We've been receiving a flurry of questions from our friends upon notifying them about the date of our wedding, the most common being: "Aren't you guys married already?". The 2nd most common question would probably be: "Why is your wedding date so far apart from your ROM date?" To answer all these questions once and for all, here are the reasons for choosing to hold our wedding separately from our ROM...
- My Grandmother. My (maternal) grandmother was in poor health when we were engaged. We decided to hold an early ROM in case her health deteriorated. My beloved grandmother has since passed away earlier this year, but we are glad that she managed to see us exchange our rings.
- Housing concerns. We decided that having a marriage cert would give us more housing options in Singapore. Yes, you could apply for a HDB flat without a marriage cert, but this does not hold true for resale properties, or properties in the private market. True enough, the marriage cert came in handy when we applied for our Executive Condominium last month.
- More time for planning and execution. Delaying our wedding ceremony allowed us more time to plan, as well as more time to save up on resources (ie. money...) Taking the ROM ceremony out of the wedding day will allow us more time on the actual day itself to travel and rest.
- A 'mini-rehearsal' before the actual wedding. Planning for our ROM allowed us to have a taste of organising such events before moving on to the larger scale wedding. We were able to choose our team of brothers/sisters, photographers and videographers with little hesitation for our wedding as we have already worked with them before.
So yes, we are legally married, but we haven't had the traditional gate-crashing, tea-ceremony and dinner banquet yet. And in a lot of our elders' eyes, we aren't married until we have gone through the traditional rites. Hopefully this answers the queries :)