It's shocking, is it not, that 50% of American marriages end in divorce. "Fifty per cent" is not just a statistic; it's a reality that stands for tons of personal distress and suffering and remorse. Alas, the rate of divorce for second marriages is even higher -- 60%; for third marriages, according to many sources, as much as 75%. The fact that the percentage rises with age and experience at first seems counter-intuitive. Shouldn't second and subsequent marriages be happier, more peaceful? Don't people learn and improve with experience? Should they not know themselves better and therefore choose a mate more wisely? Now that they are veterans, shouldn't they have grasped the art of marriage ? Learned how to solve problems? Learned to make a stronger and more sensible commitment to each other? After all, they've voluntarily and optimistically decided to take another crack at marriage. Why not bend every effort to succeed?
But the numbers don't lie. Many of the people who have been divorced one time, say sociologists who study marriage and the family, bring negative attitudes to the next. Instead of assuming that marriage is a lifelong commitment, they regard it as a flexible arrangement that can be abandoned if things get tough. They've already survived one or two divorces and are therefore less fazed by the prospect of another. And inasmuch as the taboo against divorce has already been shattered, such social inhibitions that remain are the more readily overcome.
There are even simpler explanation for the failure of subsequent marriages: some people are marriageable by nature and some are marriageable-skittish. The population of the marriageable-skittish increases as the natively marriageable leave the pool. Who remains to be married among the population setting out on second or third marriages? Only those people who are not intrinsically inclined to prosper in long term relationships. As the pool shrinks to the less and less marriageable, the percentage of failures inevitably rises.
Divorce and the rates of divorce have been well studied. But what about second marriages of people who are not divorced but widowed? It's curious that there seems to be no interest in how widows and widowers (w-ws) fare when they contract subsequent marriages. Are second marriages of the w-ws more or less likely to succeed? Apparently, it's not a pressing problem for sociologists. Or perhaps it's too hard to procure the data. Just who are the remarried (or "re-partnered") w-ws's? Many "remarried" widows and widowers don't bother to inform either church or state of their new situation. They may have financial or tax reasons to avoid scrutiny. They may be separately domiciled. They're not talking but they're there. Hard to find and hard to study.
My suspicion, drawn from anecdotal evidence and just looking around at people of my own age cohort, is that the divorce rate among remarried w-ws is very very low. Why? Well, for one thing, because w-ws are people who are among the marriageable by nature. They've stayed together, stayed married until death did them part. Because they succeeded at maintaining a long marriage, they very likely entered a later marriage expecting to do so again. In addition, w-ws are likely to be older and weathered. Because they're not scarred by a painful divorce, they are more likely to be sound of heart rather than wary and wounded.
Re-partnered w-ws have outlived many of the tensions of more youthful marriages. They're probably not obsessed or consumed by their careers or by worldly success. For better or worse, their successes and failures have been long established, long completed. If they're old enough to be retired, they may have the leisure to talk intimately with one another.
One of the principal causes of divorce, we're told, is tension around child-rearing, an activity in which philosophical differences between the parents can cause all kinds of difficulties and tensions and squabbles. But most w-ws aren't going to have more children, and the ones that they have are likely to be grown and gone.
Nor will there going to problems with in-laws, because the in-laws are all dead.
And older w-ws, if they're fortunate, don't have the financial problems of earlier decades: no sudden unemployment, no need to move to a larger, more expensive house, no college tuitions. If they're not formally remarried, they most likely keep their resources separate and therefore don't need to negotiate about how money is to be spent.
Older folk don't have to deal with contraceptives. While sex is probably less urgent and imperious than in earlier decades, it might be more consoling, especially because older partners should have a better grasp of their own needs and how they might be fulfilled. And they are probably more accepting of themselves and of their bodies.
It goes almost without saying that w-ws have experienced the deaths of their previous spouse and therefore share a most important mutual experience. A bond, a link. An important mutual consolation, one among the many experiences that older w-ws bring to the table. They know from living many years on the planet that various things that seemed important years ago turned out not to matter at all.
And most important of all: older w-ws have learned over the course of many decades not only how to love but how to cherish and to respect a wife or husband.
