Legal Question in Family Law in New York

Re: NYS Divorce Laws

There may be circustances that will allow you to annul the marriage but brief marriage on its own is not a category which will allow you to forgo a divorce in NY

Should you like to discuss this or any other legal matter, you can e-mail me for more information about low cost face-to-face, on-line, or a telephone consultation with a lawyer in our office.

Re: NYS Divorce Laws

You said that you "filed for separation on December 22, 2005." I assume that this means that you signed a separation agreement on that date. If that is true, you probably realize that this will enable you (or your spouse) to file for a divorce as of December 22, 2006.

If you'd like to end your marriage sooner, you could seek an annulment of your marriage. Annulment means, in effect, that your marriage was invalid from the start for one (or more) of several reasons.

The grounds for annulment in NYS are: bigamy (one of you was married to someone else at the time of your wedding); blood relation (you are a close relative of your spouse); underage (one of you was underage at the time of the wedding); non-consummation (you and your spouse have not had sex since the wedding); fraud (your spouse deceived you so significantly that you would not have gone through with the wedding had you known the truth); mental retardation or mental defect (one of you had mental problems at the time of the wedding that made you incapable to legally consent to marriage); or coercion (one of you was forced into the wedding and did not freely consent to be married).

If one of you were to seek to have the marriage annulled, he/she would have to claim that one of the above grounds applies, and the other person would have to not contest the annulment.

If you are both willing to seek an annulment, then you should be able to have your marriage annulled well before December 2006. The time it takes would depend, among other factors, on the county where you might file the annulment action.