Quaker Wedding - Quaker Marriage Today

Quaker Marriage Today

When a couple decides to get married they declare their intentions to marry to the meeting (either in writing or in person). The meeting then appoints a clearness committee to talk with the couple and make sure that they have properly prepared themselves for marriage. If the committee is clear that this couple is ready, they recommend that the monthly meeting should take this wedding “under their care” and appoint a committee to ensure the couple makes all the needed arrangements for the wedding ceremony. These duties vary but may include helping schedule the date, finding premarital counseling, making the Quaker marriage certificate, making sure the couple knows how to acquire and file any legal documents.

Some couples choose to marry within the meeting without registering their marriage with the government, a tradition dating back to Quakerism's earliest days. Meetings generally encourage couples to seek legal advice before undertaking this option. Common law marriage (also called "marriage by habit and repute"), by which a couple were legally married simply through cohabitation and by holding themselves out to the world to be husband and wife, is no longer a valid method of marriage in most American jurisdictions.

Meetings encourage Friends to seek legal advice before deciding against registering their marriage.

Same-sex couples can also be married with or without government documents in some meetings (see Homosexuality and Quakerism).

If a couple later needs to prove that they are married, the Quaker wedding certificate signed by witnesses at the ceremony may be sufficient in some states of the United States. A few states have statutes that specifically recognize Quaker marriages, in which ministers are not officiants, are legal.

However, most Yearly Meetings and Monthly Meetings encourage Friends marrying under their care to obtain marriage licenses and have them signed by a representative of the Meeting and duly file the licenses with the state. This is a special concern since common law marriages, under which Quaker marriages were formerly valid in many states, no longer is legally recognized in the USA. There is some discomfort with the obtaining and filing of marriage licenses for heterosexual couples in Meetings in which the joining of homosexual or lesbian couples is recognized, because of the Quaker concern for equality. Various means of dealing with issue have been worked out in Monthly Meetings and Yearly Meetings.