'Flush with Love': Couple Marries in Courthouse Ladies' Room After Groom's Mother Falls Ill
A New Jersey couple had the marriage of a lifetime: a Hawaiian island, a beautiful sunset over an oceanic backdrop and hundreds of friends and family members in attendance — just kidding, the couple wed in a courthouse bathroom.
Maria Schulz, 21, and Brian Schulz, 26, used the women’s restroom at the Monmouth County Courthouse to serve as the setting for their wedding ceremony.
Don’t worry, the restroom doesn’t hold any sentimental meaning to the couple’s relationship pre-marriage. Rather, it became a makeshift venue after the groom’s mom became ill during the ceremony.
“We were sitting outside of the courtroom and waiting to go in and my mom gives me a call and says she’s having trouble breathing,” Brian Schulz said.
“She really couldn’t talk at all,” he said. “I could just tell something was wrong, so I just got up and I ran and started looking for her.”
The groom eventually found his mother in the courthouse bathroom.
“She was not looking well,” he recounted. “Her face was very pale, and she was profusely sweating.”
He added that his fiancee and her mother began speculating that he had suddenly got cold feet and backed out of the marriage.
“They started to get a little worried that maybe I got cold feet and ran away!” he said.
While a group of officers from the Monmouth County Sheriff’s Office tended to the groom’s mother, one officer, Leonard Maxfield, went and proposed the idea of a bathroom ceremony to Judge Katie Gummer.
“The couple was clearly upset about the mom and having to postpone their wedding in which they would have to wait another 45 days for a new marriage license to be processed,” Cynthia Scott, a public-information officer for Monmouth County Sheriff’s Office stated on Facebook.
“Since the sheriff’s officers were concerned about the mom and did not want her moving from the ladies’ room, S/O (Sheriff’s Officer) Leonard Maxfield kicked his thinking into high gear, why not get married in the ladies’ room?” she added.
Gummer obliged, and took the ceremony to the restroom.
“By the authority invested in me by the laws of the state of New Jersey, I pronounce them married!” Gummer announced as the newlyweds exchanged a kiss in front of the paper towel dispensers.
While the sequence of events was unusual, Brian Schulz claimed that the setting didn’t embarrass him.
“It really doesn’t bother me at all. It’s not embarrassing,” he said. “I don’t think it means any less than somebody that got married in a church or on a beach or in Jamaica.
“It’s something between myself, my wife and God. Those are the three entities that need to be involved, and everything else is second.”
He added that he and his wife will host a “traditional” wedding ceremony, but noted that nothing will compare to the lavatory covenant.
“It’s not going to be as good as the first one,” he stated. “You can’t beat that.”
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