Freedom to Remarry: Two More Ways To Escape Alcatraz

Church annulments are not legally binding. You need an annulment from the civil courts to remarry. Only civil courts can dissolve marriages.

Remarriage signifies a personal victory over the dark demons and gremlins that taunt us, whispering words to dissuade us from taking another chance to regain our emotional foothold. Samuel Johnson, the English critic who married a widow twice his age, was a great believer in remarriage. He told James Boswell, a Scottish lawyer who wrote The Life of Samuel Johnson in 1791, that a man's second marriage represents "the triumph of hope over experience" even if it is "far from being natural for a man and a woman to live in a state of marriage" that all the motives they have as individuals and all the restraints of society "are hardly sufficient to keep them together" (Bate, Samuel Johnson, 1975).

"The chain of wedlock," wrote Alexander Dumas, "is so heavy that it takes two to carry it, sometimes three." If your marital surroundings begin to look like the confining walls of Alcatraz, one of America's most formidable prisons located near the Golden Gate bridge in scenic San Francisco Bay before it was closed, there are two additional ways to cut the bars, break the chains and move on with your life, thus:

1) When your spouse is missing or has disappeared for four years (as required by Art. 41 of the Family Code) or two years if in the disappearance of your spouse, there was danger of death (under the surrounding circumstances provided by Art. 391 of the Civil Code) and you have a well-founded belief that your lost spouse is already dead.
The lost or absent spouse provision are legal oddities that may have turned intentional desertion into a ground for the so-called "poor man's divorce." It is also the equivalent of the Enoch Arden law which could be used as a defense in bigamy cases.

2)When you are married to a foreigner and that your alien spouse has obtained a divorce decree against you in a foreign land, capacitating that alien spouse to remarry (Art. 26, par.2,Family Code).

This is one rare instance in which the Family Code recognizes one type of foreign divorce in the Philippines. Properly invoked, Art. 26 of the Family Code could open an alternative for you to make you regain your right to remarry under Philippine law. Subject to some exceptions, a clear passage to matrimonial liberation could be available. Art. 26 is an important law because it enables ("capacitates") Filipinos to remarry if the marriage between a Filipino and a foreigner is validly celebrated and a divorce is thereafter validly obtained abroad by the alien spouse, capacitating the alien spouse to remarry. Once this happens, you are granted a "capacity to remarry" under Philippine law. Before you can remarry in the Philippines, you must get an authenticated copy of the foreign divorce decree from the appropriate Philippine consulate or embassy abroad. To be on the safe side, you may have to file a petition in court based on Art. 26, par. 2 of the Family Code. The court will determine the veracity of your allegations and evidence. After you get this judicial imprimatur on your capacity to remarry, you have to proceed to the civil register and record this decision. Once the civil register gives you a marriage license and after you have complied with a few more administrative requirements, you may be allowed to remarry in the Philippines without breaching a penal statute. If you choose the first remedy (declaration of presumptive death), you are required to initiate a summary court proceeding to have your absent spouse declared presumptively dead.

In void marriages, once there is a final and executory decision that at least one of the parties to a marriage is psychologically incapacitated and the period of appeal has lapsed, both parties could regain their rights to remarry following the compliance of a few more recording and procedural requirements. The ultimate benefit that could be derived from Art. 36 is the freedom from the bondage of a loveless marriage. Once the legal impediment is removed by the court, both parties are allowed by law to find and marry new partners. Even if you are the spouse adjudged to be psychologically incapacitated, you still have the capacity to remarry under Philippine law. Strangely, just because you have been judicially found to be psychologically incapacitated, you are not legally barred from finding another person to take as your new spouse.

The feeling of regaining your right to remarry under any of the above methods is similar to having obtained a decree of divorce in a foreign jurisdiction, without the expense of leaving the Philippines. This somehow levels the playing field for those who are married but could not afford to go abroad, get naturalized as a U.S. citizen, obtain a quick decree of absolute divorce in Nevada, return to the Philippines, regain their Filipino citizenship back and remarry the spouse of their fantasy in the Philippines.

Before remarriage becomes particularly appealing, make sure that your previous marriage has been properly dissolved and liquidated. You may remarry as many times as you wish, but your marriages, unless you are a Muslim, must be seriatim, one at a time. You can legally enjoy marital bliss and peace of mind only when your prior marriage has been terminated in ways allowed by Philippine law.