If you have never been in the position of a simple sentence of misinformation threatening to ruin months of work and planning, you have certainly never heard the words “Of course the courthouse will be open on the 15th” when the date in question happened to be a federal holiday.
I asked because the Arkansas government websites I found were unclear on the matter and did not list President’s Day as a day on which all courthouses in the state would be closed. For months Rainey and I had planned to get married on Feb. 15 because it is a sentimental date to us. It is the day we first expressed romantic feelings for each other and decided to try out dating after being best friends for a few years. It is also smack dab in between Valentine’s day on the 14th and Rainey’s birthday on the 16th. We joked that we would be able to celebrate “Birthaversarytine’s Day” and be able to enjoy all sorts of heavily marked down valentine’s day merchandise on our future anniversaries.
When I got the news on Thursday afternoon that we would not be able to be married legally on that coming Monday, I started panicking. I called the courthouse initially to see what documents I could use other than my social security card to meet their requirements as mine had been voided minutes prior due to processing my name change and I had not yet received a new one.
Once Rainey calmed me down, we hatched a plan to start the three hour drive up to Arkansas that night after she was done with work around 10 or 11 p.m. I had a test scheduled Friday morning, so I called up my professor in a panic begging their voicemail not to hold it against me before sitting outside their office door until they came back. Thankfully, they were very gracious.
We got in around 3 a.m. and slept at Rainey’s parent’s house for a few hours before going to the courthouse. After same-sex marriage passed, apparently nine of the 10 people in the Chicot County who were authorized to marry people quit and the last person was a minister who grudgingly accepted our administrative fee and insisted to call the relationship a “civil union” rather than a marriage. Regardless, the deed was done so we now legally have a different anniversary than the day we actually care about.
Rainey joked that we got married in jeans at the courthouse after all – which was her original plan until I expressed interest in having an actual ceremony. Besides, it is not every day that it is socially acceptable to dress as a Victorian Dandy with blue and black hair and have your love dressed in a black and gold vintage French silk chiffon gown with a hand-beaded veil made by our better third. I ended up wearing more white than my bride.
I was still not done with all the preparations for our wedding clothes after being emergency married, however. I scrambled to finish all our clothes at the last minute, even sewing a final detail onto my vest en route to the venue. I also had to briefly unbuckle to fix her hair while she was driving. I had not realized there was much more to a wedding ceremony besides the vows until the night before. The friend I had officiating it and I wrote the script on engineering paper the night before, while sitting on the floor of Rainey’s childhood bedroom, after we spent 20 minutes looking for the sewing needle I had lost in the carpet.
My father texted me at the last minute asking where the venue was and ended up showing up alone because my stepmother did not agree with the marriage and forbade my little siblings from going and in fact had thrown away the invitation. My divorced parents and their parents sat on opposite sides of the central isle.
There was not much drama at the wedding, thankfully. No relatives showed up belligerent and drunk like we had anticipated and no one came there to object, though we only had about half the people who said they would show up actually come. There were a lot of family members misgendering me and one family member had given me a set of especially feminine nail polishes as a wedding gift, though I was able to get one of Rainey’s nephews to call me “uncle Bek” by the end.
The wedding was great and it was nice to see family members I have not seen in years, but as we were trying to leave to return to Starkville, Rainey got the car stuck in a mud puddle. At least we’ll have things to remember and laugh about in years to come.
