Many people believe a marriage can be annulled simply because it was brief. That is not the case. In Florida, the length of the marriage is not by itself a ground for annulment. An annulment declares a marriage void or voidable because a legal defect existed at the time of the wedding, not because the couple decided to separate quickly.
Void marriages are treated as never having existed. Examples include marriages where one spouse was already legally married, or where the parties are too closely related.
Voidable marriages may be set aside when a spouse lacked capacity or consent due to factors present at the time of marriage, such as fraud, duress, mental incapacity, or one party being under the statutory age without proper consent, or when the marriage was never consummated.
A short marriage may be emotionally painful, but courts focus on legal defects that made the marriage invalid from the start, or that it was never consummated. If no such defects exist, the only option is divorce, with everything that comes along with it.
