Dating advice (catholic perspective)

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chevalier said:
There is absolutely nothing wrong declaring a marriage null when it’s null. In fact, sometimes letting it rest would be no solution because convalidation would be required. It’s true that there are some stats showing that around 90% of American nullity decrees are reversed by Rome on appeal (this doesn’t mean 90% of nullity decrees granted, it means 90% of the appealed ones), in which case your skepticism is understandable. However, the sacrament of marriage is a consensual “affair”. You can’t effect it by words alone. There’s no valid marriage under force or by fraud. Same way, if someone is in a severe mentally debilitating condition, that’s no marriage because the person just can’t make the promise he’s trying to make. There’s nothing wrong in not insisting that those people do live together or stay unmarried in the practical sense or something like that.
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Thing is, I think most people probably can’t ever be completely sure they’re in a valid marriage. It’s not just extremes that make it invalid, lack of openness to life, not intending to follow through with obligations of marriage, not fully understanding what you’re consenting to, huge incidence of mental illness in the population (most of it mild though).

None of those things and a bunch of others like it are ever “perfect”, so if a person gets really sick of their spouse, or falls in love with someone else, they might come to emphasize those flaws either in themselves or the spouse and believe the marriage isn’t valid.

It doesn’t even have to be a conscious process, once the love is gone, once you’re sick of your partner you might even forget the good things, and focus on the negatives in the marriage and at the time the marriage took place.

You might think that good Catholics wouldn’t do this, but we’re already talking about good Catholics. “Bad” Catholics probably wouldn’t even care about getting an annulment, they’d just get divorced and remarried.

And there is always the possibility that your spouse will lose faith, or become a cafeteria Catholic.
 
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