There is a wedding that should have happened four months later than it did.
A widow, 59, collecting survivor benefits on her late husband's record. She remarries in March. Her 60th birthday is in July.
Those four months cost her the survivor benefit. Permanently, for as long as the new marriage lasts.
Had she waited until August, she would have kept every dollar and the new marriage would have changed nothing at all.
This is the strangest corner of Social Security. Remarriage can be completely harmless or quietly expensive, and which one you get depends on your age, the type of benefit, and whose record it sits on.
Nobody at the county clerk's office is going to mention it. So let's go through it properly, because for some people this is a genuine reason to move a date on a calendar.