When a married couple discovers they don’t want to be married anymore, it’s not uncommon to look for a way out of the situation without a divorce. Some people have religious or moral objections to divorce.
Others may fear that a divorce is too expensive or that they will be stuck paying a large amount of alimony. The couple may decide to look back at the circumstances under which they got married in order to see if there’s an easy way out of the situation.
In most cases, there is not an easy way out of the marriage. If you have a minor mistake on your marriage certificate, such as a misspelling of a name, that is not enough to make your marriage invalid.
If there was a major problem with how the marriage occurred, however, you may not be legally married. For example, if you got a marriage license but never performed the ceremony, you are not legally married. If the person who married you was not licensed to perform weddings in your state, you are probably not legally married.
In some cases, you may be able to get an annulment. An annulment is a legal procedure that dissolves a couple’s marital status by showing that a valid marriage never existed. Some people think that annulments can be done in cases involving short marriages but the length of the marriage does not affect whether or not you can get an annulment.
To get an annulment, generally you must prove that one of the parties was underage or legally married at the time of the marriage, that one of the spouses entered the marriage under duress or did not have the mental capacity to consent to marriage, or that the marriage was entered into fraudulently.
Annulments are much less common than divorces, because the grounds for an annulment are so narrow.