In Lebanon, civil marriage has become a major key-site for the struggle between supposedly opposite visions of the political and social system: sectarianism and secularism. Along with the implementation of a civil personal status code, it has been at the core of different civil society initiatives in recent years. As a political matter, the advocacy for the legalization of civil marriage has been analyzed through the works of activists aiming to impose a culture of secularism (Abillama , 2018; Mikdashi, 2014). Though they share a common aim, namely the end of the confessional system as prescribed in the post-Taëf Lebanese constitution, activists for a civil marriage do not agree on the same strategies to pursue it. Thus, another way to look at their battle consists in examining the transformation of their agendas since the end of the civil war and to analyze how it shaped new paradigms and practices of citizenship, as well as contending visions of sectarianism, secularism and the state. In particular, by focusing on these transformations, I argue that the appropriation of public spaces by activists can be conceptualized as an emotional politics (Ahmed 2004) which paradoxically run parallel to the privatization of the battle and the assignment of a liberal paradigm to it, that of contract-making based on the individual will. At the same time, civil marriage is a social and commercial phenomenon and little attention has been given to the formation of a civil marriage industry and people’s experiences, especially when it comes to organize and celebrate it overseas. Drawing on an ethnographic material I collected between 2015 and 2019 in Lebanon and in the Republic of Cyprus among activists, law professionals, civil servants and couples, I will combine these two approaches to civil marriage to analyze the social and legal implications of contract-making in marriage and family issues, as well as the circulation of marriage narratives, representations and practices between Lebanon and Cyprus by arguing that the ritualization of civil marriage contribute to the reproduction of social differences along the lines of religious, class, gender and status. Ultimately, as scholars has recently contended (Deeb, 2020), my analysis will encourage to think critically the use of the sectarian lens in the study of the Lebanese society.