where Aaron and I solidified what our marriage meant to us. September was all non-verbal. (I think I’d committed to loving him even if his arm got torn off by a shark… or something.) June was verbal and explicit. Our vows and our readings were very meaningful to us.
This was another nice side effect of eloping first.
Given the same circumstances, but knowing what I know now, would I do it again?
If the practical incentives were there, yes I’d do it again. (I’m really happy we could buy the house.) But I’d do it differently. Namely, I’d have told people about the September wedding without hesitation, and I’d have explained that the September wedding was private and the June one would be public and community focused. Both real. Both different.
If there were no financial incentives, would I have eloped?
That is, if it was just as easy to buy a house, and we wouldn’t have saved money on the insurance, would I have done it again?
I don’t think I would have for 3 reasons.
- It would have taken a lot more courage. Here at least we could tell people we did it for tax and insurance purposes and they’d mostly understand. Eloping for emotional purposes only… not so much.
- I wonder what the experience would have been like to do it all at once. I felt like I was missing something by being so calm at my wedding. I’ve heard it’s supposed to be a crazy emotional experience, and I wasn’t freaking out at either the September or June wedding. :-/
- We could have gone to the Arb a day or two afterward and had our private time to process our vows. I think that would have had a similar effect.
All in all this eloping before getting married thing was an interesting experience. I’m happy we did it.
And with that I raise a tall glass of grog to you all. Arr! Happy AnniversARRy AARRon.
I made my dress and the dresses for the two ladies on the left. And by made I mean I could have done just about all of it myself, but due to time constraints I sought out a lot of help from my friends. 
