OK, THIS LETTER to Pete Vere says what I was thinking (but hadn’t put into words): Most bad marriages are marriages–no annulment for you. I entirely agree with Amy Welborn’s and Vere’s thoughts on the ways in which our attitudes toward marriage, big costly weddings, and premarital sex have made good marriages more difficult, and that’s why I linked to their posts on the subject, but I really agree that you can’t have a definition of marriage in which you’re not married unless your choice was made in the best possible fashion. Here are the key passages: “Amy mentions that people get married who shouldn’t. I agree. However, making a bad choice, even an idiotic choice, is not the same thing as having an inability to choose.

“…What does this mean? Jerks can marry. Head-in-the-clouds 19 year-old couples can marry. Almost anyone can marry.”

Civil divorce is a separate issue, though it has its own problems. Obviously I’m not making any judgments about particular annulments–I’d never pretend to know “which ones were real.” And I know it can come off as arrogant talking about this subject at all, since I’m not married; I really hope I don’t sound like a jerk. But I don’t know what else to say–telling people, “You were never really married,” when they were, is not kosher at all. I know a bad marriage is a terrible thing to go through–one of the worst–and again, separation or civil divorce are very different from annulment. And I agree with pretty much everyone that the best way to help Catholics make better marriages is to focus on marriage preparation, resisting the contraceptive culture, and in general helping people understand what they’re supposed to be doing. But yeah, as far as I can tell from very limited knowledge, there are also too many annulments in this country; some marriages are being called invalid for insufficient reasons; and I do worry about what happens to the people who want to argue that their marriage was real.