A day in Philly’s Marriage License Bureau, the DMV for long-term commitment

The Marriage License Bureau in City Hall is an institution devoted to the bureaucracy of love.

Every couple aiming to be legally married in the city of Philadelphia must obtain the Register of Wills’ official stamp of approval in the fluorescent glow of Room 413. Whether couples are gay or straight, planning to stand before a clergy person in a 500-person ceremony or self-unite, all must come here to acquire their state-sanctioned license.

That means that the people who walk through the doors of Room 413 represent every age, race, class, and corner of the city. They speak many languages (primarily English and Spanish); some have never married and some have been divorced four times. They are variously motivated by health insurance, religion, babies, old age, youth, and romance.

The Inquirer spent a day at the Marriage License Bureau earlier this month, documenting the people and stories that passed through.

The bureau is effectively a DMV for long-term commitment, and as at the DMV, there’s a fair amount of waiting around. All appointments are walk-in only, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 3:15 p.m.

The days tend to start slowly, but by 10 a.m., the line is out the door and doesn’t stop.

“Congratulations guys!” says Lindsey Keenan, marriage license supervisor, every few minutes from the cashier’s desk, where she continually takes payments (a regular license costs $90; a self-uniting one costs $100). Keenan has worked at the bureau for 10 years. In that time, she has congratulated many couples and turned away a few, including someone who arrived with a doll in hand, hoping to be wed.

This is the rare government office where almost everyone is in a good mood. Divorce complaints are handled a few blocks away, at the Family Court at 15th and Arch.

Dante Gilberti and Milene Araujo arrived relatively early in the day, before the rush.

The two met at a Planet Fitness gym in New Jersey. Gilberti asked Araujo if she wanted to grab acai bowls after they exercised together. She accepted, tickled by the idea that Gilberti had invited her to share a delicacy from Brazil, where she is from.

Their first date was on a Friday.

“I think I miss you,” Gilberti, now 26, texted after he returned home that night. Their second date was on Monday, and their third date was on Tuesday. After that, they saw each other almost every day.

But Araujo, who is 23 and was working as an au pair at the time, explained early on that she wasn’t interested in some vague American concept of ‘hanging out’.

“In my culture, we don’t really just date,” Araujo said. “If you want to be my boyfriend, we gotta do this the right way. I even made him give me a ring,” she said, sitting in a chair outside Room 413 and showing off a thin silver band engraved with Gilberti’s name. (He has a matching one engraved with hers). “In my country, you propose to be a boyfriend.”

“I thought it was interesting,” Gilberti, a medical student at Drexel, said earnestly.

They applied for their marriage license on the anniversary of their first kiss. They’re planning to host two weddings: one in Philadelphia and one in Brazil, where Araujo’s family lives. They mused about what would be different when they had the official document in hand.

“You get my name,” Gilberti offered.

“I do. I don’t know, I also want to keep my name,” Araujo said. “How it is here, you give up all your names to put his name — in my country, it’s not like that. We’re figuring it out."

***

Lauren Bruce and Antony Bolante made it to the clerk’s desk inside Room 413 before being sent right back out to the hallway. The couple had checked the city’s website beforehand, but the page hadn’t been updated since before COVID, and the couple didn’t have the right documents.

“IT has been made aware of the problem,” said the clerk.

Bruce and Bolante headed to the hallway to search their phones for the right document.

“You get your social, you just come back in, ok?” the clerk said.

***

The first date of Annette Bellinger and John Belles had taken place approximately 80 miles from City Hall, at the Outback Steakhouse in the Park City Mall in Lancaster.

They were chatting over steaks, and she was studying him across the table, contemplating how he didn’t have any teeth. (He only has bottom teeth).

“Does it bother you?” he recalled asking her. She thought about it, and said no.

Outside Room 413, he explained why he brought it up back then: “There are people who are very —”

“Particular,” his wife-to-be said. The couple had just filled out their marriage license application on their second attempt to get the right documents.

He said, “If you don’t have your own teeth —”

“Don’t fit a certain mold,” she added.

“They’re not going to engage you,” he concluded.

Bellinger, who is 52, and Belles, who is 61, have now been dating for three years. He’s a truck driver who lives in Ephrata, a small town in Lancaster County. She is a medical assistant with purple hair who lives in Germantown.

It’s his third marriage and her second. They have no plans to move in together for right now, because he’s on the road during the week and she loves her job. When they’re together on the weekends, they like watching movies — action and martial arts ones especially.

***

Alicia Lobo dressed up, in a beige wrap dress and white heels festooned with butterflies, to apply for the license. She waited on a wooden bench next to her fiancé, Jose Alfaro; their 1-year-old daughter, Itzayana; and Lobo’s mother, Sonia Cuevas.

“We already have a family,” Lobo, who is 29, said, explaining why they decided to get married. She prodded Alfaro to share the story of how they met, but he was shy, and let her tell it.

They were both working in construction. One day, he was driving her home from a job and she was snacking in the passenger seat. Alfaro, now 30, told her that he liked her.

She looked over at him, confirmed a certain spark in his eyes, and then started feeding him from her hand “like a baby,” she said, laughing. “That’s how we started.”

***

Antony Bolante finally found his Social Security number on a years-old tax return buried in his inbox, and brought it back to Room 413.

He and Lauren Bruce met six years ago, on OKCupid. They’ll be married in Florida later this month.

But Bruce, who is 41, had purchased her wedding dress years ago during the pandemic. The two were already dating, but they didn’t have any particular plans to get married. She was preparing precisely for her beloved’s lack of preparation.

“I knew that if we ever got married, it would be like, ‘Oh, let’s go down to the courthouse at noon.’ I literally knew I would not have time to look,” she said.

She works in public health and he works as a theater artist, so although it’s a love marriage and they wanted to celebrate with both of their families, they’re also pleased that her health insurance will now be his — an American-style covenant. She was still in disbelief that her life seemed to be working out the way it was.

“I was one of those people that was a late bloomer, always had a hard time meeting people,” Bruce said. “I was always impatient. I was wanting it to happen. And it finally did.”

***

Mosheh “Re-Mus” Johnson and Ashley Byars brought their 3-month-old son to witness their marriage license application, his first major outing since being born.

“My husband!” Byars said delightedly afterwards, looking up at Johnson.

Then they brought their infant outside to meet up with Byars’ mother, Tammy. She wanted to congratulate the almost-newlyweds, and also figure out a way to show off her grandson to her colleagues. (She works at City Hall, for City Councilman Jeffrey Young).

Her daughter was initially thinking of hosting an extravagant wedding, Tammy Byars said, cradling her grandson in her arms, “But I said, ‘Listen, take the money and run.’”

***

As the day ground on and the line got longer, couples waited around in heavy wooden chairs in the hallway outside Room 413, entertaining each other, gathering documents, feeding infants. Inside, the clerks asked the same questions again and again, mainly for genealogical and historical research, Keenan sad.

“I’m scared!” one husband-to-be joked.

Dashawna Floyd and Elston Whitney had just submitted their signed form and received their legally binding license. She initially took a job at Sensational Styles, the barber shop he owns in North Philly, because she wanted to be around him.

He hired her to be a shampoo girl. She did not particularly want to be a shampoo girl, because, as she described it, she was “nervous to touch people” and didn’t wash people’s hair with enough vigor.

“I was probably his worst shampoo girl ever,” Floyd, now 26, reflected. But it didn’t seem to matter.

“She’s just awesome,” Whitney, 45, said. “It’s hard not to be drawn to her.”

They married at the True Heart Wedding Chapel in Glenside in January, just the two of them.

Floyd is no longer the shampoo girl.

“She married now,” Whitney joked of his wife. “She don’t have to.”

***

Jazmine Hawley-Graham and Melvin Arnett decided to get married last week. Now here they were, facing a clerk and a series of questions.

“What do you guys have for me?” asked Lauren Beloff as the couple sat before her. They handed over their IDs and Social Security cards. She asked them the requisite questions: “Have you been married before?” “Do you have a date set?” “Any transmissible diseases?” (That’s an inherited question from a previous era.)

After typing up their answers, Beloff printed their application and held it up for the couple, who peered at it through a plexiglass shield decorated with red tinsel. The couple would need to follow a waiting period of three days (this isn’t Las Vegas), sign it before 60 days, and bring it back to the office. Hawley-Graham and Arnett confirmed that everything was spelled correctly.

“All right guys, congratulations,” Beloff said. “It’s going to be $90: Visa, MasterCard, Apple Pay, money order.”

They thanked her and took the marriage license application from her. Then they paid Keenan at the register, tucked away their documents, and made their way from Room 413 into the crowded city below, and toward the rest of their lives together.