Kazakh man accidentally discovers he’s been married for 34 years

Tengrinews.kz – A resident of the Zhambyl region unexpectedly discovered that he was, apparently, married to a woman he had dated briefly 34 years ago. He filed a lawsuit asking the court to declare this marriage invalid.

Case materials show that in 1991 the man was dating a girl with whom he planned to start a family. However, something in the relationship went wrong, and after four months they broke up. They did not apply to the civil registry office to register the marriage, did not sign any documents, and did not receive a marriage certificate.

Each went their own way: in 1994 the former girlfriend legally married another man, and the plaintiff himself also started a family in 2021.

However, in 2025, in the “State services” section of his banking app, the man discovered a marriage registered in 1991. In order to annul it, he had to go to court.

When examining the case materials, the court established an interesting detail: the signatures in the civil status act entry for the marriage did not belong to either the plaintiff or the defendant, but were made by a third party. Moreover, the original civil registry book for that year had long since been destroyed after the expiration of the storage period.

The court also questioned a close friend and a neighbor of the plaintiff, who confirmed that they had never attended any marriage registration and had not signed any documents. A representative of the civil registry office, involved in the case as a third party, did not appear at the hearing.

As a result, the court concluded that the registration of the marriage in 1991 had been carried out with a gross violation of the law: the parties were not personally present at its registration, and such a “remote marriage” is not provided for by legislation. The act entry was declared invalid.