Confessions of a Closeted Mississippi Girl: Getting married? A word to the wise...

I know I said my next post was going to highlight my favorite wedding moments, and have more pictures, but I guess I lied. Since the last entry was tres sap (very sappy), I thought I would break it up a little bit with some hard-learned lessons from us seasoned marriage folk. Listen up, we are 8 days in and wiser than ever.

Lesson #1:

Don't invite people with dirty minds to your wedding if you are going to have the Velveteen Rabbit reading at your ceremony. Looking at YOU Stephen Lund. And all of RJ's friends. So rude.

Upon my search for a nice, romantic, and sweet reading for our wedding, I stumbled upon the excerpt from the Velveteen Rabbit, where the skin-horse (just shut up), is explaining what REAL LOVE feels like to the rabbit. Actually my mom was the first one to suggest this reading, and my reason for saying no was because I thought it was overdone. If only I had known... But one night my friend Sal and I read through it several times, and the more I read it, the more I loved it. I thought the way it described love was just perfect, and I even found myself tearing up a little when thinking about my lovely husband to be, and how I knew OUR love was real. Sal practiced reading it and she was perfect. Together we probably read it a combined twenty times, and never once did it conjure any dirty images or connotations.

Well, fast-forward to our wedding dinner, and my lovely brothers, and all of RJ's friends, informed me of how "dirty" the reading was. Then they proceeded to pull it up on their phones and read the phrases they were talking about. I choose not to repeat any of them because I don't believe a children's book should be defamed this way. But now I can't read it without hearing the "dirty version." My wedding reading is forever tainted. Did that damn Margery Williams mean to do it? Like those weirdos at Disney who are always throwing sex references in their films on purpose? And more importantly, how is this one of the most popular wedding readings EVER, when it is apparently very susceptible to ridicule and embarrassment? Why has no one sounded the alert? A little warning would have been nice.

Anyway, if your guests are less nasty-minded than mine, I still recommend this reading because I believe that, at its core, it is sweet and loving. Although now I probably ruined it for you, just like those jerk boys did for me. Note- my husband was noticeably absent from the "Velveteen Rabbit taunting". I asked RJ if he caught any sex-references when it was being read, and he replied, "No. But I wasn't listening." Nice.

Lesson #2:

READ THE DIRECTIONS THAT COME WITH YOUR MARRIAGE LICENSE.

Really I should just leave it at that.

First of all, apparently marriage licenses need to be signed in black ink. Again, why is this not talked about? People sign marriage licenses all the time, and I've never heard this. I plan to tell everyone, because I refuse to believe this is not a common mistake. After all, legal documents ARE usually signed in blue. That's right... I took Business Law.

So of course we signed in blue ink and discovered our mistake the morning we were leaving. RJ immediately muttered that he "really should have handled this". Rude. But then he spent the next 30 minutes painstakingly writing over everything in black ink, so I decided not to be mad. He did an amazing job too; I couldn't even tell. But I also apparently don't pay attention to detail very well. So just to be safe I decided to drop the marriage license off at city hall, which was only a few blocks from our hotel, instead of mailing it.

I arrived at the office and flashed my most charming smile (just in case), as I dropped the license on the desk. The lady took one look at it and said, "Your names shouldn't be written in the covenant marriage box." "What is a covenant marriage?" I asked. "It means you have entered into this marriage with the church, and legally you won't be able to get divorced. You would have to go through the church to get divorced." I thought about this for a second and decided it sounded fine. I mean, who wants to get divorced anyways? "Ok, well that's fine," I said. "We'll just do a covenant marriage." Isn't RJ lucky? He couldn't divorce me even if he wanted to! The woman then informed me that covenant marriages weren't even recognized in Louisiana. At which point I nicely asked the question that was screaming through my mind, "WHY IS IT ON THE LOUSIANA MARRIAGE LICENSE THEN?"

I will cut to the chase for you: Even my husband coming down to the office and trying to convince her to let us put a line through our names and initial it, didn't work.

We bought a second marriage license, re-signed the forms, IN THE RIGHT PLACES AND IN BLACK INK, and overnighted it. So although our wedding may have saved us some money, our marriage was twice as expensive as most. Oh, and the woman's final words to us were, "It really doesn't matter anyways, we wouldn't have accepted this because it has been traced over in black ink." RJ worked really hard on that retracing, so I certainly didn't appreciate her just calling us out like that.

Here are my final thoughts- really stupid people get married all the time... and I don't consider myself stupid, and yet, we couldn''t get it right on the first try. It was all quite a blow to the ego. But on the bright side, I have technically married my husband twice, and I was willing to enter into a marriage where DIVORCE IS NOT AN OPTION.

So, that's my wedding/marriage advice thus far. Here's to your licensing experience being less dramatic than ours!