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Comment by dark-star | Hacker News Reader

I fail to imagine a scenario where "getting married fast" is a requirement. I mean you've supposedly been living together for a few years already at that point, so why is 2 weeks too much?

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> I fail to imagine a scenario where "getting married fast" is a requirement.

This rubs me the wrong way a bit, and it’s because it’s clearly quite obvious there are many reasons you’d want to get married fast (emergency health issues, unplanned pregnancies, visa issues, etc etc. can come up with a million reasons easily).

You are really asking in a very ungracious way why doesn’t everyone just simply live like an ideal German.

Me and two of my siblings have had marriages to facilitate work visas, permanent residence and access to health care during a pregnancy. (Also because we liked the other person, but like, we would have kept liking them regardless of whether we got married.)

Most pregnancies take a while, two weeks is plenty of time. Don't even get me started on how long immigration bureaucracy takes -- two weeks is a drop in the bucket.

You could say the same about forming a company, or purchasing a house, or countless other things. It's when they all add up the issues begin.

I had to get married fast because my travel agent failed to get our wedding license to Jamaica fast enough for our destination wedding to be legal in Canada. So we got married a few days before leaving to Jamaica and had the pastor on the resort “officiate” for the family experience even if we were already married (nobody knew except us). The “two weddings” were only a few days apart. My pastor at home dropped everything to marry us the afternoon we called him with our dilemma.

We ended up going the Denmark route due to the German process requiring, what was for us, unobtainable documents.

We've had a number of friends do the same due to similar issues, plus the German process can be very cost prohibitive once you start including official translators and such.

The Danish authorities accept a passport as a proof of ID, and the supporting documents can be in Danish, English or German.

If it's less work, it's less work. And it can take months if one of you is not German.

So this is pure anecdata here, but as a foreigner who married a German, it took a while, but it was relatively little work.

The biggest issue was that we needed one of my documents (the birth certificate) to have a seal of authenticity from my home country, which then all needed to be translated officially. That took longer than it needed to because we didn't realise it needed to be authenticated and so we got it returned at one point and needed to resubmit it. But apart from that, it was mostly a case of waiting for the formalities to go through - that took a couple of months in total, but it required relatively little work overall. I suspect in total, getting married in another country would have taken more work to organise and arrange, although it would probably have been quicker with the right combination of country and pre-existing documents.

Websites promoting weddings in Denmark start out saying birth certificates aren't needed. The marriage certificate is provided in 5 languages too.

Hundreds of non-resident trees marry in Denmark every week.

https://medium.com/@msosacordero/how-to-get-married-in-denma...

Also no translated documents or notaries needed. They can read English in Denmark, unlike in Germany.

Yeh two weeks would be very quick for a German marriage involving foreigners, more realistically a few months at-least all things considered.

Two weeks would be quick for anything in Germany. 4 weeks seems like the standard for processes that run smoothly.

Is the delay ostensibly to ensure the identities of the parties, and that's why it takes longer if any foreigners are involved? I could well imagine it being unconscionable for Germans to aver something they were not yet certain of.

I have a friend who got married “on emergency” because her visa was expiring and she would have to get back to her country of origin if she didn’t find a job in a few weeks. So .. yeah.. could happen. And it’s also not just about the time .. it’s also about the amount of documents, forms and all the offices you need to contact.

A last-minute decision to be married before a baby is born. Being married can simplify other bureaucracy if the mother dies or is incapacitated.

People often forget marriage is also a legal contract (in Germany it simplifies so many things, eg. health insurance, joint income tax filings, etc).

I think most immigrants who get married in Germany are doing it for legal reasons primarily.

A baby takes 9 months to develop, if you notice 2 days before birth that you should be married so that you don't have to adopt (or whatever other reason), that's just very poor planning on the parents' side.

And in actual emergencies, these processes can be accelerated, like every other buerocratic process in Germany

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