What To Watch For Today
Many people who come to see me for counseling are struggling in their marriages. Some are in their first marriages and others are in a second or third marriage. Apparently, people still have a strong desire to connect with another person and to become marital partners.
As a therapist, I would believe that people learn and grow from their mistakes, but this may not be the case.
Second marriages have difficulty for a number of reasons. Once a person discovers that he or she can manage a divorce, they are less scared of going through the process again. If things get tough, they may call in the divorce attorneys and use the same exit strategy they used to solve the problems in their last relationship.
Some people simply choose another wrong person, or they bring the same emotional issues from one relationship to another. I have seen this many times. For instance, a person moves from one abusive relationship to another. Or they don’t do the work to become more emotionally available to their spouse.
Others enter a new relationship “on the rebound,” and they haven’t given themselves enough time to heal, get used to being independent, and to grow from their experience. In fact, some people marry again to avoid feeling lonely.
Several months ago, I was asked to review a great book on divorce called Break Up, by the Israeli author, Leo Averbach. This book is about Leo’s divorce experience and the psychotherapy which helped him to get through the emotional pain he experienced when his marriage ended. I contacted Leo to get his thoughts on the high divorce rate for second and third marriages. Here are a few ideas on this topic:
I think that the major factor affecting the breakup of second and third marriages is that there is less glue holding the marriage together. Marriage, as an institution, is primarily intended as a framework for raising children, for building a family. The great majority of children born to married couples are born during their first marriage, when the parents are up to about thirty-five years old.
This means that most couples in a second marriage do not have common children to bind them together in the positive sense and, in a negative sense, to force them to stay together even if their relationship deteriorates. In other words, children act as a stabilizing factor in marriages. And when they are absent the marriage is prone to be rocked by minor storms.
In addition, because the couple does not have children in common, the element of family is not as central in second and third marriages. Consequently, the desire to ‘preserve the family’ is not a strong stabilizing factor. For the couple there is less at stake in allowing the marriage to collapse. This reduced importance of the family in second and third marriages may also explain why the couples concerned are said to be less ‘committed’ than those in first marriages.
Furthermore, in second and third marriages the children of previous marriages can complicate the situation. Even with the best of intentions, it is not easy to get on with other people’s children and friction frequently ensues. So the children of previous marriages can be a destabilizing factor in a second or third marriage.
Generally speaking, relationships become increasingly tangled and messy with subsequent marriages, as more and more individuals join the ever-expanding family. On a day-to-day level, maintaining those relationships often causes problems and generates animosities all round.”
Now, Leo and I are not saying that second and third marriages cannot work. Rather, we are pointing out some of the issues which people need to be aware of when entering into these relationships. We hope that addressing these issues will help you find your happily ever after!
