Getting married in Belgium, Part II

This is a follow-up to an earlier post about my wedding, which took place last summer. I always meant to write another post about getting married here but somehow never got around to it--until now. Since our one-year anniversary is just around the corner, I figured I shouldn't wait any longer to write it!

One of the strangest things for me (as an American) to wrap my head around was the Belgian custom of inviting different people to different wedding events.

Where I come from, a wedding is considered a single event comprised of different activities, to which all guests are invited and expected to attend. The usual sequence goes something like this: wedding service (civil or religious) followed by wedding reception, either at the same venue or a different location. The reception usually involves drinks (champagne), then a formal dinner, and finally dancing.

The creation of the guest list is a complicated and tortuous affair, made even more difficult by budget concerns when providing dinner and drinks for everyone on the list. The final guest list has to include a carefully calibrated mixture of close friends, casual friends, immediate family, distant relatives, co-workers and professional acquaintances of both the bride and the groom, and perhaps the parents as well.

Here in Belgium, it is customary to have a different guest list for each wedding activity. For instance, pretty much everyone is invited to attend the civil ceremony; there's no cost to the couple and because it takes place in a public venue (at city hall) anyone can show up and watch. On the other hand, if there's going to be another ceremony (in a church) only close friends and family might be invited and expected to attend. In general, people outside the couple's immediate circle are happy to skip the church ceremony.

Then there might be two or three different celebratory events after the ceremony (or ceremonies). First, a champagne reception for the people invited to the church ceremony. Then a formal dinner for just the immediate family and closest friends. And finally an evening party with music and dancing for the wider circle of friends, acquaintances and other relatives. (At the evening party, there will often be a casual buffet served late in the evening with sandwiches or snacks.)

Breaking the wedding up into different events (sometimes taking place over two or more days) has two advantages: First of all, you can tailor the guest list to the event, limiting the more intimate events to your inner circle of family and friends and including everyone else in a big dance party. Secondly, it saves money since you're not expected or obliged to provide a formal, sit-down dinner to all of your guests--which is often the biggest wedding expense. It's a very practical system.

However, I just couldn't do it. To me it felt rude to exclude some of my guests from certain events. I couldn't bring myself to invite people to my wedding service and then tell them to get lost for a few hours while I went to a nice dinner with my family and closest friends, even though my husband assured me that no Belgian would take offense.

In the end, because our second ceremony took place in the same location (an old, renovated farmhouse) where we had the reception and party, it didn't make sense to break up the guest list anyway. Everyone who came to the ceremony stayed for the champagne reception, sit-down dinner and dancing. And because I had family and friends coming from the United States and England, having our guests spend the whole day together gave everyone the chance to get to know each other.

Some of our Belgian friends couldn't make it to the ceremony since it was on a Friday afternoon and they had to work, so they just showed up during dinner. I found that strange. In America, either you come to the wedding or you don't. You don't accept part of the invitation and you definitely don't skip the wedding ceremony itself. I'm pretty sure Emily Post would not approve, but then she's not Belgian.

I was used to thinking of the wedding ceremony as the most important part of the wedding and my job as guest was to witness and support the couple during this momentous and romantic event. Here, the ceremony is considered a boring formality, and the guest's role is to help celebrate afterwards. Perhaps this is because civil and Catholic weddings tend to be rather formulaic and impersonal, whereas we Americans put a lot of emphasis on customizing the wedding ceremony to reflect the couple's personality and beliefs.

In the end, our wedding day was a reflection of our marriage and ourselves: a combination of American and Belgian influences and traditions. The civil ceremony was in Dutch and the religious ceremony was in English. We sang songs and had readings in both languages. We served Flemish food for dinner and had an American-style tiered wedding cake. The DJ played both Belgian and American music, and the dance floor was full all night long.

It was everything I wanted our wedding to be, and it was perfect.

Getting married in Belgium, Part I

I got married in Belgium this summer (to a Belgian, of course.) In many ways it was just like getting married in the United States: the bride wears a fancy white dress, the groom wears a fancy suit, family and friends come together, there's a big party afterwards. But there are some surprising differences.

Perhaps the main difference is that in Belgium, everyone who gets married has to get married at city hall (stadhuis or gemeentehuis) in the city where they reside. In the United States, you can get married at city hall, in a church, in your parents' back yard, on the beach, or almost anywhere you want. As long as the officiant has the right to perform weddings in the state where the wedding takes place, the wedding is legal.

A few years ago, one of my friends in California got ordained by some Internet church so that she could perform another friend's wedding, which was outdoors at a lovely garden restaurant. I think all she had to do was fill out an online form and pay $20. When it was her turn to get married the following year, her brother did the same thing so that he could officiate at her wedding--this time at a hotel in downtown Los Angeles. All perfectly legal.

This could not happen in Belgium. For a predominantly Catholic country, Belgium takes the separation of church and state very seriously. A priest cannot perform a legal wedding. Put another way, a church wedding (or religious ceremony of any faith) is not legally recognized in Belgium. The only legal way to get married is to have a government official perform the ceremony in a government building.

Many people choose to have a church wedding in addition to the legal wedding, but the church wedding has to take place after the one at city hall--otherwise it's considered illegal. That's right: it's illegal to get married in church unless you've already been married at city hall. Usually the couple and their guests go directly from city hall to the church, but sometimes the second wedding takes place on a different day.

It's also very unusual for the religious ceremony to take place anywhere but in church. Apparently priests don't like to leave their churches, and you just don't find the variety of "officiants" that exist in the U.S. who are available to perform weddings in other venues. You simply don't have a second wedding unless it's a church wedding. There's none of this business with writing your own vows or having theme weddings performed by Elvis or Captain Kirk.

My American family, hearing that there would be a civil ceremony preceding the religious one, said that they'd just as soon skip it and only come to the second ceremony. Where we come from, a wedding at city hall is a sterile, perfunctory affair. One pictures a bland, administrative office with fluorescent lighting and linoleum on the floor, and couples waiting outside in the hallway until their number is called.

Here in Belgium, there's a good chance that city hall is a 600-year-old late Gothic masterpiece, as is the case in Brussels (pictured above), Leuven and Bruges. As residents of Hasselt, we weren't that lucky, but our stadhuis is still quite beautiful, an eighteenth-century former mansion with an imposing brick-and-limestone facade. The room where we got married has a huge marble fireplace, dark wood paneling and brass chandeliers.

We convinced my relatives to come to city hall, assuring them that it would be worth their while. Although brief, the civil wedding had a formality that emphasized the gravity of the proceedings. The Americans in attendance were impressed by the Belgian legal code (which we'd had translated into English) stating, among other things, that the couples' place of residence shall be determined by mutual consent, and the each spouse has the right to pursue a career without the permission of the other.

At the end of the ceremony, we received a small book from the city official with our names and wedding date, the official city stamp, the full text of the marriage law, and pages with spaces to write in the names of up to fourteen children. Fourteen! That's optimistic, but then the Belgians do love children.