You’ve found the one, and everything seems to be falling into place. But, as an expat in Berlin, the thought of navigating the bureaucratic maze of marriage registration is daunting. From endless paperwork to language barriers, the process can be overwhelming.
However, you can bypass these challenges by considering marriage outside of Germany!
As an Egyptian expat living in Germany, I want to share the story of my marriage journey.
Disclaimer: this blogpost is all about personal opinions and experiences. I hope they serve as in inspiration or starting point for someone who’s in the same boat as us. The post might contain errors, and not up to date information. I certainly don’t intend this as legal or financial advice of any sort 🙂
Backstory
I and my wife are non-EU Citizens (Egyptian and Turkish). We considered a couple of options when things got serious. Do we marry in our home countries, Egypt or Turkey? Or do we choose Germany?” Are there other options ?
Option 1️⃣ – Our country of residence: Germany 🇩🇪
Germany is a great country for many things, but doing your legal paperwork isn’t one of them 😅. Especially if you are in expat living in Germany (double especially if you’re living in Berlin). In our situation, we would need to legalize and translate official papers from various countries. The waiting lines are insane. A lawyer we consulted told us that she knew of couples that’d been waiting for almost a year. Last but not least, we speak some German, but not enough to navigate complicated bureaucratic matters with mostly old and only German speaking clerks.
We ruled out Germany, unfortunately, due to the potential complications.
Option 2️⃣ – Our countries of origin: Egypt 🇪🇬 or Turkey 🇹🇷
That was the least likely option for us for many reasons. Travel expenses, long stays, overly involved families 😅❤️ , complicated and oftentimes undocumented steps. We would’ve needed to deal with embassies (always fun 🥳), translate and legalize documents, across three countries, with the eventual goal of proving this marriage in Germany anyhow!
Option 3️⃣ – Marry in a third-party EU country 🇪🇺
After researching online and consulting our circles, we found that marrying in Denmark is the go-to solution for our situation. Denmark is pretty much the most favorable option among expats for an array of reasons:
- International couples find the process much smoother in Denmark than in other countries. International marriage is a serious business there. People often label Denmark as Europe’s “Las Vegas” 👯, given its straightforward marriage process by European standards..
- You’ll mostly communicate online 🌐, efficiently, in English, though they also support German and Danish..
- After collecting the necessary documents, the expected time should be short (more on that later).
- The wedding ceremony takes place usually in an architecturally gorgeous city hall 🏫.
How did the application process go in our case ?
Options
Before getting into that, there are generally two options.
- You can hire an agency to handle the process for you.
- You can do everything by yourself (that’s what we did).
Based on my online research and an email from a randomly picked agency, the first option is pricier, but it can significantly enhance the experience. We did not pick that option because as veterans in German bureaucracy 🏢, everything from our internet research sounded like a child’s play 😎. The agency would make things even more efficient and nicer (again, according to the internet), but not strictly needed.
The 2nd option is the cheaper of the two, and it works. The communication was mostly pretty clear with the Danish authorities (more on that later). The problem is there might be some cases where you don’t understand what went wrong, or how to proceed, and you don’t get an answer from the Danish authorities right away.
The catch here is, if you start the process by yourself, you cannot delegate the same process to an agency. You’ll need to start over if you change your mind mid-process.
The application process
The application process consists of two parts:
- We contacted the Agency of Family Law to obtain a marriage permit for one of the Danish city halls.
- After obtaining the permit, contacting one of the city halls to book an appointment for the marriage ceremony.
After obtaining the permit (step 1), an applicant typically has up to 4 months to get married in Denmark (step 2).
The Agency of Family Law
- The process started by sending to the The Agency of Family Law of Denmark. This agency is basically the official authority that studied our case, made sure that our papers are correct, we are of age, and we’re not already married to other people.
- Since we are both not Danish citizens, we went with the international marriage option, and we selected “We wish to get married in Denmark”.
- We continued until we reached a button to start the process with an SMS.
This started a registration process where they asked us for some official documents (like the passport, the residence permit, … etc), along with other personal information. This is by far the longest part of the process and the most uncomfortable because they get quite personal with their questions (such as how did you meet ? how frequently do you see one another ? do you have proofs of your relationship ? are you already living together ? ) and a bunch of other intrusive questions, but it is what it is 🫤
4. The Agency requested that we re-scan and submit certain documents. After processing them for a while (more on that later), they granted us a marriage permit.
Contacting a City Hall
After obtaining the marriage permit from the agency, we had the ability to choose a city hall of our liking. For us both, we’d always wanted to visit Copenhagen, so naturally we picked Copenhagen city hall. We contacted the Copenhagen City Hall for an appointment.
Unfortunately, the earliest available official date was in mid May (about 3 months after receiving the permit). “We inquired about an earlier appointment, and they responded that we could have one outside regular hours for an additional DKK 1,500.
Communication
We handled everything online through emails and online portals.Things were pretty smooth and convenient.
The communication with the Agency of Family was the slowest part because they are not answering support requests, so you need to be pretty patient.
The communication with the city hall was pretty nice ! Everyone we dealt with, whether via emails or IRL was super nice, spoke perfect English, and congratulated us.
Before the wedding day
We needed to show up before the ceremony at the city hall, in order to give our passports and residence cards for verification. The process took about two hours. In the City Hall’s confirmation email, we were told we could show up early on the wedding day, but since our wedding time was already pretty early (10 am), the realistic option for us was to do that the day before the wedding.
We simply went to the city hall’s gift shop and handed them our documents, visited some landmarks in Copenhagen, and came back later to collect our documents.
The city hall workers instructed us to show up the day after and follow the hearts drawn on the floor in order to reach the waiting area for the ceremony.
The wedding ceremony
- On the wedding day, we arrived 10 minutes late (we live in Berlin, nobody’s ever on time 😛), they were mostly understanding.
- As I mentioned, they directed us to follow the hearts on the floor. However, we ended up running in circles 😅. Fortunately, we eventually found our way to the destination.
- We could rent plastic flowers from the gift shop for an eye-watering price that I don’t quite remember (Maybe 30+ or 40+ Euros but I might be wrong here).
- Although we were told we can bring our witnesses, they just assigned us two official witnesses, which is okay 🤷.
- A civil officiator… well… officiated our ceremony.
- The whole ceremony took about 10 minutes, and was very pleasant. Our family members and friends were awesome, and the officiator was calm with a good sense of humor.
After the wedding
That’s actually an ongoing process at the time of writing this. Being non-EU citizens, we need to take the following steps to legalize our marriage certificates in our countries:
- We need to legalize the marriage certificate from the Danish ministry of foreign affairs.
- After the legalization by the Danish ministry of foreign affairs, we need to legalize it from our embassies, unfortunately we didn’t manage to do that on time because we had to go back to Berlin right after the wedding. In order to rectify the situation:
- As an Egyptian citizen, I need to legalize the marriage certificate from the Egyptian embassy in Copenhagen. Unfortunately, I didn’t know at the time and the Egyptian embassy in Berlin could not help me with the process. Guess who’s going to Copenhagen for the 2nd time just to stamp his marriage certificate ? 🥲
- For my wife as a Turkish citizen: with lots of persistence 💪 she managed to convince the Turkish embassy in Berlin to help her contacting the Turkish embassy in Copenhagen, and to update her marital status in Turkey while not leaving Berlin. She initially reached out to the Turkish embassy in Copenhagen to determine the necessary documents for updating the marital status in Turkey. She then went to the Turkish embassy in Berlin, who viewed the originals, and validated their authenticity. They then sent copies of those originals to the Turkish embassy in Copenhagen. About 2 months later, her marital status was updated in Turkey.
Back to Germany
- As far as we understood, we didn’t need to do anything to make the marriage recognized in Germany. In time, the system would have eventually reflected our marital status.
- My wife’s ongoing address change process (Ummeldung) in Germany sped up our marital status recognition. She presented our marriage certificate, leading to an immediate update of our official marital status in Germany.
- We needed to change our tax classes. Changing your tax class was pretty crucial for us because at the time of marriage there was a significant difference in our incomes and the tax cut helped us a lot financially. We did that via a tax advisor, because I was doing the annual tax declaration anyhow. I believe you could do that by yourself with no need of a tax advisor, and there are good online resources for doing so.
The time from start to finish
We took slightly above average time from start to finish (according to what we read on the internet.)
We started the process in mid December, so we had the Christmas season ahead of us, which delayed things a bit. As I mentioned earlier, they rejected our passport scans (more on that later), and resolving the issue took some time. We got the confirmation from the Agency of Family Law by the end of February.
The earliest appointment at the Copenhagen City Hall was in mid May (that’s about 3 months).
We asked for an earlier appointment, outside of the normal work hours, and that cost 1500 DKK (That was about 200 Euros). They offered us an appointment around mid-March.
So from start to finish, things took about 3 months with delay and a holiday season in between.
Corner Cases
- We made an avoidable mistake, that essentially happened because the requirements were a bit vague (to us at least). One of the required items was a scan of the passport. When people normally request passport scans, they typically want the essential pages with personal information and visas. That’s what we provided. However, they specifically needed photos of every passport page, including the blank ones! They even recommended to take multiple photos of the same page from different angles to prove authenticity (like the watermark in the personal info page). All pages needed to be in good quality. There might have been an issue with uploading the documents, because they replied to us that they received empty scans.
- Before the wedding, we had to provide evidence of our current marital status. Since we are foreigners living in Berlin, we got an extended registration certificate (erweiterte Meldebescheinigung). The website says “nur vor Ort oder schriftlich möglich (only possible on site or in writing)”. Writing here actually also means via email. We needed to pay 10 Euros for the service via a bank transfer (obtained via Bankverbindungen der Bezirksämter), and sending an email to the responsible office. I got the document in less than a business week 🙂
Conclusion
Getting married in Germany might have been a viable option if one of us were a German citizen.
However, it turned out to be unnecessarily long and complex for us. On the contrary, marrying in Denmark proved to be a highly positive experience. I share my story because, in hindsight, I couldn’t find a comprehensive resource on this experience, especially from the perspective of a non-EU couple like us. Additionally, I wanted to highlight a few unique situations we encountered.