General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The NVC rejected my marriage certification. My wife's Green Card is dead [View all]Ms. Toad
(33,999 posts)Marriage is marriage. Once you are married (same gender marriage quirks aside, and plural marriage quirks aside) it is recognized everywhere.
Some of the same-gender marriage quirks were really mind bending.
We ran off to Canada to elope to beat the constitutional marriage ban in Ohio (we wanted to be able to establish we were married before it became unconstitutional for purposes of an adoption petition).
First - I had to prove I was actually divorced - since I had been married before (in the US). In Ontario that requires a significant amount of time for them to verify the validity of your divorce decree. In British Columbia a certified copy was enoug. We went to British Columbia.
But before we got married, we had to reconcile ourselves to never ever getting a divorce - unless we were willing to move to do it. Since (at the time) Ohio didn't recognize our marriage, it couldn't grant a divorce. And there is no such thing as common law divorce. Even if you are married at common law - you have to be divorced in court. So one of us would have had to move to a state that recognized our marriage and establish residency in order to file for divorce. So gay marriage, before the US woke up and recognized it, was kind of a super-glue marriage.
And the final quirk is that - post Obergefell - I may be in a legal pickle. Obergefell granted recognition to all marriages valid at the time/place of their inception - from the date of their inception. My common law marriage (recognized in Ohio until 1990) dates to September 11, 1981. The requirements are (1) believe ourselves to be married, (2) hold ourselves out to be married, (3) living as spouses and (4) eligible to be married. We satisfied the first 3 as of 9/11/81. Obergefell made the 4th retroactive.
So - that may make my Canadian marriage invalid . . . because we were not single individuals at the time we eloped in Canada (because we were already married to each other - even though recognition of that marriage only came into being retroactively in 2015).