‘Joyful Chaos’: Couples Flock to Courthouses to Wed on Valentine’s Day

It was just before midnight on Thursday and dozens of couples were waiting on and around the steps of the Bexar County Courthouse in San Antonio. There were men in cowboy hats and suit jackets, and women in classic wedding dresses and veils.

They were there to get married.

At 12:01 a.m. on Valentine’s Day, the county clerk, Lucy Adame-Clark, began to officiate a brief, collective ceremony. At its conclusion, 125 couples kissed for the first time as married partners to cheers from friends and relatives.

Then, to the sound of “At Last” by Etta James, the couples took their collective first dance.

The couples were among the first who flocked to city halls across the country to get married on Valentine’s Day, which held special appeal this year as it fell on a Friday.

“It was a really good experience to be there with everyone else and just be surrounded by a bunch of people who are also in love,” said Nadia Martin, 29, who married Callaway Jones, 27, at the group wedding around midnight.

For some, the date held special meaning.

“He was the very first valentine I ever had in my whole life” Melanie Ehrenborg Ordaz, 35, said of Juan Javier Ordaz, 39, whom she married at the group wedding in San Antonio. “Last year was our first Valentine’s together, so this year it was like, why not just go all the way.”

The number of weddings held annually at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau, where 75 ceremonies were expected to be performed on Friday, increased by 22 percent from 2022 to 2024.

“It’s New York. We love New York!” said Lauren Oceguera, 28, who flew from Phoenix with Jose Oceguera, 34, to marry on Valentine’s Day in downtown Manhattan — ball gown wedding dress, tuxedo and family in tow.

In San Antonio, the county clerk’s office offers four group ceremonies on the courthouse steps on Valentine’s Day, the first starting right after midnight. Last year, 337 couples exchanged vows there, and even more were expected to do so on Friday.

In Chicago, despite a Friday forecast calling for a chance of flurries and a high temperature of only 24 degrees, the Circuit Court of Cook County was preparing for a Valentine’s rush.

The court performs about 60 weddings in a typical week, but around Christmas and Valentine’s Day, the number grows to 200 to 300. With Valentine’s Day landing on a Friday this year, the court was expecting even more.

To accommodate the surge, six judges were ready to perform ceremonies, twice as many as on a typical day, Circuit Judge Diann K. Marsalek said. Ceremonies are performed in offices and courtrooms, some of which were decorated for Valentine’s Day.

Judge Marsalek said that couples are attracted to the flexibility and ease of a courthouse wedding.

“They can start celebrating immediately,” she said.

San Francisco was also preparing for a deluge of lovebirds. Diane Rea, the city clerk, said that more than 250 appointments had been scheduled for Friday, with ceremonies to be performed in eight locations across four floors of City Hall. (A typical weekday brings in about 28 wedding appointments.) Mayor Daniel Lurie was to be among the city’s 25 officiants.

Ms. Rea said she was expecting “joyful chaos.”

“It’s definitely not an intimate moment when you do it on one of these days,” Ms. Rea said. But, she added, “it’s fun to be among a lot of people doing the same thing for the same reason. Particularly in this moment, we’re all yearning for those feelings.”

That was the case in Lower Manhattan on Friday morning, when dozens of couples lined up to say “I Do.”

Appointments had been booked solid for weeks, said Michael McSweeney, who has been the city clerk since 2009. Across New York City, 225 appointments were scheduled, he said.

Among them were Jessica Goulart, 38, and Gilan Salehi, 35, who had booked a 9:15 a.m. slot in Manhattan on Friday, their sixth anniversary as a couple. They knew they wanted to get married on Valentine’s Day and set a calendar reminder for the day it opened up on the city’s reservation website.

“We grew up here, fell in love here, thought it would be a magical moment,” Ms. Goulart said. (Saving money on a lavish wedding was also a plus, she acknowledged.)

At about 10 a.m., the couple emerged from the depths of the Louis J. Lefkowitz State Office Building, which houses the Manhattan Marriage Bureau, and were greeted by family and friends who cheered and blew bubbles. “It was lovely and very fast!” Ms. Goulart said, before planting a kiss on Mr. Salehi.

Kelly Willinger, 37, and Arthur Siddharta, 31, decided to marry in a civil ceremony in Manhattan on Valentine’s Day, in part because it was convenient: Ms. Willinger, an assistant principal at a charter school in Harlem, is off next week for school vacation. The couple plan to have a bigger wedding later in Indonesia, where Mr. Siddharta’s family lives.

“This is just for us,” Ms. Willinger said.

For now, they sealed their vows with a signature New York move: by splitting a hot dog.