- Unintended marriages can happen anywhere, not just in Vegas.
Divorces take place all the time (unfortunately), but annulments are somewhat rarer. After all, you need to show that the entire marriage process was somehow invalid for courts to declare the marriage null and void.
One woman from Australia had a very good reason to seek an annulment, however. She didn’t even know she was getting married in the first place.
The woman had been dating her boyfriend for a few months when he invited her to a party. When she got to the location, however, she discovered a situation that looked a whole lot like a wedding.
The boyfriend asked the woman to help him stage a fake wedding. He explained he wanted to boost his social media following, and the wedding footage was just what he needed.
In the end, the woman decided to play along. It was just an act for a video, after all.
Or that’s what she thought until the man called her and asked him to list him as a dependent on her application for permanent Australian residency. When she said that wasn’t legal, he responded that it was — they were married.
He had forged the woman’s signature on official marriage documents and used their fake wedding video as proof of marriage. The unwitting bride was a bit upset, to put it mildly.
Fortunately, the Australian courts have sided with her. They’ve annulled the marriage, releasing her from the union she had no idea she entered into.
A White Party
The woman, who hasn’t been named due to Australian law, met her (now ex) boyfriend in September 2023 through a dating app. She was in her mid-20s at the time, and he was in his late 30s, and both lived in Melbourne.
The two bonded over their immigrant status and started dating. Remember that they were foreigners — that’ll be important.
After some three months, the boyfriend invited her to go to a party in Sydney with him. He told her that the party’s theme was “white” so she should wear some kind of white dress for it.
When she got to the venue, she became incredibly confused. She was the only person wearing white, and waiting for her were her boyfriend, a photographer, and a marriage officiant.
The whole thing looked a whole lot like a wedding.
“I didn’t see anybody in white, I asked him, ‘What’s happening?’ And he pulled me aside, and he told me that he’s organizing a prank wedding for his social media, to be precise, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content, and wants to start monetizing his Instagram page,” she told the court.
She was suspicious and called her friend for advice. The friend, however, told her she might as well go along with it.
After all, Australia requires couples to file a notice of intended marriage before the ceremony. She hadn’t signed anything, so it was all just pretend.
That makes sense, right? So, the woman played the bride for her boyfriend’s social media video, and that was that.
Babe, Can You Get Me into the Country?
Well, except that it wasn’t. Two months later, she got a bizarre call from the wannabe groom.
He knew she was about to send in her application for permanent residence in Australia. He asked her to put his name down as a dependent on the application, as that would help him get residency as well.
The woman naturally refused, explaining that she couldn’t do that because they weren’t married or anything. To that, the man responded by saying that they actually were.
A month before the fake wedding, the man had filed a notice of intended marriage. The woman didn’t remember signing it, but that was because she hadn’t — her boyfriend had forged her signature on the document.
That, in turn, had made their fake wedding a whole heck of a lot more real. Legally, the man said, they were married.
Not only that, he told the woman that he had “organized the marriage” to help him get residency. The gall on this guy.
‘Intimate Ceremony’
Needless to say, the woman wasn’t particularly happy with this revelation. She immediately asked the courts to annul their sham of a marriage.
The woman presented her story to the courts. As further proof that she hadn’t intended to get married for real, she stated she and her family were very religious and she never would’ve had a non-church wedding without her entire family there.
The man, for his part, disputed the woman’s story. He claimed he had proposed to her in Melbourne the day before the wedding and she had agreed to marry him in an “intimate ceremony.”
They were to have an “official” wedding at a later date in their home country, he said.
But when the judge asked him why he had arranged the wedding to take place the next day following his proposal and in Sydney instead of their home in Melbourne, the man had no response.
He also claimed that the two had been living together as a married couple following the wedding. That claim quickly went out the window, though, as the woman proved she had her own place.
In the end, the judge found the man’s story “so bereft of detail as to be near meaningless,” and promptly annulled the marriage.
Although this story had a happy(ish) ending, it does teach us a valuable lesson. Don’t walk down the aisle unless you actually mean to — no matter how many followers it might get you on social media.