When they walked into the Ramsey County records office to get a marriage license this month, Jesse Hunt and Taylor Russell had their wedding plans mapped out.

The Blaine couple will have a small ceremony April 29, the date Hunt first asked Russell out five years ago, and then a larger celebration next year. But before they showed up in the county office, with their 4-month-old son in a carrier, they had not planned for the five-day wait the state of Minnesota requires before issuing a marriage license.

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Minnesota is one of only two states in the nation with such a long waiting period; the majority of states do not make couples wait at all to obtain their licenses, according to information from Hennepin County. With the support of the Legislature and county officials, Minnesota may join the majority this year.

“We would welcome the change,” said Chris Burns, communications manager at St. Paul-Ramsey County Public Health, which handles marriage licenses.

The five-day wait is inconvenient for couples, counties and the judiciary, supporters of the change say. It doesn’t take counties five days to prepare the license, they note. And the waiting period means couples either return to the licensing office five days later to pick up their marriage license or have it mailed to them, which requires extra staff time.

In Minnesota, couples can get the five-day wait waived if they ask — but only if they get a judge to sign off on the waiver. That sometimes means couples have to travel to a separate location and take up a judge’s time.

“We believe the waiting period is burdensome,” Mark Chapin, Hennepin County’s auditor and treasurer told senators late last month.

Hennepin County issues about 9,000 marriage licenses. Of those, 200 to 300 couples had to get a judicial waiver. And even if they are applying for a license at a service center elsewhere in the county, those seeking a waiver had to go to the courthouse downtown Minneapolis to get it, then return to a service center to get the license.

In Hennepin County, most couples asking for a waiver did not know about the wait or did not want to wait, Chapin said.

And the judges always sign off on the waiver.

“We could not find a case where the judge has said, ‘This does not meet the standard that they need,’ ” said Rep. Dennis Smith, R-Maple Grove. He is sponsoring the measure in the state House.

In Wisconsin, which allows people to pick up their license six calendar days after the application, couples who want to avoid the license lag simply have to pay an extra $25 fee, according to Wisconsin’s Dane County.

In researching the Minnesota waiting period, there was no clear legislative history describing the reasoning behind the wait, which first appears in Minnesota law in 1931, Chapin said. But the researchers did come up with a theory.

“During the Great Depression, there was a lot of concern about whether people could support each other and support their children,” he said. The wait may have given the engaged enough pause to confirm that support.

The waiting period has some support from Liz Michaels of White Bear Lake.

“This is serious,” Michaels said as she and her fiance Anders Garbe applied for a marriage license in mid-April for their May 6 wedding. Neither she nor Garbe knew about the wait before applying, but Michaels said she kind of liked it.

Even if Minnesota eliminates the waiting period, couples would still need two witnesses and an officiant, such as a judge or a member of the clergy, to actually get hitched.

House and Senate committees have both approved eliminating the wait. The measure awaits final floor votes before it can be sent to Gov. Mark Dayton for his signature.