Unless people grieve the loss of the prior relationship and the end of the marriage, they are at risk of staying covertly attached to it. "When they don't grieve, often they remain angry," Larson says. "Exploring the feelings of sadness, and understanding the ways in which the first marriage was good, is a way of unhooking from it."
Many are the sources of loss that require acknowledgment:
The loss of an attachment figure. "It has nothing to do with how you were treated," says Love. "You lost someone you once cared about."
Loss of intact family: We all harbor the idea of a perfect family, and it's one in which emotions and biology are drawn along the same tight meridians.
A sense of failure. "A powerful element contributing to vulnerability in a second marriage," observes Love, "is a sense of shame or embarrassment stemming from relationship failure," denial of any role in the marital breakdown notwithstanding.
"There is pain and fear from the fact that former relationships did not go well," adds Hawkins, "which inhibit commitment to the new relationship and distort communication between partners."
A sense of grief. Grief is bound to be especially great for those who were dumped by their first spouse. "You can't grieve and try to get used to a new relationship at the same time," says Jeff Larson, who recommends waiting at least one or two years after a divorce before remarrying.
Digging Up the Past
Stahmann emphasizes that for remarriage to be successful, couples need to look at their previous relationships and understand their history. How did they get into the first marriage? What were their expectations, hopes and dreams? Through the soul-searching, people learn to trust again.
"It is essential that they do this together," Stahmann says. "It helps each of them break from the past relationship and sets a precedent for the foundation of the new one."
Pat Love stresses that this joint exploration must include a look at the partners' own role in the failure of the past relationship. "You have to list what you didn't like in your partner and own your own part in it. If you don't understand your part, then you are bound to do it again.'"
"When you do something that reminds me of my old partner," Love explains, "I project all the sins of that partner onto you. If you don't want sex one night, then you are 'withholding,' just like the ex." The fact is, Love insists, "the things you didn't like in your old partner actually live on in you."
But such joint exploration doesn't always take place. Couples are often afraid that a partner who brings up the past will get stuck there. Or that a discussion will reignite old flames, when in fact, it helps extinguish them. "Couples often enter remarriage with their eyes closed more than in a first marriage," reports Hawkins. "It's as if they are afraid the marriage won't happen if they confront the issues."
Once a couple has opened up and explored their past, they need to bring kids in on the discussion. "Kids don't have the same understanding of how and why the prior relationship ended," explains Stahmann. "Yet they need it." On the agenda for discussion: how the adults got together, why the past failed, how contact the biological parents will be maintained, and all the couple's dreams and hopes for the future. Most experts would reserve this conversation for after the wedding.
o Clearing Customs. In any marriage, each partner to some degree represents a different culture with different traditions and rituals and symbols. The two distinct sets of highly structured traditions are not simply deeply emotionally resonant; they carry the force of commandment. The subtlest departure from them can make anyone feel like an outsider in his own home. One or both partners is bound to feel bad, even unloved, when their current family does a celebration "the wrong way."
The problem is, culture clash is built in to marriage, says Frank Pittman III, M.D., an Atlanta-based family therapist who wrote Grow Up!: How Taking Responsibility Can Make You a Happy Adult (Golden Books, 1998).
That, however, is where the fun begins. "The conflict causes electricity and the need to discuss things and compare perspectives, and thus come to know one another and oneself. That is the source of a marriage's energy," he says.
It's wise for couples heading into remarriage to explicitly discuss and agree on which ritual styles will prevail. Even the everyday ones: Will dessert be served with dinner? Are evening snacks allowed? Then there are the big celebrations sprinkled throughout the calendar, culturally designated as holidays but more likely hurdles of stress in remarriage households.
o Negotiating External Forces. As if there aren't enough internal hurdles, remarriage can be undermined by outside forces, too. "People who lived independently before remarriage often have jobs, friend networks and hobbies that are antirelational," says Stahmann. "These are spheres in which they have come to invest a lot of themselves as a regular source of gratification." He counts among them learned workaholism. "Such individual-gratifying activities can be hard to give up. Couples need time to work out these patterns."
o Coping with Kids. Nothing challenges a remarriage more than the presence of children from a prior marriage, and 65% of remarriage households contain kids. Their failure rate is highest in the first two years, before these multiplex families have even sorted themselves out.
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