After 55 hours of marital madness and publicity gone wild, U.S. pop singer Britney Spears and temporary husband Jason Allen Alexander decided Monday to scrap “I do” for “I wish I hadn’t.” 

The current cover of 'US Weekly' magazine features singer Britney Spears on the cover, and features exclusively, as an inset, the first photo of Britney Spears and Jason Allen Alexander as husband and wife. Spears married hometown friend Alexander in Las Vegas Jan. 3 at a wedding chapel, but the marriage was later annulled in Las Vegas Jan. 5. The magazine will be on newsstands Jan. 9 in the United States.  [Reuters]

She didn’t get a ring or a fairy-tale wedding. He didn’t get any of her fortune. But the 22-year-olds did forever etch themselves in the annals of ill-advised Las Vegas marriages. The two might have performed the quickest marriage-to-annulment escapade in the history of Sin City.

Britney Spears was granted an annulment Monday to end her surprise two-day marriage, after the pop star told a Las Vegas judge in court papers that she and her new husband were “incompatible.”

The Las Vegas judge signed the petition just hours after it was filed, Spears attorney David Chesnoff told reporters. He said the couple sought the annulment after realizing that they had not worked out the “serious issues” involved in marriage.

The court papers were filed under the name Britney Jean Spears just 12 minutes after Clark County District Court opened Monday. They assert that the Grammy-nominated entertainer is “not currently pregnant.”

Representatives for Spears said in a statement that the nuptials, which took place at a chapel on the Las Vegas strip, were a “joke” gone too far.

“Plaintiff Spears lacked understanding of her actions to the extent that she was incapable of agreeing to marriage because Plaintiff and Defendant did not know each other’s likes and dislikes, each other’s desires to have or not have children and each other’s desires as to state of residency,” the court papers said.

“Upon learning of each other’s desires, they are so incompatible that there was a want of understanding of each other’s actions in entering into this marriage.”

U.S. singer Britney Spears

Spears asked in the petition that both she and Alexander, who made international news with the quickie marriage at 5 a.m. Saturday, “be restored to the status of single, unmarried person.”

A friend of Spears told Reuters that the singer began arranging to annul her marriage just hours after the two were wed and signed the documents by Saturday afternoon. There were apparently no hard feelings. Shortly after the papers were signed, the couple had dinner Saturday night at the Palms Casino Hotel.

The friend said Spears was having a “good time” in Las Vegas but was not inebriated when she got married at the Little White Wedding Chapel, wearing a baseball cap, T-shirt and jeans and escorted by a Palms Casino Hotel bellman.

The only people who witnessed the wedding were the chapel’s minister, a photographer and the bellman. The wedding ceremony was videotaped, but no video has so far been released.

Alexander said he and Spears hatched the idea to get hitched early Saturday morning.

“It was just crazy, man,” he told Access Hollywood in an interview at his home Monday morning. “And we were just looking at each other and said, ‘Let’s do something wild, crazy. Let’s go get married, just for the hell of it.’”

Spears doesn’t have a potential multimillion-dollar headache. Las Vegas-based divorce attorney Anita Webster said had Spears’ marriage not been annulled, the singer would have been bound by her home state’s community-property laws to share her wealth.

Entertainment Tonight uncovered a January 2003 guilty plea to a disturbing-the-peace charge in Hammond, Louisiana, where Alexander attends Southeastern Louisiana University. The New York Daily News reported the former high school football standout was arrested in Hammond again last October 25, following a bar fight. Alexander reportedly was booked on battery and disturbing-the-peace charges.

Alexander currently is said to be back in Kentwood with his family. Among the deals Alexander may need help deciding on: Whether or not to sell the video of his wedding for US$1 million, as Access Hollywood says he’s been offered.

Also looming for the former Mr. Britney Spears: spring semester. The college junior is scheduled to resume studies at Southeastern Louisiana on Jan. 20, school officials say. The campus is ready, Rene Abadie, the university’s director of public information, says.

“I think (the media interest) pretty much died down today,” Abadie says. “By that time, it’ll be real old news.”

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