Legal Considerations

Getting married is a legal undertaking;
you may do it in a church or synagogue;
it may be a sacred ritual, a spiritual
joining of two souls, a religious rite, or all of these;
and, of course, your family, friends, and community
will forever after look upon your relationship in a
different way, but it is in government and business
affairs that your new status will make a great
difference to your everyday life. It’s possible to live
together as a couple, have children, go to work,
shop, and have dinner with your neighbors without
ever having made your arrangement legal. Goldie
Hawn and Kurt Russell have pointedly chosen to
conduct their lives without benefit of matrimony,
and their household seems to work just fine. Then
again, living together is not what sparked your
interest in picking up this book; you want to know
about planning your wedding and living together
happily ever after.

You’ve probably already given some thought to
whether you will change one or both of your
surnames after the wedding, and of course, you
have “apply for license” on the to do list in your
three-ring binder, but there are several other legal
and business things you’ll need to tidy up. Nothing
too onerous, but you do have some phone calls to
make and forms to fill out that don’t involve caterers
and photographers. You may find yourself
sitting “on hold” on the phone while your credit
card company transfers you to one person after
another before you find the one who can send the
form you need to fill out or tell you what legal
papers you’ll need to fax to them. And then there’s
the matter of the name….