How difficult can it be anyway?

I promised you a Friday 13th wedding day story... so here goes.

Now you would imagine that two Finns wanting to get married in Finland wouldn't be a big deal? You'd be wrong...

The Finnish government is extremely bureaucratic - all the details of all the citizens are on computer file somewhere. To get married in Finland you have to have a permission to get married - and to get this permission, the government needs to do a check on both parties to confirm that they can be legally married. This means that both need to be over 18, not currently married and not under guardianship. The problem is this: although we both are Finns, we don't actually live in Finland. Now, this means that although we can prove everything else - the officials want a certificate from the country we live in to prove that we hadn't got married in that country. (Don't even try to bring logic here - I could be legally married in Sweden, but because I live in UK, I just need to prove that I'm not married here...)

Second problem is this: this certificate that proves we're not married in UK, doesn't actually exist in UK. The UK marriage law is based to two people taking an oath where they say that they can legally get married. That's it. If we were citizens, they could check whether we've gotten married - but since we're not... we'll you guessed it: they can't help us.

So, I was still thinking at this point that the people at Helsinki Magistrate are reasonable people, and that if I just explain the problem to the they'll understand. Wrong. They did tell me though that we should be able to get the certificate from our local Finnish consulate - so we call them. They say that they unfortunately can't help us, but that the Finnish embassy in London can. So we call them - but they say that they unfortunately can't help us, since it's a private matter (it escapes me what their job is if not to help Finnish citizens, but never mind...), but that we should get what we need from a solicitor.

This shouldn't be too difficult, we think - surely this then is a service that solicitors offer for a reasonable price. We couldn't have been more wrong - most solicitors were not interested, since it was "a minor issue", and those who were would have charged around £600-700 for this piece of paper - and only trough a friend did we manage to get an offer for £250. Now this is still a lot of money for a paper that says that we say that we can legally be married - and I just refused to pay this kind of money for something I consider to be my right.

At this point we started to look into possibility of getting married here. Since we are EU citizens, there shouldn't be any difficulties - but at this point we also were not so gay and naive as we were when all of this started, and for a good reason. First of all, the local magistrate at Bishop's Stortford (where we lived at the time) was open only on very strange hours (obviously when we were at work). Secondly, although they do have a phone number and therefore presumably a phone - it seems to locked somewhere where no-one can hear it ring, because after calling them numerous times and leaving numerous messages on the answer machine, no-one never got back to us. So Dragon took couple of times time off work to see the magistrate, who wasn't very keen to help us because of all the work involved (for her that is) - and also at this point we were running out of time. According to English law, there needs to be a three week period between a couple telling the officials that they want to marry and when they do (I guess it's to prevent quick marriages). While the magistrate was fiddling her thumbs, this three week period run out...

It was starting to look more and more likely, that we would have to celebrate our wedding before we were actually married. We had never planned a church wedding, or even have a wedding ceremony at the reception - but still, we had planned to get married with our families and closest friends present. The ring had already been engraved with the date of 13.7.2001 - the day we had intended to get married. But then my brilliant mother had an idea that we should try to get the permission from another city than Helsinki - a city where we both have lived before moving to UK: Espoo. We had already booked a time from the Helsinki magistrate, but again, there shouldn't have been a reason why we couldn't get the permission from Espoo.

My mother then calls Espoo magistrate and explains the situation. This time, the response is very sympathethic and they promise to help us. Send us the paperwork and we'll take care of it they say. They promise to deal with the paperwork within 7 days. So my mum posts the form, and we start counting the days and holding our breath...

...and like a miracle, the permission arrives in the post to us, just like they promised! Not a moment too soon either, since this actually happens just two weeks before the wedding!

Getting married on Friday 13th - what could possibly go wrong?

Posted by kolibri at 13 February 20:02, 2004