Marriage the Second Time Around

With 40-plus years of conducting couple’s therapy, I have seen many people who have managed—with great pain and effort—to extricate themselves from destructive marriages. Once free, I have typically heard them make the following promises: “Next time I will find someone with similar interests. Next time I will make sure the person is not an addict. Next time I will find someone with a higher sex drive. Next time I will choose a nicer, less critical person. Next time I will find someone I am more physically attracted to.”

These promises tend to come from the newly divorced rather than the widowed and usually serve to protect the individual from anxiety associated with future disaster. These people are frightened of a “repeat.” A recently divorced friend said to me: “I do not mind getting divorced. It was the right thing to do. But I am terrified that I do not have the ability to choose any better the next time around.”

This post will focus primarily on the divorced, and who and how they choose to remarry. The divorced more often than the widowed tend to convolute anger and grief in their separation process, adding a certain complexity that makes successful remarriage more tenuous. I will avoid further complications by limiting the discussion to those married no more than twice.

There are individuals that promise to “never marry again.” I attribute this to the current pain they are in and the relief they may be feeling courtesy of their newfound freedom. I usually tell these people that they are presently in a gauntlet but may feel quite different once they heal. Some of these people, however, will remain true to their word, more so women than men. According to the National Center for Family & Marriage Research (NCFMR) at Bowling Green University, the remarriage rate is consistently higher for men than for women at 37 per 1,000 versus 20 per 1,000 as of 2018 (Reynolds. 2020).

Denial and Remarriage

Many people do remarry even though the divorce rate for second marriages hovers around 67%; this is up from approximately 50% for first marriages (Smith, 2021). But why the higher rates? People claim to have learned from their mistakes, but have they? Don’t relatives and friends warn them of their choices? Have relationship therapists failed these people? Unfortunately, I have seen far too many individuals pull themselves out of a bad union and immediately drop out of treatment; they believe that they have reached their therapeutic goal: ending their relationship. They claim to have learned enough to move on and make better choices. In some cases, this is true but in most it is not. Often they report back to treatment having replicated another unhappy union and appear totally deflated and dismayed. Most express embarrassment about having to contact me. “How did this happen again?" many ask.

It happened again because people choose the same partners over again. They may have chosen a taller person, or someone who is better off financially. They may have chosen someone they consider more attractive. They may have avoided another abusive alcoholic, or mentally ill partner. But they have left the one thing out that will have offered them the best protection against another poor choice: They did not get to know themselves well enough to understand how their unconscious dictates their mate selection.

I am not placing blame. In fact, I do not believe in mistakes when it comes to choosing a mate. Rather, I see mate choice as an unconsciously predetermined process that unless understood will be difficult if not impossible to alter. The following is an example of this point:

Case Example

A couple in treatment separated when the male client discovered that his wife was having an affair with her co-worker. When caught, the wife ended the affair and showed remorse for her actions. She claimed that she wanted to stay married to her husband. The male client was hurt but forgave his wife and took ownership of his contribution to the affair. However, when the wife had another affair with a different man, the male client decided to call it quits. The couple ended marital therapy and although I recommended them to each seek individual therapy, neither did. The wife went off with her most recent lover and I never heard from her again. The male client, more disturbed by the events, claimed that he enjoyed being married and that someday he would try again. Approximately five years later, the male client called me because he had remarried to another unfaithful wife. I asked him why he ignored my recommendation that he seek individual treatment, but he could not explain his resistance. He did say that it took him several months to call me, in part because he felt like an “idiot.”

The male client, in this case, demonstrated a pattern of attraction to cheating women; his high school and college girlfriends cheated on him as well. While he acknowledged there was a tendency to choose cheating wives, he had to be convinced over time that there was a connection between the wives he chose and the girlfriends he chose. He initially thought one set of choices had nothing to do with the other in part, because of the great gap of time between the two sets of women. This struggle alone convinced me that he denied the “force” of his unconscious pattern.

As a young adult, the male client was witness to his father numerous affairs and his passive mother’s reactions. The client was terribly upset by this and tried to intervene to no avail. That is, he could not get his father to stop cheating nor his mother to stand up for herself.

It might be simple enough to conclude that the male client role modeled his mother’s victim by marrying women who also cheated on him. But it was more complicated than that. Therapeutic insight came when the male client discovered that he chose cheating women because he viewed them as empowered and in control. These women were attractive to the male client who longed for his mother to be more powerful in dealing with her cheating husband. The male client was willing enough to make this fantasy a reality even though he risked being treated poorly. Until he reached this level of insight, he was at the mercy of his masochistic attraction.

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Conclusion

What the previous example makes clear is that it is often difficult for any of us to free ourselves from that which is deeply internalized, including mate choice. If you married an alcoholic, for example, you may avoid repeating this dynamic, but will you avoid a different type of addict, or someone who may behave similarly? Knowing yourself and who you are attracted to on the deepest level is the way to prevent replication; it may be the key to avoiding a poor choice the second time around.