Marriage

**Marriage** is a legally binding contract that says two people stay together until their death. Many people have a celebration at the start of their marriage known as a wedding. The end of a marriage is known as *divorce*. Two people planning to be married in the near future are known as *engaged*.

### Location

Various

Molly Weasley claimed that during the First Wizarding War many people were "rushing into" marriage in the worry that they might not be able to do it in the near future lest they were killed.
The exact legal nature of marriage in the wizarding world is unknown, although it is known that ***Celestina Warbeck*** married three times, and divorced two times.

## Types of marriage

### Low status

There existed some notorious discrimination toward "morganatic" marriages. Many ***Pure-blood*** families disowned their own relatives for their marriage to ***Muggles***, ***half-blood***s, ***Muggle-born***s, and ***blood traitor***s,James Potter.

## Known marriages

### Magical marriages

The marriage between a witch and a wizard or a witch/wizard and a non-human, in rough chronological order.

* Mr Prewett and a woman

### Muggle marriages

The marriages between two Muggles.

 Vernon Dursley

## Behind the scenes

* ***J. K. Rowling*** has stated that ***homosexual*** relationships do not suffer as much discrimination in the wizarding world as in the ***Muggle world***, so it is possible that Template:W is legal in the wizarding world; however, this has not been confirmed.

## Appearances

* Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (First Known Appearance)

## Notes and references

1. ↑ celestina-warbeck
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Cite error: Invalid `<ref>` tag; no text was provided for refs named `OOTP6`
3. ↑ Arthur Weasley was born in February 1950 and Molly Weasley was born in October 1949. They both attended Hogwarts from 1961 to 1968, and they had their first child together, Bill, on November 1970. They must have married sometime between their graduation from Hogwarts and the birth of their first child.
4. ↑ In *Deathly Hallows*, Chapter 33, Dumbledore refers to James as Lily's "husband" in the scene where Snape asks him to protect Lily. This scene can be determined as having occurred in autumn 1979, based on the description of the setting ("...the sound of the wind in the branches" and "Though leaves and branches still flew through the night air around them..."), and J. K. Rowling's statement during her 2007 Carnegie Hall appearance that the Potters went into hiding when Lily was pregnant. James and Lily must have thus married sometime between leaving Hogwarts in June 1978 and autumn 1979.
5. ↑ Harry Potter and the Prisoner Of Azkaban (film)
6. ↑ In a deleted scene on disc two of the Blu-ray edition of ***Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow, Part 1***, Petunia tells Harry, "*I have lived in this house for twenty years*", indicating she settled at 4 Privet Drive in 1977, since the scene is set in 1997. Since the ***vernon-and-petunia-dursley*** mentions Lily was still in her final year at Hogwarts during Vernon and Petunia's engagement, and Lily's final year was 1977-1978, the engagement must have thus occurred on or after 1 September, 1977 and the wedding and moving in together by 31 December, 1977.
7. ↑ ***vernon-and-petunia-dursley***