If our optimism steers us into marriage, it goes into overdrive with remarriage. Despite disappointment, pain, disruption, and sometimes even the destruction of divorce, most opt to get back on the horse. An astonishing 70% of the broken-hearted get married all over again. Yet a whopping 60% of remarriages fail. And they do so even more quickly than first marriages (Hara Estroff Marano).

Given what we just read, the message we need to shout from the housetops is, “Be careful— be very, very careful before you marry—especially if you’re remarrying.” The Cinderella story may appear romantic but it’s also full of holes. We’d like to address some of those holes in this Marriage Message.

We’re going to be gleaning from a magazine article called, “DIVORCED? Don’t Even Think of Remarrying Until You Read This,” that appeared in Psychology Today a while ago and is now posted for everyone to read in its entirety on the Smart Marriages Web Site.

We’ll only be able to share a portion of what the author had to say. But we HIGHLY recommend going to the web site at www.smartmarriages.com to read the rest. If you don’t have internet access just contact us and we’ll personally send the document to you in its entirety.

Everyone should read this message, whether you’re considering remarrying or not, because it brings out some excellent points to discuss together and also to share with others. Some of the highlights of the article read:

If the divorce and remarriage rates prove one thing, it’s that conventional wisdom is wrong. The dirty little secret is experience doesn’t count when it comes to marriage/remarriage. A prior marriage actually decreases the odds of a second marriage working.

“It’s so counterintuitive,” says Diane Sollee, who’s the director of Smartmarriages, an organization based in Washington, D.C. “It just seems obvious that people would be older and wiser, or learn from the mistakes of a failed first marriage and do better next time around. But that’s like saying if you lose a football game you’ll win the next one. You will—but only if you learn some new plays before you go back on the field.”

Remarriage may look a lot like any other marriage—but it has its own subversive features, mostly invisible to the naked eye that make it more tenuous than first marriage. It’s not impossible to make remarriage work, but it takes some concerted action to make love better the second time around.

When it comes to relationships, people don’t automatically learn from experience. Love deludes us. The rush of romance dupes us into believing our own relationship uniquely defies the laws of gravity.

“We feel that this new, intense relationship fills the firmament for us,” observes Dr. William Doherty, author of The Intentional Family. “Under those conditions, our background knowledge of relationships doesn’t kick in.” There’s not even more cynicism, once you fall in love again, Doherty adds.

“You really think problems are for regular people and our relationship certainly isn’t regular,” so the problem had to be our ex-spouse. “Partners bring to remarriage the stupidity of the first engagement and the baggage of the first marriage.”

“Partners don’t reflect on their own role,” says Dr Jeff Larson. “They say, ‘I’m not going to make the same mistakes again.’ But they do make the same mistakes unless they get insight through their own thinking about what caused the divorce and their role in the marriage failure.”

Invariably, marriage experts insist, whether the first marriage or the fourth, couples tend to trip over the same mistakes. Number one on the list of errors is unrealistic expectations of marriage. A decline in intensity is normal, to be expected, says psychologist Clifford Notarius, Ph.D. And in its own way, welcomed. It’s not a signal to bail out.

“You’ll be disappointed—but that opens the potential for a relationship to evolve into something wonderful: a developmental journey of adult growth. Only in supportive relationships can we deal with our own personal demons and life disappointments. The next stage of relationships brings the knowledge of having a partner who’ll be there no matter what, who can sit through your personal struggle for the hundredth time and support you.”

Why is remarriage so difficult? The short answer is, because it follows divorce. People who divorced are in a highly vulnerable state. They want to be in a close intimate relationship, but the failure factor is there. The longing for comfort, for deep intimacy impels people to rush back into the married state.

But prospective remarriage partners need to build a relationship slowly, experts agree. “They need to know each other individually and jointly,” says Dr Robert Stahmann. ” They need to know each other’s expectations.”

They need time for bonding as a couple, because that relationship will be under stress through all the links to the past that will inhabit their present, none more tangible than children and stepchildren.

In remarriage, children don’t grow out of the relationship, they precede it. Nor are they delivered by the stork as helpless little bundles; they come pre-packaged, with an entirely different set of agendas than adults have.

Although feelings develop very quickly, courtship should be prolonged. It’s essential to allow enough time for the cognitive and emotional reorganization that has to take place. “It happens piece by piece, as with a jigsaw puzzle, not like a computer with the flick of a switch” says Dr Pat Love.

There’s even more opportunity for conflict and disappointment in 2nd marriages because the challenges are greater. Remarriages are always more complicated than first marriages.

The influence of exes is far from over with remarriage. Exes live on in memories, and often in reality, interacting with the children and with your own parents and siblings. “When you remarry,” says Dr Larson, “you marry a person—and that person’s ex-spouse.” It comes with the territory.

“A complete emotional divorce isn’t possible,” explains Minnesota’s Doherty. “You always carry that person around with you; a part of you retains a ‘we’ identity.”

And if there are children, exes live on in the new household as permanent extensions of their children, arriving to pick up and deliver the kids, exerting parental needs and desires that have to be accommodated, especially at holiday and vacation times. What’s more, the ex’s parents are in the picture too, as the children’s grandparents, as is all of the ex’s extended family, as aunts and uncles and cousins.

Nothing challenges a remarriage more than the presence of children from a prior marriage, and most remarriage households contain kids. If there are kids, partners to a remarriage don’t get a developmental period as couple before they’re parents—and then, because it takes time for family feelings to develop, that bond is immediately under assault by the children.

For that reason especially, every family expert recommend that couples heading into remarriage prolong the period of courtship despite the desire and the financial incentives to merge households.

The children themselves are in a state of post-divorce mourning over the loss of a “perfect” family and the loss of full-time connection to a parent. No matter which parent a child is with, someone’s missing all the time. That’s the starting position.

“This sadness is often not recognized by the adults,” says Emily Visher, Ph.D. “But it leads to upset, depression, and resentment at the new marriage.” The resentment is typically compounded by the fact that the children don’t have the same perspective as the adults on how and why their parents’ marriage broke up. And the remarriage further deprives them of the custodial parent who’d been theirs alone for a time.

“There’s also an existential, moral dimension to remarriage families that’s not talked about,” says Minnesota’s Doherty.

“The partners will always be in different emotional and relational positions to the children. One is till death do us part. The other is till divorce do us part. The stepparent often harbors a deep wish that the children didn’t exist, the very same children the parent couldn’t live without.” And these are the complications even before getting into the difficult management issues of who’s in charge, who disciplines the children, and what strategies of discipline are used.

People need to develop “a deep empathic understanding of the different emotional world’s parent and stepparent occupy.” To be a stepparent, Doherty adds, “Is to never be fully at home in your own house in relation to the children, while the original parent feels protective and defensive of the children.” Each partner is always an outsider to the experience of the other.

The role of the non-biological parent is crucial—but fuzzy. “The more a remarriage couple can agree on expected roles,” says Dr Carlos Costelo, the more satisfied they’ll be. There are lots of built-in ambiguities. “How am I supposed to discipline the kids? How much time do we spend with her family at Christmas? The inability to come to consensus interferes with intimacy and commitment.”

The key to remarriage, says Stahmann, is that couples need to be less selfish than they used to be. They have to realize there’s a history of something that came before. They can’t indulge jealousy by cutting off contact with kids. They can’t cut off history.” Selfishness, he insists, is the biggest reasons for failure of remarriage.

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We pray this information has been helpful to you. Even if this isn’t pertinent to you specifically, you may know someone who is contemplating remarrying and can see this may benefit them.Steve and Cindy Wright