Divorce and Remarriage

Sometimes, your faith in your marriage might be rattled. Fears about the future, fears about the behavior of your partner, or even maybe fears about your own behavior can cloud your emotions of contentment and happiness in the present. This is a normal set of thoughts to have, and anxiety is often found in looking to the future. But these are not very productive thoughts, and if you think you're going to not be compatible with your spouse, it's your responsibility to do everything you can to not let that happen. If certain things your partner does sets off alarm bells that make you think divorce is inevitable, you should talk to your spouse about it. If that doesn’t work, maybe see a marriage therapist, who can help you communicate better, or facilitate communication between you and your spouse, or both.

Divorce and remarriage can affect the family in many ways that “normal”, “basic”, or nuclear families could never imagine. There are many questions everyone in the reconstituted family has, yet never dares ask, until situational landmines are stepped on. How does the stepparent discipline the children? How invested are the stepparents in the former family, with the former spouse and children? If there seems to be a breach of unspoken norms between the two parents, how do they handle it? There are millions of awkward, clumsy, offensive, and straight-up anger-incensing situations that can occur. It seems best if the stepparent takes on the role of a really cool aunt or uncle rather than a stepparent to avoid the classic “you’re not my dad (or mom)” rebuttal to step-parental authority. Especially for the first two years after remarriage, when everyone is still trying to settle into the new family. When I was a teen, I saw a woman in my church congregation who had married a man from Wales learn from this mistake. The man, who brought his five children to the States, allowed his new wife to attempt to be a compassionate, yet serious mother to two Welsh teenage girls. It did not go over well, and those girls, their cute accents, and their oldest brother went back to the UK only a few months into their year-long stay.  

Now the thing is that about 70% of women initiate divorces, and about 70% of couples asked if they regret their decision do regret it. The reason is that couples admit that the differences were small and could have been worked out. The highest divorce rate is with blended families, meaning if you divorce once, there is a significant chance that it will happen again. The least likely people to remarry are those who divorce their spouse “amicably”. This flat affect seems as though these people lost the idea that love could even exist. If a divorce becomes a bitter pitched battle over assets and children, bullying each other into admitting who was at fault, it could be said that love exists, just not between those two. If it was more or less a peaceful walk into the sunset, the whole validity of the romantic experience could be called into question. Either way, why would you put yourself through what the bluegrass band, The Avett Brothers, described as “No celebration, bad communication, worse interpretation, love deprivation, pain allocation, soul deprivation, cold desolation, life complication, resuscitation, divorce separation blues”? The payout seems tiny in comparison to reconciling with your partner.

Divorce has an enormous effect on children. First off, joint custody eats their time, and the feeling of being tossed around like a hot potato to a different parent based on a schedule a judge arbitrarily made up probably doesn’t feel like you’re a child, but a burden, as if your parents now have to do a form of adult homework where the math never makes sense. Whatever the judge rules will never really be fit for raising children, and they will always suffer emotionally for it. When the parents develop the divorce flu, the children catch pneumonia. I have a friend, who, for most of middle school, was able to spend a decent amount of time with his father, but not too long after I met him, his father moved 12 hours up the coast. In high school, it became increasingly harder for my friend to suppress his anger toward life. Toward the latter years of high school, while only focusing on one sport, he injured himself frequently, but the incidence of poorly thought out or outright self-inflicted injuries grew.

Divorced couples have 10 areas of incompatibility, and healthy couples have the same. What matters is what you focus on. If you focus on the mistakes, you will never be happy, but working together creates something beautiful.