Am I Really Married?

I’m in the process of completing my retirement paperwork. For context, I’m retiring on the same day from two systems—the University of California (where I work now) and CalPERS (which administers the pension fund for the university system I previously worked for). My husband, who worked for a state agency, retired from CalPERS in 2016 and has been drawing his pension as well as using his retiree health benefits for both of us. We elected pensions with full survivor continuance for all three.

So here’s what’s weird. I got a message from the UC retirement system saying that the marriage certificate I uploaded as support for him being my survivor won’t serve. We were married in a church in 1983 and have a certificate signed by the officiant that we’ve always used as official documentation. The analyst who messaged me says the certificate is “ceremonial” and doesn’t show that it was filed with a county clerk. I had three options to resolve this, including the easiest one, which was to upload a previous 1040 that showed we are married filing jointly with both of our signatures.

CalPERS has never said a word about the marriage certificate, not when we separately filed for our pensions, and not when he had to prove I was eligible for health coverage. I keep a scanned copy of the marriage certificate handy for when they ask for it every few years (to reconfirm the spousal coverage). CalPERS has been much easier to deal with in general than the UC counterpart, which leads me to think they’re more competent with more modern processes. It’s possible that this UC analyst was wrong or overthinking things.

The immediate problem is resolved by the 1040, but now I’m wondering if I should follow up with the county clerk where we got our marriage license, which happens to be a different county from where the ceremony was performed. It might make sense to have an “official”certificate in case this problem ever happens again. And it makes me wonder—did the “ceremonial” certificate ever get properly filed, and if not, are we really married? (I’m mostly kidding about the last question, but the whole thing made me wonder.) Weird.