Misadventure with our Marriage License
A Hilarious Misadventure while Obtaining Our Marriage License
We arrived on the shores of Keflavík, severely disoriented and jetlagged from our 9 hour flight, having left Seattle in late afternoon and arrived in Iceland at 5:30am. Did we ever see night? Nope, we outflew it, watching it just on the fringe of our flight path the entire time.
We were also starving, we had just picked up our rental car, and were figuring out how to drive this new-to-us car on foreign streets for the first time ever. We hadn’t seen a shower or toothbrush in who knows how long (seriously, we didn’t know, with the disorientation of travel). Any logical person would first seek to remedy some of these basic human needs. Food, cleanliness, perhaps a nap, or reorientation of the senses in general.
We had our map queued up and were heading into Reykjavík proper, but we happened to know Sýslumenn (The Commissioner’s Office) is on the way and they just opened for the day. Why don’t we just stop and quickly verify our paperwork? Shouldn’t take too long for them to take photocopies of our passports and hand us our license to wed, right?
WRONG!
We pulled into a parking lot of what our map announced should be Sýslumaðurinn á höfuðborgarsvæðinu (The District Commissioner of Greater Reykjavik). In no way did this building have a giant sign on it indicating such, in fact it just looked like one of five normal office buildings. I should also mention here that our international phone plan through Verizon was not all they claimed it to be, so we were without internet capabilities to look any of this up or figure out if we were even in the right place. Our view:
As we walked up to the building, we finally noticed the other sign on the right side of the building, “Sýslumaður.” This roughly translates to “sheriff” or “commissioner.” It has nothing to do with marriage, getting married, marriage paperwork, or anything of the sort. Upon entering the building, we were greeted with several signs, all in Icelandic, none of them anything we could in our ignorance decipher, or which we could understand to mean had anything to do with marriage. To our right looked to be the Icelandic version of the DMV. We still aren’t really sure what was on our left. Directly in front of us was a staircase leading to more offices.
Now completely disoriented, we began speaking in hushed tones. This was perhaps one of the quietest government office buildings we’d ever been in, you could probably hear a pin drop on top of a pin drop. We felt like the boisterous Americans barging in, “This here says Sis-lumen? Not sure what that means or where to give over our mawiage papers?”
Eventually we decided to climb the stairs, as we ruled out the offices on both the left and right because they didn’t “feel right.” Our active imaginations saw the headlines, “Foreigners found in official government building, mere hours after landing in Iceland.” The article went on to explain that we were found in an area no American has ever strayed, authorities are still attempting to glean whether we were trying to steal official records on Iceland’s long and ancient lineage, or if sabotage was the intent?
The upstairs rooms were not really marked, just two solid wooden doors with offices of some sort. Eventually we convinced ourselves this second floor office was the only place it could be.
We held our breath as we opened that solid wood door. A short hardwood floored hallway greeted us, walking down it revealed a small waiting room on the right and a desk on the left. The woman there greeted us, our first ever Icelandic sentence falling on our ears. For those unfamiliar with Icelandic… there was no way we could ever hope to make heads nor tails of it! Incredibly inelegantly, Jess said, “Hello. I am wondering if we are in the right place, is this the office where we turn in marriage applications?” And crossed every bone in her body that this woman knew English. She easily switched into English, saying yes, we were in the correct place. We don’t think we imagined her surprise over the fact we’d made it to here without actually knowing we were in fact, in the right place.
Jess introduced herself and explained she had been communicating with their office over email for the past couple months, we were getting married on July 4th and had everything arranged and were now there to turn in hardcopies of our formal documents. Our past communications were easily identified, then our documents were handed over, and we breathed a sigh of relief. Things were going well so far.
Until she got to the Hjónavígsluskýrsla (Marriage Notification) document, which is basically a document we sign declaring we aren’t already married, and have two friends back home sign witnessing that we are in fact real people, and aren’t married. Sternly, she asked, “Where is the original copy of this? We have all of your documents approved and ready, but we just need this one.” Confused, we told her this was in fact the original copy. Equally confused, she asked how our witnesses had signed.
Starting to realize the issue and feeling like complete dunces, we said that our witnesses had signed the document digitally, and this copy on hand was in fact, the original.
A frown of disapproval appeared on her face, and she asked us to take a seat while she consulted their on-site lawyer how to proceed. I haven’t experienced a shame that deep since my first grade teacher looked at my friend and I in disapproval for playing in the bathroom sink instead of returning to class, as we well knew we ought.
What had possessed us to think that digital signatures would suffice on a formal document? Admittedly, everything about our exchanges with Iceland had felt so modern we had let ourselves be tricked into thinking this was alright. Also, since we’d sent them digital copies of everything we sort of expected they would have let us know ahead of time if something was amiss…
Now sweating bullets and taking a seat, we both stared at each other in a moment of panic, and then looked across at the wall. Ryan whipped out his phone again, hopelessly hoping he might learn what to do.
At that moment, the office door opened and another Icelander walked in. Tall, white long hair pulled stylishly back into a simple ponytail, and looking ready to take on the nearest Kikimora, he calmly walked up to the desk and another clerk appeared, tones of Icelandic easily flying. Ryan leaned over to Jess, eyes wider than saucers, and said so quietly it was barely perceptible, “Hollllyyyy shit… it’s Geralt!!!”
The comical nature of our situation raining down upon us, we spent several moments trying to contain a few laughs amplified by hunger and exhaustion. Here we were in Iceland with what might as well be forged signatures, hoping to convince them to let us get married in their country. The delinquent Americans sitting woefully in the corner in shame, meanwhile Geralt of Rivia has stopped off in the Icelandic government office to casually update an official record. He was in the neighborhood and thought he’d drop in, probably out to assist Redania in scourging its latest monster this afternoon.
We were eventually called back up to the window after a couple other Icelanders had entered the office and been directed to the waiting room. Now we had witnesses for our humiliation.
As suspected, she told us that they could under no circumstances accept the document we’d provided. They had noticed the scanned signature in the advance email but just assumed the whole document was a scan and we were bringing the original in person. She was sorry but they would have to, “Consider this marriage application voided and canceled. We cannot proceed.”
To really drive home her point, she took the paper between her fingers and rubbed it, explaining that this was a living document, and if she couldn’t physically feel that nice pen and ink signature on the paper, it wasn’t valid. Then, perhaps unnecessarily, she again repeated something along the lines of canceling the marriage application, “Unless you can get real signatures between now and the 4th, but we are closed over the weekend. We are only open tomorrow, and only until 1400, so you would have to have signatures before then and I just don’t see how you can do that, because someone here in the country would have to vouch for you saying that they know you and that you aren’t already married. They would have to be willing to legally sign for this. So, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid there’s really nothing we can do.”
Tail between our legs, we left the office, not dignified enough to look at the crowd of other waiting Icelanders.
But wait! This story does have a happy ending!
After getting some food in our bellies, we reached out to both our photographer, Steph, and our celebrant, Kristrún, with pleas for help. As luck would have it, both of them were allowed to be our witnesses. Consequently, we met them both on that very first day in Iceland and then the following day we dropped our freshly signed Hjónavígsluskýrsla (Marriage Notification) off back at the Commissioner’s Office.
They told us they probably wouldn’t be able to get it back to us by the end of the day, so we wouldn’t have it over the weekend. Oh well, our official wedding date would be a little different. We went back to Reykjavík proper and were just settling down for a nice breakfast when we received a call from the Commissioner’s Office saying, “We have it ready but we close in 20 minutes.”
We were near exactly 20 minutes away.
We devoured our food, then jogged the 5 minutes to the parking garage (no, our full stomachs weren’t fans of this part). We arrived at their office about 5 minutes after their closing, wondering if we were much too late.
Alas, the lady who had helped us the day before had been kind enough to delay her exit of the building, despite having locked up the office. She gave us a smile as we entered the building, declaring, “You made it!” We left with our marriage license and huge grins.
And there you have it. The story of how we made a silly mistake on a signature, but still managed to have our official wedding on the 4th of July, 2021… despite a rather large and, in hindsight, obvious mistake.
