Five ways to screw up your wedding, part one: don't get divorced first!

July 7, 10:43 PMWedding and Marriage ExaminerElizabeth Oakes

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Thanks to Sean Mack, Steve Sims, and WikiMedia Commons

You’ll find lots of wedding planning books and websites and magazines out there, but it’s the rare publication that offers you advice that doesn’t directly benefit their bottom line; you may have noticed that most of this commercially available wedding planning “advice” encourages you to buy stuff from advertisers. You see, commercial wedding rags have no incentive to warn you about some of the biggest, most horrifying ways you can screw up your wedding plans because telling you the truth about such things won’t improve their advertising sales.   

So over the next few posts I’m going to pick up the slack:  I will now, forthrightly and without commercial self-interest, lay down some non-profit advice that hopefully will pay off big....for you.

Here's the first of Five Ways To Screw Up Your Wedding Without Really Trying: 

Don’t Get Divorced First.

You’d think this would be a no-brainer.  But, like the old saw about common sense not being very common, apparently there are no-brainers out there who need to be told this before they no-brain again.

It’s based on sad experience (other people’s, not mine.)  Two or three times a year, I get a phone call that begins: “This is really stupid, but....” and I usually know the rest of the story.  Shall Auntie Examiner tell it to you?  Okay, get cuddly now and listen carefully:

Once upon a time a happy-wappy couple got married in California but they had a baaaaad time of it for whatever reasons and sought a divorce.  They went to the biiiig stone courthouse and got their divorce GRANTED, but their nasty naughty lawyer didn’t tell them that in California there’s a loooong waiting period between when a divorce is GRANTED and when it is FINAL. (The Lemony Snicket narrator interrupts here and chides, ’They call it the ‘six-months-and-a-day rule’ for a REASON.”) 

And guess what?   Our deluded protagonists each have an intimate friendie (who may or may not been in the background during the divorce-filing part of the story) and that friendie has just been itching to be made official.  And somehow, they’ve all been bewitched into thinking that the best way to end the emotional torture of a hasty bad marriage is to jump instantly into another one!!  Poor divorcing couple! Poor friendies!

This is sad, because what our characters here don't realize is that having your California divorce GRANTED is not the same as having it be FINAL.  In California, there’s a six-month waiting period between the time Hizzoner Mr. Pokey Judge GRANTS the divorce and the day it become FINAL.  You can only remarry once it is FINAL.  

(Yes, yes, I know you know where this is going, put your hand down and stop fidgeting.)

And so, in a cloud of doom that smells (to them) like rose petals and wedding cake, they all scurry off to a shining desert castle called Las Vegas, and they get a marriage license without their divorce being FINAL (because you don’t have to show your divorce papers in Vegas, unlike in California) and they all tie the knot in a wee wedding chapel with wee plastic flowers, with hopes for happy-wappy in their wee little unsuspecting hearts once again.

But OH NO!  When they return to their homes in California, what do you think goes down?  They find out (and the story varies here as to how this happens--either the nasty naughty attorney wakes up and advances the plot, or friends casually mention the six-month-and-a-day rule as it pertained to their own divorces, or the information about the Vegas trip is seized upon by the evil witch/warlock/not-yet-ex spouse due to either a deliberate or unintentional information leak.) 

Anyway, they all find out that the divorce is not yet FINAL, that they are now technically BIGAMISTS, and they’d better puzzle out a solution right quick or get into some icky scary trouble!! (fomented by witch/warlock/not-yet-ex, most likely.)

So that’s when Auntie Examiner gets the phone call, because I do have a reputation as a fairy godmother of sorts.  Those silly bigamists have usually figured out by the time they contact me that they have to get the Vegas nuptial annulled, since it wasn’t legally valid (note to Clark County Clerks in Las Vegas, Nevada: really good reason to start requiring people to show their final dissolution papers before giving them a marriage license)  and that they have to wait and twiddle thumbs until Hizzoner Mr. Pokey Judge signs the papers that say the divorce is FINAL. 

Anyway, the annulment happens, the heroes wait anxiously with their now-annulled friendies until the divorce is FINAL and then they receive the stamped, signed paperwork from the courts showing it’s truly done with and they are free to remarry, hooray!!! and they ask me to marry them in a way that's furtive and low-key!!! because, after all the unnecessary dashed hopes, anxiety, rancor, and expense, they don’t want to think about weddings and marriage anymore!!!!

But there is a happy ending to this fairy tale, because YOU’LL never do this, RIGHT? Of course not.  You're smart kids.

But that’s not the end, my dears, oh my goodness no!  You must also promise Auntie Examiner that you’ll never, ever start PLANNING your wedding until you have your final divorce papers in hand, no matter what state grants your dissolution or how eager you are to get married the same instant you're divorced.  You must promise me this because of another kind of phone call I receive is from couples who say how “we’ve planned our wedding and made the deposits and bought our honeymoon plane tickets but it looks like our divorce won’t be final in time!  Can you help us?”  Well, no, because EVEN A FAIRY GODMOTHER CAN’T LEGALLY MARRY YOU UNTIL YOUR DIVORCE IS FINAL!!!  I am truly sorry, but that's the way it is; I do sincerely hope you have a nice trip, though. 

"Auntie," you chime in, "why can't we go ahead and start wedding planning when our divorce is GRANTED even though it’s not FINAL,  because I’ll know the date when it’s FINAL because the judge told me, so why can't I make all those deposits and plan a big wedding with guests and honeymoons and cakes, and plan it for the very next day after it's FINAL?  Huh huh huh?" 

Because my dears, Hizzoner Mr. Pokey Judge and his minions--more often than not, at least here in L.A.--will thwart your eager plans. 

Some court jurisdictions are notoriously slow about signing, stamping, and recording divorce paperwork.  Your divorce may be really and truly FINAL but you won’t be able to walk out of the courthouse with the paperwork proving that, and therefore you won't be able to get a marriage license in California and many other states besides.   Maybe the Recording section closed early for inventory, or Hizzoner Mr. Pokey Judge doesn’t sign his paperwork except on alternate Tuesdays after golf, or any number of other things that really and truly happen in courthouses and clerk’s offices.  There's nothing you can do to rush the process; all a fairy godmother can do is sigh along with you in these situations.

Here’s Auntie’s advice: wait until you have that FINAL proof of divorce in your hot little hand before you use your other hand to pick up the phone and start making wedding arrangements.  You certainly don’t want to end up like the guy who called  and wanted me to perform his wedding and he hadn’t even FILED for divorce yet.  That was here in California too, the wedding date was less than four months away, he'd already bought the plane tickets for they honeymoon, yada yada, you get the picture.  And this optimistic groom was so sure everything would just work out, even though I told him it was unlikely he was going to be able to obtain a marriage license because his divorce wouldn’t be final in time.  I even referred him to an attorney to see if anything could be done to expedite matters, but no, he was going to handle it all himself pro se, and I continued to get peppy little updates on my voicemail about how he’d finally filed for divorce and asked for a special dispensation from the six-months-and-a-day rule.  Meanwhile the wedding day kept creeping closer, and Hizzoner Mr. Pokey Judge said no to the special dispensation thing, and soon the updates weren’t so chipper anymore, and finally about six weeks before his projected wedding date the calls stopped coming.  Insert fairy godmother sigh here.

So once again, hope you had a nice trip.  Though still unmarried--at least, to each other--such a trip offers both partners lots of time for reflection and a little inspiration for generating a Plan B, to be implemented once the divorce is FINAL.  AND you have the paperwork proving it's final.

The moral of these grim(m) tales: the uncontrollable grinding of divorce courts, marriage license bureaus, government document recording protocols, and the inexorable march of time aren’t going to hurry themselves in order to meet the impatient timeline of your dreamy wedding dreams.   You’d do well to take a good hard look at what needs to be done to finalize your divorce first--before those dreamy dreams take hold--obtain the official paperwork proving you’re free to remarry, and then you can set a date and program the GPS to speed you to the nearest wedding chapel.   Though I’m always happy to help a couple with a “do-over,” I’d rather not receive those phone calls of doom every year--it’s depressing for us fairy godmothers. 

So now you know the first step to not screwing up your wedding--get the divorce done first!--and now you can live happily ever after (if you also mind the rest of Auntie Examiner’s advice, which will be forthcoming over the next couple weeks.)

A sweet and happily-ever-after life to you all; hope to see you again soon. 
 

Elizabeth Oakes can be reached at weddingexaminer@gmail.com.