Dear Emma,

We want a close friend to conduct our wedding ceremony but we are having trouble finding out whether this is legal in the UK and if so, what documentation we need to acquire. Can you help on either issue?

Stacey

Dear Stacey,

It comes down to whether you want your ceremony to be legally recognised or not. There are specific lines that need to be said in a ceremony to make it legal, but these lines must be spoken by someone acting as an official registrar, who also has the legal authority to enter the marriage into the official register of marriages. Priests that conduct full church weddings are also official registrars for their parish district, so they have the legal power to enter the marriage into the register and make it all official. For civil ceremonies, this power is held by Registrars and Superintendent Registrars.

It's my understanding that no-one else has the legal power to make a wedding legally binding and legitimate.

If you are keen for your friend to officiate at the ceremony, your best bet is to have the legal bits taken care of at the register office the day before, and then have your full-on ceremony with friends and family separate to that, with your friend conducting the ceremony. This is effectively the same as if you had a humanist wedding – the humanist celebrant is not able to make the ceremony legally binding, even though they are fully trained to be excellent celebrants.

I strongly advise you to contact your local register office and speak with them on this matter, as I don't have all the details regarding your particular circumstances.

Good luck!

Dear Emma,

My fiance's family is very religious, but he isn't and neither am I. They are putting him under a lot of pressure to have a religious ceremony when it's the last thing we want. We don't want to upset them, but we really hate the idea of marrying in church. How can we stick to our guns without upsetting them?

Jenny, Cardiff

Dear Jenny,

There's nothing like a wedding to bring out underlying differences of opinion in families. If you would feel hypocritical marrying in a church, explain this as a couple to his family in a calm, reasonable manner. If you leave it to your fiance to tackle alone, he may give in to their pressure, or make promises or ultimatums you haven't agreed upon. Even worse, you may be blamed for all of the conflict in your absence and be seen as bad influence on their son.

You have every right to have a civil wedding ceremony, at the end of the day, it is your marriage, not theirs. However, if it is causing a huge amount of upset and no amount of reasoning is working, a compromise to consider would be to have the ceremony that you want with a separate blessing on another day. The most important thing to do though is stay calm, it can be easy to lose tempers when there are such emotive issues involved.