Ask a Lawyer - Archive

I am wondering if I would be eligible for an annulment. We have been married for about 14 months but have never lived together or had any joint accounts, etc. My husband will not dispute.

In most states, the answer to your question would be no. Legal annulments, in contrast to religious annulments, are notoriously difficult to obtain. You can't get a legal annulment, for example, just because you and your spouse haven't been married long, or because your spouse lied to you about whether he or she is gay, or because you didn't know your spouse had been married before, or because you didn't know your spouse was a drug addict or a convicted sex offender, or (in most states) because you and your spouse didn't have sex after you married. In the states that do annulments at all (and not all states do), it usually comes down to whether one of the spouses was already married at the time of the wedding, or whether the two spouses were too close in relation (like first cousins) and didn't know it at the time they married.