A judge has annulled a marriage arranged by two mothers who agreed that their son and daughter ought to marry soon after being introduced to each other.
The parents were so keen on their children getting married that they could not even wait for the date given to them by the Public Registry, so they organised a wedding reception more than a month before the actual wedding day.
Madam Justice Abigail Lofaro described the marriage as a “textbook case” of an invalid consent at the time of the exchange of vows. She said that from evidence heard in court, there was no doubt that this consent “was obtained through moral and physical violence”.
She heard how it all began when the couple’s mothers discussed the possibility of arranging a marriage between their children. They decided to go ahead and arranged a first date.
The families met at the home of the man’s parents. The men were in the sitting room and the women in the kitchen. According to religious tradition, the woman whose marriage is being fixed must leave the room and join the men, where she would meet the man whom she is to wed.
But this plan failed because the woman, who at the time was just 18 years old, refused to meet her prospective husband.
The first date took place the following day in the presence of the groom’s sister where the couple met for just one hour. The parents had agreed that the couple would date for six months before they got married. They even fixed an appointment with the Imam to discuss the marriage.
A few days after the first meeting, the man’s family invited the in-laws over for dinner but as soon as they arrived, the woman and her father got involved in a big argument during which the father slapped and kicked his daughter and had to be restrained.
Later that evening, he threw his daughter out of his home and she went to live with her future in-laws, staying there for nearly three weeks. It later transpired that the argument was over a female friend of whom the father did not approve.
The man’s parents started to put pressure on the couple to marry because they could not live under the same roof unless married. The mother called the public registry and was given an appointment for the wedding. But this was too far off, so a wedding reception was organised a month prior to the actual civil wedding.
The couple told the court they had “no option” but to get married since their parents had struck all the agreements beforehand. The court heard how, after just 10 days of marriage, the couple separated and both returned to their parents’ homes.
Handing down her judgment, Madam Justice Lofaro spoke about the parents’ insistence on the marriage and observed that they had made their children’s lives “miserable” when they did not obey their orders.
The court upheld the request for the marriage to be annulled.