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A wedding license has a very limited lifespan (just a matter of months). It actually is a license for the officient -- the clergyman, the JP, the Elvis impersonator, or whoever is conducting the ritual -- to perform the wedding. The license either expires or is effectively exhausted by the wedding itself.
After that last event, you've got the fact of the marriage itself - not the license to perform the wedding ceremony - and the marriage can be dissolved only in accordance with the state law. Oddly enougjh, in those states that recognize common law marriage, it is possible to enter into a marriage without a license or ceremony or any other formality -- and even so, even a common law marriage still can be dissolved only by compliance with state law. There's no such thing as a "common law divorce".
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