What is an Annulment?

Many have heard the term “annulment,” but many do not have a clear idea of what it means. It’s a common term used to describe ending a marriage quickly or ending a marriage through approval by the Catholic Church. However, a civil annulment is very different from a religious annulment. 

In legal terms, an annulment is a retroactive motion that declares a marriage invalid from the start, almost as if it had never taken place. While divorce also involves ending a relationship, divorce is filed when the law sees the marriage as valid and existing. Annulment is almost like erasing the fact the marriage ceremony happened. 

Each state treats different divorce and annulment slightly differently, and Toronto has a set of requirements that must be met in order for the annulment to be on the table. 

A list of possible “grounds” of a marriage that can end in annulment has been compiled by the divorce attorneys in Ontario below:

• The couple is related by blood.
• One spouse in the couple was still married during the second marriage (this is also known as bigamy).
• The person requesting the annulment was under the legal age of consent (eighteen) at the time of the union.
• The marriage happened under false pretenses, meaning that either spouse lied in order to marry the person. The spouse’s fraud has to damage the pillars of the marriage. For example, if someone gets married for a green card without letting the other spouse know their ulterior motives, this is grounds for annulment.
• One of the spouses has an “incurable physical incapacity,” which is most often a reference to the couple being unable to have sexual relations.
• One or both spouses was of “unsound mind” during the marriage ceremony, meaning that they did not understand and appreciate the nature and duties of marriage. This includes intoxication by drugs or alcohol.
• One spouse forced the other to get married.

For the annulment to be granted, the person who is asking for it carries the burden of proof to show the courts that at least one of the above reasons existed at the time of the marriage. If this burden is not satisfied and the person does not show adequate proof of their reasoning, the judge will not grant an annulment.

Annulment often occurs when it is requested shortly after the marriage, which helps show that one or both of the spouses was not in the right state of mind to get married. A famous example of an annulment is the brief first marriage of pop singer Britney Spears. Spears married a childhood friend in a Vegas wedding ceremony after a night of drinking. Fifty-five hours later, Spears’s management team convinced her to annul the marriage. The grounds that Spears filed upon was that she “lacked understanding of her actions, to the extent that she was incapable of agreeing to the marriage.” 

If you need help establishing a burden of proof when requesting an annulment, contact the family court lawyers in Ontario at the Zimmerman Law LLP.