You may have heard of someone having an “annulment” or having their marriage “annulled”. Such as the famous Britney Spears annulment after she married her high school friend Jason Allan Alexander one drunken-night, during a party trip to Las Vegas.
An annulment is a legal procedure for declaring that a marriage is not valid or that it is null, or voided. An annulment is not the same thing as a divorce because a divorce involves the court ending a legal marriage on a specific date. An annulment, in a sense, simply means declaring that a marriage was never really a legally binding agreement and that it is not a real or complete marriage. Grounds for an annulment include (these all deal with “at the time of marriage”): if either spouse was already married to someone else; either spouse was too young to be married; either spouse was under the influence of drugs or alcohol; either spouse was mentally incompetent or insane; the marriage was never consummated; if the spouses find out they are blood relatives; and prisoners sentenced to a life in prison cannot marry. The innocent party in these cases (the quote, unquote victim) can often still obtain certain the financial benefits of marriage such as spousal support, child support, helping with legal fees, and the division of property from the “null” union.