By admin 
Introduction
We are sold a fantasy that love is eternal, especially when sung by the man who wrote the soundtrack to our romances. but deep in the archives of Barry Manilow’s history lies a cold, startling legal maneuver that contradicts every ballad he ever sang. Before the fame, before the nose, before the millions, there was a girl named Susan. They were young, they were in love, and they stood before a judge to bind their lives together. But just one year later, that bond wasn’t just broken; it was obliterated.
The narrative of this split is not a tragedy of falling out of love; it is a thriller of ruthless ambition. Manilow didn’t just leave; he reportedly packed his bag and walked out the door into a “musical adventure,” leaving his high school sweetheart in a stunned silence. But the true shock lies in the legal aftermath. The question that has haunted biographers is the nature of the split: Was it a divorce, acknowledging a failed union? Or was it an annulment, a brutal legal declaration that the marriage never validly existed in the first place?
To seek an annulment is to ask the law to rewrite history. It implies a defect so profound that the vows were void the moment they were spoken. For a man destined to become a global icon, the distinction is crucial. A divorcee has a past; a man with an annulment has a clean slate. This wasn’t just a breakup; it was an extraction. Manilow chose the siren call of the piano over the domestic reality of a wife, and in doing so, he engaged the machinery of the law to sever the tie with surgical precision.
This story transforms the “nice guy” image into something far more complex and desperate. It reveals a young man so consumed by a burning need to succeed that he viewed his own marriage as a shackle that had to be cut, not untied. Susan became the phantom of his past—the wife who was there, yet legally, perhaps, never was. It is a heartbreaking collision between human emotion and cold legal text. While the world hummed along to his love songs, the real-life inspiration for his first commitment was being processed, signed, and filed away into oblivion.