A wedding in your twenties used to be the safe bet, the one everyone expected to last. Now it is increasingly the marriage that ends first. Couples who said their vows during the pandemic, or soon after, are filing for annulment at a pace that should worry anyone still planning a big church wedding.
What The Pandemic Really Did To Young Couples
Lockdown pushed a lot of relationships into fast-forward. Isolation, financial strain, and the sense that life could end at any moment convinced many partners to skip the years of dating and jump straight to marriage. Some couples described feeling pressure to prove their devotion through crisis, rather than through time spent together. Once the world reopened, so did the cracks: unresolved incompatibilities, financial stress that never eased, and partners who had married someone they barely knew outside a crisis.
Add to that the ordinary pressures facing anyone under 30, unstable income, the cost of renting or raising children, family expectations around having kids early, and a rushed marriage can collapse fast.
Why Leaving Is So Hard In The Philippines
Here the problem compounds, because the Philippines still has no divorce law. Couples who want out have only one legal route: annulment under the Family Code, built on narrow grounds such as lack of parental consent, fraud, force or intimidation, impotence, or psychological incapacity under Article 36. That last ground has become the default option for most petitioners, since things like infidelity or abandonment are not independent grounds on their own.
The process demands psychiatric evaluation, court testimony, and proof that the incapacity existed before the wedding, even if it only became obvious afterward. Lawyers, filing fees, and expert witnesses can push total costs well past a hundred thousand pesos, with some cases reportedly climbing toward half a million. For someone in their twenties, often without savings or a stable job, that bill alone can trap them in a marriage they have already left emotionally.
A System Built For A Different Generation
A pending divorce bill in the Senate would widen the grounds for ending a marriage and speed up the process, but conservative lawmakers continue to resist it, preferring tweaks to the existing annulment law instead. Until that changes, young Filipinos stuck in marriages that started too fast have only one expensive, slow, and uncertain exit. For a generation already squeezed by debt and gig work, that is not a safety net. It is another cost of growing up too quickly.
