You can’t trust everything you see on social media, not even the sanctity of marriage.
According to The Guardian, an Australian woman has successfully applied for an annulment after she believed she was taking part in a sham wedding with the groom in order to boost his Instagram following, only to learn that she’d actually been married.
As the unnamed woman told the court, she had met the man on a dating app, and after three months, he’d invited her to a party where she was told everyone would be wearing white. When she arrived, she discovered that she was the only one in white and that the man had “organized a wedding.”
“He told me that he’s organizing a prank wedding for his social media,” she said. “To be precise, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content and wants to start monetizing his Instagram page.”
The bride went through with the ceremony and even acted along to “make it look real.”
She then learned that the wedding didn’t just look real and was, in fact, legally binding when the groom told her that he needed to be married to help him apply for permanent residence.
The groom, meanwhile, argued that he proposed to the bride a day before the wedding and that they’d agreed to hold an “intimate” ceremony before a more “official” one on a later date. That didn’t pass muster with the judge, who ruled that the groom’s version of the story was “so bereft of detail as to be near meaningless” and agreed to annul the marriage.
“The applicant did not have a single family member or friend present at the alleged wedding ceremony,” the judge said.