Friday afternoon, C & I went to meet with the official who will be marrying us next weekend (Yes, next weekend!). I had been hoping the woman we had originally met with would do it since she just seemed so upbeat and positive, but alas, she was unavailable.

As a side note, bigger cities have several people who marry couples and while they all have assigned weekends, you can request whomever you would like. We heard one story of a couple who loved sailing and one of the adjoint maire's was a semi-famous sailor, so they asked if he would do it.

Anyways, so we started explaining what we had in mind - a few people reading texts, etc - so that it would seem more like an American wedding for my family since we weren't doing the church wedding.

He stopped us there and said "Why aren't you doing a church wedding?" C replied "Well, because we're not the same religion." The official replied "That doesn't matter, some priests will marry you anyways. Where do you live? We'll find out what diocese you are in and we can call them".

We sat there stunned for a second - like "Dude, we're getting married in a week, I think it's a little late for that." I was rather incredulous actually - here our mairie is all for people doing civil ceremonies-only and yet this guy is trying to push a church wedding on us. Me thinks someone did not read the memo!

In the end, we were able to brush him off by saying we were doing a small thing here and then something for the rest of my family in the US. But still, so much for separation of church and state, right?