‘Little embarrassing’: Why Dr Karl finally married after decades

Once Mary got her head around my proposal and eventually accepted my formal Offer of Marriage, we had to decide where and when to do it.
And, you guessed it, my idea wasn’t just about rose petals and chocolates – I had a ‘scientific’ angle for our wedding.
It was almost a little embarrassing to be getting married at that stage of our relationship – it was not like we were spring chickens anymore. And obviously, a quarter of a century after meeting, falling in love, living together and having three children, it wasn’t as though we desperately needed white goods or any of the usual blessings on our union!
Watch the video above.
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So we opted to elope and save ourselves from explanations about why we had decided to get married now, after all the years we had been together. The upside of eloping was that we got to spend the cost of a regular wedding entirely on a trip to Norway to see the midnight sun, which was something we had both always dreamed of.
Why the midnight sun? I had read about it as a child, and it just seemed so unbelievable and exciting. After all, every day we can see with our eyes that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, so how could it still be ‘up’ at midnight?
And why Norway? Well, the far north of Norway is above the Arctic Circle (which was essential to seeing the northern midnight sun), and Norway itself seemed both friendly and exotic.
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So Wedding in Norway with the Midnight Sun was the number-one plan. My desire for the wedding was to combine romance, science and love. My dream of us getting married under the midnight sun was a symbol: in the same way that the sun would not set on our chosen wedding day, so I also hoped that the sun would never, ever set on our love for each other.
It turned out to be easy to choose, but hard to organise.
Getting married in a foreign country involves a decent amount of paperwork, which we didn’t realise at the start. (Yep, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.) We spent a long time running between government offices in Sydney getting various documents certified in order to go ahead with the plan. But after a few months, the length of time it was taking to get the last few Norwegian official documents was plain ridiculous. So we eventually let our fingers do the walking and phoned the relevant government departments in Norway after finally narrowing our problem down to just one recalcitrant bit of paperwork that we couldn’t make sense of. There were two forms, translated into English, that looked identical to us, so we couldn’t work out which one to complete.
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We spent a lot of time on long-distance hold trying to sort it all out, and the Norwegian government’s official hold music was Fly Me to the Moon by Frank Sinatra. We were always ringing in the middle of our night and giggled hysterically with both tiredness and anticipation (of getting married, or at the very least of finishing the paperwork) every time we heard that song. Going to the moon was a long-term dream of mine, but the midnight sun in Norway was closer and the perfect compromise.
When we finally got a human on the line, I explained our problem with the seemingly identical forms to him.
Completely deadpan, he said, “Aha! You, Karl, are you a man or a woman?” I replied that I was a man. The follow-up question was, “And you, Mary, are you a man or a woman?” When Mary replied a woman, he said, “So it seems you need the Heterosexual Wedding Form B, not the Homosexual Wedding Form A.” Hah – so simple!
This is an edited extract from A Periodic Tale by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, published by ABC Books and HarperCollins Australia, which is available in stores and online. Click the link here for more information.
You see, back in the 2000s, foreigners coming to Norway specifically to get married were usually gay, because it was one of the very few countries in the whole world where this was legally allowed. In fact, way back in 1993, Norway was the second country in the world, after Denmark, to provide official government recognition of same-sex couples via a registered partnership. This was not officially a marriage, but provided virtually all the benefits, responsibilities and protections as a ‘traditional’ marriage. In 2004, a legal bill was proposed to abolish the registered partnership and simultaneously make marriage laws gender-neutral, so that people of the same sex could officially marry. That bill was passed into law in mid-2008, making Norway the sixth country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage.
But Mary and I were applying to get married in that intermediate window before the gender-neutral marriage law had been enshrined in legislation and while same-sex couples were still coming to Norway to get hitched under the registered partnerships legislation. Being a foreign heterosexual couple made us the odd ones out, which was a nice reversal of stereotypes, I guess! But it meant we did not fit with the standard foreign gay wedding that the Norwegian officials could organise in a heartbeat.
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Once we sorted that out, everything else fell into place – we just had to book the flights. It is actually a really long way from Sydney to inside the Arctic Circle. Our four back-to-back flights were Sydney–Singapore, Singapore–London, London–Oslo (outside the Arctic Circle) and Oslo–Kirkenes (inside the Arctic Circle). Travelling continuously, it took us about 40 hours. We looked pretty rough by the end of the last leg!
We were getting married on the summer solstice, the day with the most daylight hours of the year, which at the Arctic Circle meant the midnight sun would be in the sky for the whole 24 hours. My lovely daughter Lola had been totally convinced that I was lying to her about the sun never setting above the Arctic Circle during the time of the summer solstice. “Daddy, you’re not making sense,” she defiantly said. “The sun has to set at the end of the day. It can’t stay up in the sky!” She was always very firm about what she thought was right and wrong in the world, and in her rules, the sunset happened every day. The midnight sun simply didn’t fit into her knowledge base.
The wedding itself had to be in a church because that was the Norwegian rule. We chose an old church on the border of Russia and Norway for the Big Day. It was very picturesque, with misty tendrils of fog trailing around the striking copper-topped stone building.
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Being us, we didn’t elope by ourselves. We brought along our two daughters, Alice and Lola, and Mary’s parents, Max and Carmel. Our son was invited but was off watching some football match instead! (OK, it was the World Cup in Germany with his slightly older uncle Brendan, and that combination was a big deal! For him, there didn’t seem to be any difference to his life if we were married or not married.)
My pre-wedding meal was a breakfast of champions – herrings, beetroot and coffee. It was the happiest day of my life, and not just because of the fabulous breakfast!
We intentionally tried to avoid the standard trappings of a wedding. First off, after brekkie we asked a random person in the foyer of the hotel to take the photos. (Hey, so the tops of our heads are missing from some of the photos, but the price was right!) Second, our wedding car was a purple and very functional four-wheel drive truck. Lola, then eight, was quite clearly unimpressed, but it was a really practical vehicle in all the mud. Third, we stopped our purple truck on the way out of town and bought a bunch of flowers from the blomsterbutikk. We chose a simple but pretty bouquet.
The church was partly divided between those of us who cried and those who didn’t. I, of course, was on the crying side with my older daughter, Alice. We have always shared an emotional ability to laugh and cry at the very same things, even though in many ways I send Alice insane with my structured approach to life in general! Mary and Lola were on the non-crying side, along with Mary’s parents, a church organist and a couple of tourists who seemed entranced by our random wedding. That made up the totality of the congregation. My parents were of course both dead by this stage, and being an only child meant there were no other blood relatives for me to invite.
The minister’s wedding speech was supremely silly. I am pretty confident the priest had used the primitive 2006 version of Google Translate to write the sermon. We almost got the giggles halfway through!
I imagine what he was trying to express was that because we were getting married after all these years together, our love must have bonded us very strongly, and the marriage was a sign of great optimism, and hope that our love would continue into the future. There were hints of the film Captain Corelli’s Mandolin about the sermon, with images of the roots of our trees joining together and getting stronger with time, but the translation of his words into English did not quite reflect this subtlety. Indeed, it was outrageously brutal and hysterically memorable in the end.
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I swear he actually started by saying that maybe I used to look good as a young man, but now I looked more like a sack of badly packed potatoes. Not much hair, either. And Mary? Well, she might have been pretty when she was younger, but the blossoms had already dropped from her face and the roses in her cheeks had now turned to chalk! And that was before he started moving on to talk about love and desire. In summary, because we were by now so old as to be almost decrepit and physically incompetent, we must truly love each other deeply, because it could no longer just be lust!
That wedding speech gave us something to talk about for a long time to come. We invited the pastor to our wedding lunch anyway, in a private room of a restaurant, which was lovely. Some wonderful friend had sent champagne – but without a card! So we never worked out who to thank for the gift, but we did enjoy every drop. Reindeer and carrots featured on the menu, from memory.
And it was with great joy that we stayed up all night. With her own eyes, Lola could see the sun move down close to the horizon but never sink below it as it skimmed around us in a complete 360-degree circle. Lola finally understood that the midnight sun was real, because she had witnessed it with her own eyes.
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So there we were, Officially Married! The next step was our honeymoon – with my in-laws and our beautiful daughters.
Tired but happy, we returned to our life in Australia as husband and wife. My son was right: getting married made no difference to our daily routines.
Mary was still making my trademark bright shirts. My love of bright clothes goes back to my childhood. I have a memory from back then of a woman in a bright dress, standing like a lighthouse, in a sea of grey and brown on a miserable, rainy day in downtown Wollongong. She left a wake of smiles behind her as she walked by, literally and figuratively brightening people’s day. So bright clothes for me seemed a shortcut on the journey to joy.
Before Mary was sewing ‘one-offs’ for me, I wore a lot of Hawaiian shirts, but synthetic fabrics get smelly really fast. To get a cotton business shirt with long sleeves and two pockets in bright fabrics was a task for my own personal dressmaker! Mary buys whatever fabric she likes, and I get to wear them once they’ve been sewn up as my ‘stage clothes’. For me, the hope is that my colourful shirts might brighten other people’s days too, just like that lady I saw as a teenager in Wollongong! 
One big bonus of being married was that we now had easy labels for each other. We didn’t have to stumble with introductions explaining how we were related, when meeting new acquaintances!
While the whole point of the wedding was to celebrate and create ritual around our love for each other, simplifying the terms of endearment was an unexpected perk.
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