In media various over the years there’s a trope of 2 people getting so drunk that they get married and sex may or may not be implied going on afterward of course 90 percent of the time they try to stay married break up and then realize they fell in love and schmaltz ensues
most recent read of this was in vegas two girls who never met each other before were supposedly straight hangout together cause they were bored and going through issues at home start drinking and have a wild night in various clubs and casinos and wake up married to each other and after some soul searching that is basically "kissing other girls isn’t icky " and some obvious statements about race (one girl black and the other is some undescribed Asian )the above-mentioned schmaltz ensues
My question is at some point wouldn’t wherever they got married or even went to get a license say "Woah hold on there your too smashed go home and sleep it off and come back tomorrow? " and what would be the real-world legal ramifications of said union … I know once sex is had you cant (or used to be you couldn’t) get an annulment in many places …
I’m a lawyer, though not a Nevada lawyer; but it would seem to me that a marriage entered into while drunk would be voidable, meaning it’s valid at first but can be annulled; when annulment occurs, it has retrocactive effect (with some exceptions; children from the annulled marriage would continue to be considered legitimate, for instance), so it is as if the marriage had not occurred, and no alimony or distribution of community property takes place. Having had sex does not preclude annulment on this ground.
This was part of the plot of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, wherein a character awakens in a sleazy hotel to find that as a result of a drunken binge the night before, he is “irretrievably” married to a woman of Ill Repute.
There had to have been some way he could’ve gotten out of it.
“Surely this is common enough that TVTropes has a page for it,” I thought. Well, not exactly, but they do have a page for “Accidental Marriage,” which has some overlap.
And, while I wouldn’t accept TVTropes as the Final Authority, it does say
Not having sex can be grounds for annulment. Having sex does not disqualify one from annulment. As evidence of this, I present the annulled marriage of my parents.
During the debate about legalizing divorce in Italy, many decades ago, the media mentioned the folk saying “there is no divorce in Italy, and only the Catholics can get one.”
IIRC it was JPII who discontinued the time-honored practice of the Catholic Church of annulling inconvenient marriages when a well-connected parishioner wanted to remarry. However, AFAIK this had no civil legal standing as to the validity of the original marriage, it just allowed the parties to pretend for church purposes the divorce never happened so one or other could marry the next lifetime partner of their dreams in the sanctity of the church. JPII saw it was becoming a mockery and discontinued automatic nullifications. Obviously, he had never heard of Henry VIII.
Dorothy Parker wrote a similar story called “You Were Perfectly Fine” in which a young guy wakes up from a riotous and disgraceful drunken evening to find himself in the presence of a lady who it gradually dawns on him that he got married to the night before.
Catholic marriage annulments are still very much a thing; the Catholic Church maintains its own system of ecclesiastical courts, and such annulments constitute the vast majority of cases handled there. The latest statistics I could find (Link) date from 2007 and say that in that year, 58,000 Catholic marriages were annulled worldwide, 35,000 of which in the United States.
Yeah, it’s not as easy to get an annulment as it used to be, but it’s still possible. As it must be, because if nothing else, there would still be cases where, for instance, one of the partners was actually already married, and that didn’t come to light until after the wedding.