I was 28 when I left my husband, 29 when I finally decided—against my family’s wishes and without their support—to file for annulment. I was 33 when I received the court decision. And on the phone that day, I felt like the oldest 33-year-old in the world.

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Under Philippine law, two people wishing to end their marriage have limited options. They can file for legal separation, which will allow them to separate their possessions and live apart, but does not legally end a marital union and thus does not permit remarriage. They can file for divorce if they are among the estimated 5 percent of the population that is Muslim and is governed by the Code of Muslim Personal Laws.

Or they can get an annulment, which in the Philippines is a lengthy and expensive court proceeding. (An ecclesiastical annulment, granted through a Church tribunal, is a separate procedure, without which a Catholic cannot get remarried in the Church. Pope Francis has said that the Church should “streamline” this process, which can take up to a decade.) An annulment ends a marriage, but differs from divorce in important ways. The parties, for instance, must prove that the marriage was never valid to begin with. Under Philippine law, reasons can include one or both parties having been below the age of 18 when they got married, either party having an incurable sexually transmitted disease, or cases of polygamy or mistaken identity.

Divorce has not always been banned in the Philippines. The Spanish colonizers who ruled the island until the late 19th century imposed their own Catholic traditions, allowing “relative divorce,” or legal separation, in cases involving adultery or one spouse joining a religious order. But the relevant law declared that “so great is the tie and force of marriage, that when legally contracted, it cannot be dissolved even if one of the parties should turn heretic, or Jew, or Moor, or even commit adultery.” After the Spanish era, divorce laws depended on the colonizer. The Americans, who acquired the nation in 1898 following the Spanish-American War, allowed divorce, but only on the grounds of adultery or concubinage. The Japanese, who occupied the Philippines during World War II, introduced liberal divorce laws. Following liberation, however, divorce was once again outlawed—except among the Muslim minority—under the Philippine Civil Code of 1949.

If marriage is essentially a contract, the difference between an annulment and a divorce is the difference between declaring the contract null—because, say, it was signed under conditions of duress or fraud—and terminating it.

In the case of marriage, declaring the contract null is a far more difficult proposition. Infidelity and physical abuse, for example, are not on the list of acceptable reasons for a marriage to be declared invalid under Philippine law. A petitioner seeking to leave a marriage for those or any number of other reasons has to try to prove that his or her spouse is suffering from “psychological incapacity” such as narcissistic personality disorder.