A city hall wedding...

For a couple months now, we have been joking of getting hitched before the big date...  in city hall of course.  At first the idea was to get married so that I could start using some of his ex-military benefits such as the VA gym.  (A girl needs to get in shape before the big day!)  But the more we begin to plan this huge event as it seems to be less fun and more worry about rising costs, it becomes more evident that our little joke would most likely suit us very well.  Let me explain...

It all boils down to how officiates the wedding...  At first it was to be a friend of mine who has since moved out of town and I think is now in Indiana.  Where he lives is not the big issue, it's more so that he's a bit hard to get a hold of and i've heard he's gone through some big life changes that might include ditching the church and religion.  If he's not backed by any church then I'm not sure of his status to legally marry us.  And while we'd love him to marry us, we don't want to find out 5 yrs down the road that it isn't legit.  Upon worry about this friend, I contacted another friend from one of my art classes.  But unfortunately she is in the process of switching sects and last time she switched around doing a ceremony, there was a whole fiasco with the legit-ness of everything.  Because of this, she had to turn me down so we wouldn't be stuck with no one to marry us.  Talking to another friend who is going to be our photographer, I realized that I have yet two more friends who are pastors of a sort (I'm not sure of their ordainment but religious ceremonies are not necessary for us as I'm Lutheran and Josh is Buddhist).  But once again, I don't know of their legal ability to unite us.

Because of all this uncertainty, we decided a month ago that we should just get married in city hall.  This way it's legit and then our big fat wedding will be the pomp and circumstance for the family and friends.
From what I've seen recently it appears to be a growing trend for couples to wed before the ceremony...  For us it's not to jump on any bandwagon but to just get one more worry out of the way.  =)  Plus, you can't get cold feet on the big ceremony day if you are already hitched!

Now we just have to figure out if we want the immediate family to come to the city hall union or if we want to go ourselves...