Aiming for an International Marriage! 🌈 A Series Looking Back at My Third Marriage: David Edition VII (Chapter 1: Finally Married 👰‍♀️)

10th installment of the romance series ✨ (Ages 45~)
A retrospective article on the road to marrying David 🌈

Click here for the previous article...

August 8, 2011

About a week after my sister's family and friends returned to Japan,
we held our wedding ceremony in the hall of the
local government's
"Register Office."
We held the wedding in the Register Office hall.

In the UK, there is no marriage registration form.
The day of the wedding ceremony is the day you are legally married.

By declaring your intent to marry in front of witnesses at the ceremony
and signing the Marriage Certificate,
your legal marriage is recognized.

Flow of the day

With my best friend Fion and Andy,
and his cousin Jill and her daughter Kelly, the four of them,

and watched over by two Register Office staff members,
the wedding ceremony began.

Just as David wished...

I didn't let him see me in my wedding dress until I entered the room 🤣

Escorted by Fion,
I walked over to David's side.

We sat in our seats together,
said our wedding vows,
signed the documents, and finally became a married couple 💝

The registry office staff
even played the Wedding March for us
and gave us advice on poses for photos after the ceremony ended 🤗

At the time, 40% of international marriages were sham marriages😅

The British government was also
quite tense regarding immigrants,

so I was expecting a purely bureaucratic process,
and was moved to see the staff genuinely congratulating us😭

The wedding ceremony for Fion and Andy
that I attended a few years ago at the register office
was conducted in a very cold, business-like manner by the staff.

I was surprised that the staff's attitude
could be so different depending on the area where the ceremony is held.

Even now, when I think back on it,
I feel like I was lucky🍀

When I first moved to the UK in 2006,
I didn't know anyone at all.

While living in a private girls' school dormitory,
the only person who was kind to me
was Fion from Taiwan.

She was nearly ten years younger than me
and was engaged to Andy, a Latin teacher.

Because we were both Asian,
she taught me many things
when my English wasn't very good yet.

A few months after their register office wedding,
Fion brought her family over from Taiwan
and held another ceremony in Andy's hometown of Manchester.

I attended with Richard,
whom I was dating at the time🤣

Five years after moving to the UK...
Finally, an international marriage with a British gentleman💝

On my third attempt, I was finally united with my blue-eyed soulmate.

Next time, I will share
what happened after the register office wedding!

To be continued...