I'm not really that experienced with faces so perhaps others can chime in here ... but I will try to help with what I can.
I seriously doubt that your spouse object is actually null as you are claiming it to be. I would think that would definitely get you a NPE if you tried to call a method on it. I could be wrong though ... Its one thing to return a null value, its another to call a method on a null value. I'm not sure what JSF does about the former, but I would imagine it would crash in the later case. Is your spouse object configured as a property in faces-config? If so, the managed-bean facility might be creating a default one for you. That would be my best guess. sean
