About seventeen percent of the U.S. population gets married twice. That’s relatively low considering seventy-nine percent get married once and about fifty percent of those end in divorce. Given the trauma of divorce perhaps it’s not surprising but some of that may depend on timing.
My current guest, Lois Tarter was over fifty when her first marriage of twenty-five years ended. She has since remarried but she didn’t see that coming when she first divorced. Here’s Lois:
I said I didn’t want to get remarried. I did. I thought, “I’m never going to put myself in a position like that again where I’m emotionally dependent on somebody, where I’m that involved with somebody—” any of that nonsense.
Then I met this—well, I knew him for a long time and we really clicked. There was such an involvement. We just had so much fun together. We enjoyed being together so much. We loved to travel together. It just became a thing that would be good to do.
I guess part of me is still somewhat old-fashioned and I didn’t particularly think that it was a good role model, although that’s obviously very stupid because it doesn’t really matter. I don’t know. It just became something that we both really wanted to do. We wanted to make that commitment to each other.
The person that I married is—and perhaps he wouldn’t have been the right person when I got married the first time. I don’t know. He’s very different than my ex-husband, but we have a lot of things that we both like to do and we have a lot of fun together. We do a lot of things together.
The period where you get married, you start a family, you hopefully buy a house, you start to establish yourself—all the things that one does, it’s very different than when you get married, when your kids are growing and you’re not thinking about establishing yourself in the way that you did when you were much younger. I think the dynamics are dramatically different. And the things that you want and need are dramatically different.
I think my ex-husband and I, our values and our priorities diverged, whereas I think with my husband now, they’re much more the same.
The Divorce Coach Says
Records show that people who do remarry wait between three and four years after their divorce to tie the knot again and that 67 percent of these marriages end in divorce. That’s a higher divorce rate than for first marriages and that’s concerning. So how do you avoid being one of these statistics?
In my non-scientific opinion, one of the keys is in Lois’s final sentence – she says her and her husband’s values are much more closely aligned and relationship experts agree that relationships that are based on similar values have a greater chance of enduring. How do you know if your values are aligned? Well, that starts with you knowing your values and spending time getting to know yourself. There’s lots of ways you can do this and while some of it may be hard and emotional, much of it is fun. I have new report out – 14 Ways To Get To Know Yourself that could help you. It’s available for free when you subscribe for updates to my newly-launched divorce coaching site, My Divorce Pal.
This is the last segment in Lois’s story. I’m grateful to Lois for sharing her journey and I’m grateful to her for writing The Divorce Ritual. I do believe that creating and normalizing rituals around the end of a marriage will make it easier not only for spouses but also their children and their loved ones.
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