My fh is Orthodox i am Catholic we both want church weddings

Honestly, based on your description of the situation, my first suggest is premarital counseling. Conflicting firmly held religious beliefs are a significant issue for an engaged couple to work through. Your use of "he's unwilling" and "I refuse," suggest it might help a lot to get some help with communication and compromise skills. Good luck!

You need to sort this out together ASAP. If neither of you are willing to compromise, you could end up having a lot of problems in the future. I don’t see why either needs to give up your faith, but when you marry someone who practices a different religion you have to find some middle ground. It’s not even just for the wedding. What will you do if you have children? Or on holidays? Or if one of you dies unexpectedly, what will happen with the funeral? As far as the wedding, you won’t know what a priest will or will not be ok with until you speak with them. There’s millions of people who marry with different beliefs, and can usually find a compromise without too much difficulty. But if the two of you are really dead set against everything the other stands for, you really should work that out before moving on with any planning.

Exactly what MOB So Cal said. Have you talked about how religion will look in your marriage? How will you raise your children (if you decide to have any)? These are all big, important questions that need to be answered.

I agree with the PP. Perhaps could you have two ceremonies (different days) and only one reception on another day? it seems like a lot but you both need to talk. communication and compromise is HUGE. Best of luck!

My FH is catholic and I am not and it was suggested that maybe we do a small catholic ceremony in addition to the bigger one. That may be an option. I did not feel strongly enough to do that, we will have the Catholic ceremony (only not a full mass) because it's important to FH and I do not have strong religious ties. I also always knew a Catholic ceremony would be important to FH long before we were engaged. I'd accepted that and I felt by doing the half mass we were compromising. FH knew I was uncomfortable not being able to take communion at my own wedding. I am also ok with raising kids Catholic. He was not previously registered with a local parish (he's not from here), so we picked a Parish to attend together and we've been going to mass together every weekend. Even as a non-catholic, I feel comfortable in this church. I think it is important that you all find a place (no matter which religion) that you're both comfortable in. Best of luck.

We have discussed what we would do for children and we decided we would practice both religions so we aren't worried about that aspect, we've been doing both for years. We just want one ceremony however and finding the compromise on a ceremony type has been hard. Thank you all for your input! We are going to meet with a couple different priests to see what they say!

View Quoted Comment

Thank you Sarah! I always thought I was okay with an orthodox wedding, until we started sorting details and I found that my dad cannot walk me down the aisle. That has become my biggest issue so far. We've talked about doing a mixed ceremony we just need to find a person to perform it and at what type of church we would want. We're not really fighting and we're willing to compromise, we both just have things we would rather not give up.

View Quoted Comment

I totally understand that! My FH and I didn't quite agree on the "no communion" part at first. He really wanted it and couldn't picture not doing it. I felt I'd already compromised on the catholic thing anyways and was very uncomfortable with it. In the end, the priest offered us 2 choices for times 1:00 before Sat. mass or 5:30 after mass. We both preferred 5:30 and thought at that time the hour long ceremony was too long. It kinda solved the problem for us.