I do, I do, I do, but do I really mean it?

Monday morning in Cape Town's marriage office in Home Affairs is not boom time. Everyone awaits permits. Permission: the dreaded word.

Marriage is a permission. Oaths are taken and promises made.

Princess at Counter 15, keeper of the appointment book, is a scowl in glasses. She is helpful but it is as if she is reading the words off a screen that is just out of focus. "I am," she says, "at wits' end." I think she's talking about witnesses.

"Lady," a woman taps my arm urgently, "are you seeking husband?" The fact that the registry office is within Home Affairs, where people wait for passports, brings its own complications.

Some of the beige carpet tiles have been replaced with different colours. There is a bunch of dried grass and a South African flag in a corner like a folded butterfly. A man with a Mujahedin beard is marrying a tent in sunglasses.

In my 20s I was addicted to early-relationship love (okay, let's call it sex) and got married to anyone who asked me. My first marriage - in the year of the Edible Panty - was at Caxton Hall registry office, where Elizabeth Taylor got married and where someone had recently been shot. I travelled there by bus in a dress I'd made out of a curtain. It made me look like a burst sofa.

There was a long queue and the man in front turned and said: "Is this your first? It's my sixth." He added: "Money can't buy you love but it can buy you a Thai wife."

My husband-to-be stamped out a cigarette just before the vows. When the magistrate said: "You can kiss the bride," he kissed the witness. On the bus home he confessed he had always loved her more than me.

The second time, I turned up with flowers in my hair, a poem by TS Eliot, a dog on a string, a Neil Young LP and a pack of 30 Rothmans. There is nothing like an after-vow gasper to settle the nerves. But the documentation was not in order and we were both quite relieved.

The advantage of a registry office wedding: you can shrink it at the last minute without having to spend the rest of your life paying off a wedding planner.

Another time I got married in a registry office in Athens. My husband, who had hair like liquorice and wore Cuban heels, said: "The mother must not know." But when we got home, the mother did know and the grandmother and the great-grandmother. They shouted in Greek and I heard the word xeni (foreigner) and the word xippy. I still had flowers in my hair.

I have never been married in a church, but when I go to weddings I am assaulted by their beauty, the artifice, the authenticity. The articulation of the Christian wedding service is like the voice of justice: for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish.

When it comes to registry office weddings I do - and I don't. Would one find it harder to discard vows made beneath the eye of God? I will never find out. LS

• @Hellschreiber