Colombian Marriage Bureaucracy

It still startles me that I know more about getting hitched in Colombia than I do about it in my home country of England. And I find it particularly confounding the amount of bureaucracy that is involved with the whole process here and I ask myself whether it would be the same in the UK.

Bureaucracy is something that one cannot avoid here in Colombia, even to sign up for a contract for a mobile phone I had to sign 16 forms. No exaggeration. That’s exactly 14 more than I needed in order to complete on the purchase of a flat in London. So, I guess it shouldn’t come as such a surprise that getting married requires a few burning hoops through which one must jump.

This is where you, dear readers, come in. Are my experiences extreme? Or am I taking this all out of context.

We all know how long the wedding checklist can be and after sorting out the church, sorting out the reception, sorting out the decorator, alcohol distributor, hotel for the wedding night, honeymoon destination, honeymoon flights, wedding gift list (more on this later), getting my suit tailored, looking for shoes, trying to find suitable accommodation in Cartagena for my friends, I figured that I would at least be granted a breather.

Then Alba suggested we return to the church just to check up on what was required by the priest in order to be wed.

Okay, so you’ll have read in my last email that I am in the throes of a) corrupting a priest to provide me with the necessary paperwork to make me a catholic or b) tapping into a reservoir of preexisting corruption to achieve my aim. But then, the overly helpful lady at the church office landed a bomb.

There are two further documents that I require.

1. I need to have some sort of registered certificate from the UK government that declares me to be single.
2. Alba and I need to enroll in a marriage course here in Bogota.

I figure I can get the first one, with a little difficulty and discomfort, from the British Embassy. Obviously a few Brits have been married in Colombia to Colombians. This cannot be too much of a hassle until you know how slack the performance is at this particular embassy. But how hard can it be? There are so many people in my expat circle that came here having found their very own Shakira, shacked up and married.

But it is the second issue that upsets me. We have been quoted anything from a full day course to a three day one. And apparently we need to meet with a priest and have a chat about being good Catholics, meet with a gynecologist that will inevitably teach us about the responsibilities of being a married couple and lastly meet with a married couple who will…I don’t know, guess, speak about marriage?

What a bore.

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