News and Views
Media Coverage

Why It Won't Be Easy for Love Is Blind Contestants to Get Their Rushed Marriages Annulled

Entertainment Weekly

If love isn’t blind, can it be annulled?

That’s the question we had once we finished binging our way through Netflix’s addictive new reality dating show, Love Is Blind. Left wondering if the marriages between Cameron and Lauren and Amber and Barnett would go the distance and what would happen if they immediately decided the next day that they had made a mistake, we reached out to Norman Heller (of Blank Rome LLP) — one of New York’s top matrimonial lawyers who regularly represents the rich and famous — to ask him for the lowdown on dissolving a mistake marriage.

How easy or difficult is it to annul a rushed wedding that you, perhaps, instantly regret?

I’m going to talk about it New York-centric because annulments are treated differently in every state. There’s no one set rule. It’s the same for divorce. So I know two states: I know Connecticut where I practice and I know New York. In New York annulments are a disfavored form of judicial relief to end a marriage. You could say that’s true probably elsewhere too. The reason it’s a disfavored view is that the people were validly married. There was a priest or rabbi or justice of the peace or they went to the town hall, right? So they were married. An annulment doesn’t just end the marriage or dissolve a marriage as a divorce does, an annulment is a judicial declaration that, in effect, the marriage never happened. It’s like you’re retroactively canceling a marriage and so that is not something they want to do. So the judges say, “Hey, if you want to end the marriage, get divorced.” It’s going to be a rare subset of cases where we’re going to declare, as a matter of policy, that the marriage never happened. Because it’s as if it never happened — that’s what an annulment is.

To read the full interview, please click here.

"Why It Won't Be Easy for Love Is Blind Contestants to Get Their Rushed Marriages Annulled," by Ruth Kinane was published in Entertainment Weekly on February 27, 2020.