Marriage/Divorce

What People In Second Marriages Already Know

They get it.

As a person who’s on her second marriage, there are certain things I know that I may not have known before if I hadn’t been married and then subsequently divorced.

It’s Not The End of The World.

Marriages end but that doesn’t mean the world ends with it. This is a common belief/fear still held by many people entering into marriage — that if the marriage ‘fails’ it’s almost impossible to come back from that.

Not so. Going through the process of putting all your relationship eggs in one basket — which is what marriage essentially is — and then losing all those eggs is a great teaching moment that some of us need to experience to recalibrate our ideas about what a relationship/marriage should be like.

Recovering from the shock of things not turning out as we originally envisioned they would turn out can be cathartically necessary for creating new relationship coping tools.

Although most people have good intentions when marrying someone else, that doesn’t necessarily mean the marriage is going to last. Vice versa, no one gets married expecting the marriage to end in divorce.

The root of the issue regarding marriage is that we often have warped expectations or standards of what a lifelong partnership should look like. These ideas can come from society, movies, social media, our upbringing, or a combination of all these things.

Additionally, the life span of the average human being is significantly longer than it used to be, so the amount of time you’ll potentially be spending with a mate you decide to commit to and marry is sizable.

Do The Work.

People in second marriages tend to understand that doing the work on themselves as individual human beings is essential to making a long-term functional partnership work. Quite often, we enter into a first marriage when we’re younger, more impetuous, and less aware of our own flaws and annoying quirks.

Those who have already been through the journey of trying to maintain a lifelong relationship with another human being realize that there needs to be a certain amount of grace and compromise in a relationship with someone and that as much as you might expect your partner to accept your challenges or issues, you, in turn, need to be willing to do the same.

Defining Failure VS Success.

Most people who find themselves in a second marriage have felt that sting of not succeeding at an endeavor that they wanted to work out — yet were still hopeful enough to try again. That is not meaningless. It belies an admirable resilience.

Diagnosing a marriage as a failure or success doesn’t necessarily depend on whether a divorce took place or not.

Some people stay in miserable marriages which certainly doesn’t scream success. Other people might hastily get out of a relationship where they feel unsatisfied or even abused. That choice leans toward success. People who have already been through a divorce and married again know this. They get it. They’ve tasted humility. They’ve lived through those feelings of letting go of a dream — the dream of a happy marriage

Ultimately, people who are in second marriages know there is no happily ever after in the way that it might have been imagined before gaining more life experience. That’s more of a first-marriage dream. And that’s OK. It’s OK to have dreams. It’s OK to have a vision of what you think marriage should be like.

That vision may work out well, or it may not. That’s OK too. This is something people in second marriages already know.

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