Haidee Dela Guerra wants her maiden surname, Sanchez, back after her failed marriage. But a Philippine court denied her petition to void her marriage to her husband in March 2023. Nearly three years later, she still needs the law to change before she can change her name for good.

“It pained me more than separating from my husband,” Haidee tells TIME. “That was my only chance to earn back my old name, to be single again. And the court denied it.”

Haidee, 42, had filed before a local family court to invalidate her 2012 marriage in 2019. She’s been de facto separated from her husband for more than a decade, and in her court case, she accused him of physical and verbal abuse as well as infidelity. But the judge overseeing her case ruled that Haidee’s marriage “cannot be dissolved at the whim of the parties” and that “any doubt should be resolved in favor of the marriage and against its dissolution and nullity,” according to a written ruling reviewed by TIME.

Since then, Haidee has joined a group of advocates—the Divorce Pilipinas Coalition— who are tirelessly visiting congressional buildings across Manila, lobbying for the passage of divorce legislation in the only country in the world, other than the Vatican, without such a law. But in a nation dominated by Catholic voters and Catholic interest groups, the road to passing a national divorce law has been anything but smooth.

“I don’t understand why they’re depriving us of this,” Haidee says. “It’s so harrowing. You’re obviously separated from your spouse, but you’re still shackled to him. The nightmare persists. You’re trapped in your own marriage.”

Besides unresolved name issues, the failed annulment also means Haidee’s husband still has partial rights to her properties. And, despite their separation, if she pursues a new relationship, she could be held criminally liable for adultery.

But change could be on the horizon. In 2024, the Philippines’ House of Representatives—the lower chamber of the legislature—passed a bill that aimed to institutionalize absolute divorce, which terminates a valid marriage, granting singlehood and the right to remarry to parties. It had tried the same six years earlier under a different President. 

While neither of those bills succeeded in becoming law, Haidee, like many others in the Divorce Pilipinas Coalition, sees the attempts as signs to keep pushing. 

“I don't lose hope,” she says. “As long as there are people who are there to support divorce’s passage in the Philippines, I won’t lose hope.”

The archipelago now known as the Philippines is no stranger to divorce. As a Spanish colony from the 16th to 19th centuries, the country adhered to Las Siete Partidas. Under this legal code, divorce a mensa et thoro (”from table and hearth”) was allowed: couples could live separately if there were adultery, heresy, or if one of the parties wanted to join a religious order. But the marriage wouldn’t officially be severed.

After the Spanish-American War, the Philippines became a U.S. colony, and absolute divorce was allowed if the husband committed concubinage or if the wife committed adultery. Then came the Japanese occupation during World War II, and the grounds for absolute divorce were expanded widely.

The Philippines eventually achieved independence in 1946. But Christianity, which Spanish colonization left behind, persisted, and unlike in other former colonies such as Mexico, attempts to legalize absolute divorce in the Philippines after liberation failed. By 1949, the Philippine Civil Code repealed all laws relating to absolute divorce, with an exemption for Muslims. More critically, the Civil Code enshrined that a marriage was “not a mere contract but an inviolable social institution.”

Muslims are allowed to divorce in the country under a separate law. But most Filipinos whose spouses haven’t died have only three options under the country’s 1987 Family Code (supplanting marriage- and family-related provisions in the Philippine Civil Code) to legally part ways with their partners. They could opt for “legal separation,” which doesn’t end the marriage but lets the parties live apart and split their property. Or they could have their marriage voided, provided they meet the stringent conditions for one of two paths.

Some marriages could be declared void from the get-go if they were between close-degree relatives, involved minors, or constituted bigamy or polygamy. And then there are marriages that could be annulled: if there is lack of parental consent for spouses between 18 and 21 years old, fraud, inability to consummate the marriage through sex, or psychological incapacity—a ground introduced in the Family Code as an apparent alternative to absolute divorce, according to a 2023 law journal article by Kristel Sigua.

But to prove any of these grounds, “there is such a high standard of law that must be met,” says Rep. Renee Co, who, along with her colleague Rep. Antonio Tinio, filed an absolute divorce bill in the current Congressional session. Co tells TIME that because of this high standard, existing laws on marital dissolution work against women, especially those in precarious situations like victims of abuse. (17.5% of Filipino women aged 15-49 experience violence from their intimate partners.) 

Getting a marriage annulled is not just a legal test but also often a wealth test. 

Haidee says she spent $5,400—13 times her monthly salary—on her petition to nullify her marriage, despite being a solo parent of four. She was able to put together the money with the help of family to pay court appearance fees and procedural expenses, including paying for a psychological evaluation, since she claimed psychological incapacity as her reason to annul her marriage. “It’s all about money,” she says. “It’s like our laws are made for the rich.”

Co and Tinio’s version of a divorce bill aims to address potential financial barriers, including the option to have a lawyer provided and fees waived. “It’s necessary that couples who can no longer make the relationships work,” Co tells TIME, “or in most cases where the woman is suffering from abuse—physical, emotional, mental, economic—have a way out.”

It took years for Haidee to decide to leave her marriage.

She got pregnant at 19 while in high school; her husband was then 17. Her father, livid and worried about public perception of illegitimate children, coerced a wedding in 2003. But early on, Haidee already knew something was up: her husband, she alleges, would not work and, in the following years, used crystal meth and saw other women, even contracting gonorrhea in the process. In a few instances, she says, he hurt her physically. (The husband, Dela Guerra, did not respond to TIME’s repeated requests for comment.)

Haidee later found out their wedding was not even properly registered, but because of Catholic family pressures, they officially wed in 2012. 

Despite her ordeals, Haidee kept silent, choosing to stay in the relationship and having three more kids with her husband. She says even her family wasn’t aware of her struggles until years later. 

“There was a part of me that was ashamed to share my story, especially his infidelity, his venereal disease, and his vices,” Haidee tells TIME. “The physical abuse, I really didn’t want to tell. He’s my husband and the father of my kids. I don’t want him to look bad in my father’s eyes, because my father would be devastated if he found out.”

But the family court ruled that these proved to be “heavy allegations shy of any strong basis other than mere assertions.” Haidee herself admits she lacked the evidence to get an annulment in court. But she argued that throughout her 12-year relationship, she never considered documenting her husband’s actions. That would have felt shameful, or even potentially been dangerous if she’d been caught keeping hard proof against her husband to make a case to leave him.

She had been hoping that her anguish and personal testimony would be enough, she says. “I didn’t expect annulment to feel like a gamble.”

Shame also prevented Maviv Millora, the lead convenor and founder of Divorce Pilipinas Coalition, from leaving her husband whom she married in 1995. Her conservative Catholic family would tell her to maintain the marriage, despite her accusations of verbal abuse and him forcing her to take illegal narcotics. “When I finally got the father of my children out of the house, my sisters and my mother were also blaming me for not keeping the marriage,” she tells TIME.

In the Philippines, where shame or hiyâ can shape communal morality, patriotism has been attached to being a global holdout against divorce legislation. “We should not feel sorry,” one prelate put it in 2024. 

Katrina Legarda, a Philippine lawyer and women’s rights advocate, claims some of the strongest opponents of divorce laws are conservative Catholic women who do not fully understand the distinction between the religious sacrament of marriage and civil status of marriage.

One “hypocrisy,” Legarda notes, is that some Filipinos who have had their marriages annulled “have not bothered having their sacrament of marriage nullified. They haven’t bothered getting their marriages declared void in the Catholic Church. So, they’re still married in the Church, but no longer married under civil law.”

While the Philippine Constitution guarantees the separation of Church and state, Catholicism’s and Christianity’s influence has created a complex battlefield for divorce legislation, even when about half of the population is in favor. For instance, LGBT individuals are accepted, but conservative Christian evangelicals have pushed back against comprehensive anti-discrimination laws. And due to evangelical opposition, it took more than a decade before Congress in 2012 passed a bill that funded contraception and sex education.

“The Catholic priests, they wield strong influence on people. They would put up in Churches, ‘NO TO DIVORCE’ signs,” Haidee says. “They made us feel like we’ve committed grave sins.”

But the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, functioning as the religion’s official authority in the country, has shown some understanding of the need for divorce legislation under the leadership of Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David. “The tendency in a setting where you are the majority, you would be a bit too assertive about your own teachings, your own directions and faith,” David said in January 2025. “We have to be respectful also of people who think otherwise.” David, however, was replaced in December by Archbishop Gilbert Garcera, who signed a 2018 pastoral letter that argued, “let not Congress lay waste these victories with a divorce bill.”

While the debate continues, Haidee is looking for loopholes. Her marriage stopped her from going to college, so she began taking formal caregiving classes last year. Haidee hopes she’ll be certified to work overseas. If she could gain foreign citizenship, she could file for a foreign divorce, as the Family Code recognizes divorces obtained overseas between a foreigner and a Filipino citizen.

Legarda presented these cases of so-called shortcut divorces to the Philippine Supreme Court last year, in oral arguments on a case of a Filipino-American dual citizen’s U.S.-obtained divorce. Before the Supreme Court, even Solicitor General Darlene Marie Berberabe said that Congress should be working on domestic divorce legislation. “If we follow legal realism as a philosophy,” Berberabe said, “we should be acknowledging that the times have changed.”

Nine bills related to legalizing absolute divorce are pending in the House of Representatives for debate, as of the end of 2025. Lawmakers have told TIME that they have tried to meet the Church halfway on loosening the conditions for divorce. They’ve also considered changing the language of civil divorce to “dissolution of marriage” to try to avoid some of the stigma that’s been built up over the years.

President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., who said during his campaign in 2022 that divorce could be made available under his government but cautioned that it shouldn’t be easy to obtain, is planning to review divorce bills and could endorse one if it gets a Catholic Church nod.

“I won’t hold my breath,” says Legarda, who said she worked with Sen. Risa Hontiveros, a divorce advocate, on a version of divorce legislation. Tinio, the lawmaker, adds that government attention is elsewhere at the moment, particularly on perceived corruption in the country’s flood-control infrastructure.

But even if it does get on the agenda, Tinio says, the Philippine Senate is another hurdle entirely: “We’re talking about 24 individuals and any one individual Senator can in fact—in most circumstances because of the way it works—can block passage of a legislation.” Some Senators, like Hontiveros and Pia Cayetano, are clear backers of divorce legislation, though the Senate is equally packed with outspoken opponents like Joel Villanueva (a televangelist’s son) and Senate President Vicente Sotto, who in a statement told TIME that he instead prefers “administrative annulment” that removes the “tedious” court proceedings, adding: “This proposal will be acceptable to the different Church leaders in the country.”

Millora, the leader of the Divorce Pilipinas Coalition, says that Senators, as well as Marcos Jr., are wary of alienating their base, since most Catholics in the country prioritize voting for those they view are aligned with the Church.

If a divorce bill passes in the House, Haidee and her coalition colleagues say they’re determined to spend as much time and energy lobbying as it takes to get it passed in the upper legislative chamber. 

“If we have to court those Senators and talk to them, we would,” Haidee says. “I hope they take pity on us. I hope they realize that we also need to be happy.”