What happens if marriage isn’t registered?

Ross28

Hi Everyone,
Looking to see if anyone can advise on what might happen if a marriage cert wasn’t submitted to gain a license? Would that mean that a couple would not be married or are they still married without the license? The marriage will be taking place in a church and we are wondering if it was a case that if we didn’t register the marriage and gain a license, would the priest be notified of this and asked to follow up or will it be our own business?
We are in a sticky situation as we have learned that one of us has bad credit so we will not be granted a mortgage as a married couple but one of us could if we weren’t married. Our wedding is coming up in a few months. Would we be breaking the law if we were married in the church and then didn’t officially register?
Any information on this would be much appreciated!

rainbowtrout

Marrying in a church means the state has an arrangement that allows the church to marry people legally, you still have to sign the paperwork and send it in for the marriage to be formally registered and recognised as legal. Church ceremony is the registry office bit with a mass around it.

You won't be married until that paperwork is complete. You have to register the marriage within one month of the ceremony, so if you were thinking of going ahead with the marriage and then hanging on to the paperwork for 6-12 months until you had a mortgage sorted and then sending it in, you won't be able to do that.

Also remember, if your marriage is not registered you are not entitled to any of the benefits of marriage if you can't prove it with your marriage cert.

Whichever of you has the good credit rating can buy a house before the wedding or you can work with a broker/bank to see what you have to do to qualify for a mortgage after you are married.

Purple Mountain

Just curiously..
If someone had their church wedding and say after 3 weeks hadn't sent off the signed register and something happened one spouse (death, illness etc say even on honeymoon) would the law take a common sense approach to this or are you literally not married until you have the marriage certificate in your hand?

Peregrinus

Rainbowtrout is not quite right, at least as far as the law in Ireland is concerned. The position in Ireland is this:

1. There are certain formalities you have to comply with in Ireland before you marry - give the registrar notice of intention to marry, attend at the registrar's office and make a declaration. In certain circumstances you can get exemptions from these requirements but, if you neither get the exemption nor complete the requirements, you cannot legally marry.

2. When you have completed the requirements (or got an exemption) the registrar gives you a "marriage registration form" and (if you're having a church or humanist wedding) you give this to your celebrant before the ceremony. It will be difficult or impossible to persuade the celebrant to marry you if you haven't got a marriage registration form to give him (because it's an offence for him to do so) so don't bother trying.

3. The great day comes. You solemnise your marriage before the celebrant by exchanging vows in the presence of witnesses using a form of ceremony approved by the registrar or recognised by the church in which you are marrying. You are now legally married.

4. Immediately after the marriage the spouses, the witnesses and the celebrant all sign the marriage registration form. Note, the spouses are not married because they sign the form; rather, they are obliged to sign the form because they are married.

5. The form must be returned to the registrar within a month. Legally, the obligation to return the form is imposed on the spouses though, in practice, it's normally the celebrant who keeps the form after the ceremony and sends it off to the registrar. On receiving the form, the registrar enters the details of the marriage into the register. The register will show that the couple wre married on the date of the ceremony.

6. If the form doesn't come back, duly completed, within 2 months, the registrar will chase the spouses for it, sending a demand that they should return the form and, if they still don't return it, requiring them to attend at his office in person to produce the form or explain why they can't. At this point refusing to comply with the registar's demands, or lying to the registrar, is an offence.

The bottom line, then, is that you are married not by signing or flling the paperwork, but by exchanging the vows in the ceremony. Once you do that, you're married. If you fail to complete and return the paperwork (and also persuade the celebrant not to return it) you're still married. You're in a world of bureaucratic pain, unable to produce a marriage certificate to prove that you are married, and being pestered by the registrar to complete the registration of your marriage, but none of this changes the fact that you are, in fact, legally married.

The only way to have a marriage ceremony but not be married is to not get a marriage registration form in advance of the ceremony. In that case, any ceremony you do have will have no legal effect. But, as already stated, it's an offence for a celebrant to conduct a ceremony for you if you don't produce a marriage registration form, so you'll find it very difficult to do this.

What you can do is get someone who is not a legally-recognised marriage celebrant to preside over an entirely non-legal "commitment ceremony" or something of the kind. (Or you can have a ceremony of your own devising, with no celebrant.) That has no legal effect, and is also not against the law, provided the ceremony itself is clear that it's not going to result in a legally marriage.

The answer to the follow-up question (what happens if someone dies after the marriage but before the marriage registration form is returned?) is fairly clear. You're married from the moment the marriage is celebrated, not from the moment the paperwork is filed. The obligation to register the marriage still applies but, as far as inheritance rights, etc, goes, the couple were married before the death, not after.

Ross28

Thank you so much for this detail. We were just trying to find a loophole of some kind but there doesn’t seem to be one. We were told that we may be considered after 2 years for a mortgage but there’s a good chance we will have to wait the 5 years until my other half’s credit score improves.

Peregrinus

Have you considered the partner with good credit applying for a mortgage now, before you marry?