Are second marriages more fragile than first marriages?

Are later marriages generally more successful and stable than first-time marriages? And, given that most remarriages (some 90 percent) follow upon divorce rather than death, do the disaffected ex-partners tend to make smarter, more mutually satisfying choices in a second or higher-order relationship?

Apparently not. The rate of marital breakup is spectacularly high in America--currently, over half of all first marriages end in divorce; but the rate of marital breakup in subsequent marriages is 10% higher--some 60%. As sociologists Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin point out in Divided Families, many remarried families simply don't make it through their early years together; about one fourth of all second marriages break apart within a five year period. This is a rate of marital disruption which is "significantly higher than the level among first marriages" according to Furstenberg and Cherlin.

But curiously enough, this enhanced risk of re-divorce exists only for the first five years of the remarried family's existence. At that point in time, the new family's chances of remaining together are roughly the same, or even better, than those of a family living in an intact, first-time-ever nuclear household.

What is the "marriage gap"?

Since the great social ferment of the 1960s, a number of alternatives to old-fashioned, traditional marriage have emerged on the social scene. Relationships that once were viewed as morally offensive - sexual partners living together before marrying; out-of-wedlock births; single-parent child rearing - are now both acceptable and commonplace. Couples enter wedlock with a more light-hearted attitude ("If this doesn't work out, I can move on). A reflection of this is the fact that between the 1960s and the 1990s, the divorce rate tripled; it has now flattened, and gone down a slight amount, but at the present time, there is little social stigma in the wake of a divorce. Paradoxically, it seems that the only people putting up a desperate fight for the right to get married are members of the gay community - and they're not having an easy time of it.

Less obvious to the population at large is a phenomenon that sociologists have termed "the marriage gap." This "gap" refers to the ever-widening chasm between poor, uneducated mothers - who often have their babies without getting married - and their more affluent sisters, who have the means and the impetus to get educated and start their careers before marrying and starting to create their families. Scholars of the family tell me that, at present, the divorce rate is going down among these more advantaged couples and up among those poorer, less-educated couples who do decide to tie the marital knot. As social scientist Andrew Cherlin suggests, the marriages of the financially stressed are more fragile from the get-go. "They never have enough money ; they have health problems; they have to deal with the trying, difficult lives of poverty."Obviously, this can cause tensions in a marriage; it can also cause people to forego getting married in the first place.

It should be added that cultural factors are also intertwined with these economic factors, for whites and Latinos are more likely to be married than are African-Americans, in the same way that wealthier people are more likely to be married than are the poor.

For an excellent discussion of "the marriage gap" and related issues, see:

CHERLIN, ANDREW J.THE DEINSTITUIONALIZATION OF AMERICAN MARRIAGE
Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (November 2004): 848-861

I am thinking of this because a friend of mine used to tell me that her greatest fear was of becoming a bag lady in her old age. I laughed at the suggestion: The woman was in her early fifties at the time, and was the editor-in-chief of a well-known magazine. She lived in an elegant apartment in Manhattan, commanded a substantial salary and was a staple of the New York social scene. That was fifteen years ago. Since then, she has been retired from her job, lives on her accumulated savings and has wanted for nothing. But I just heard that all of her money was invested with that scoundrel Bernie Madoff. She is broke. The destiny she most feared is upon her. What made her so sure it awaited her? Was there something ineffable - something that she just knew in her bones?

In 1980, I wrote a book about marriage - Intimate Partners - in which the oldest couple interviewed was in their late forties. I got a lot of flak about that from older readers, who wrote to me and said, "Hey, what about us? We're still alive and kicking! Why exclude the marriages of older people?

I recognized the validity of that complaint, but for the next twenty years I never really returned to the subject of couples' relationships. When I finally decided to do so, and began talking with couples in their older adult years - including some of the pairs that I'd interviewed two decades earlier - I was in for some surprises! I was finding a lot of contentment and well-being in marriages that had been tense and stormy the first time around.

I was buffaloed. Much of my writing life has been devoted to identifying and solving problems - but the folks I was talking to were in an unexpectedly good place. It wasn't that they were without issues and differences - but they seemed to be on the same page when it came to resolving them.

Here's an example from my own long-married life. My husband and I were lunching with dear friends when the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict arose. The discussion became very heated very quickly when my husband raised his hand and said "I have a proposal. Let's stop this discussion now." The other couple laughed, and so did we, and we turned to other subjects, including political ones upon which we agree.

The interesting aftermath of this incident is that whenever my husband and I get into a heated discussion - and we just had one about where we should spend our next vacation - one or the other of us raises our hand and simply says the word "Palestine." We laugh, and we drop the subject right there. It's become our magic word for respecting the fact that each of has espoused a strong position - and it's really not worth fighting about.
It took us a long time - believe me - to get here.

Something truly miraculous has happened in the course of the last century; which is that 25-30 years have been added to the life-span. If you'd been born in1900, your average life expectancy would have been fifty years of age. At the present time, average life expectancy hovers around eighty years, and that figure continues to rise. Just think of it!  A whole new phase has been added to the human life-cycle. A new period of adulthood that never even existed before is now with us!. And it's unfamiliar in many ways, because most people (and therefore, most couples) simply didn't live this long. In the twinkle of an evolutionary eye, more years have been added to the life span than were added in the past 5000 years of recorded history.

As a result, we now have more couples aged 65 and over who are living together than ever before. These are among the folks I studied - spouses in the 50 to 75 year old age-range - whom gerontologists call the "young old."  This demographic includes the first wave of the baby boomers, who are now turning 62.  I found that while folks in this group often do have some health issues, they are generally in pretty good shape, vital, and engaged in the world around them. But astonishingly little research attention has been lavished upon them, despite the fact that we live in aging world - one in which a boomer will be reaching age sixty every seven seconds for the next two decades. 

As these interviews progressed, I was gathering valuable information about sex in the older adult years.  For example, couples like the Donaldsons and the Winstons whose sexual activities had slowed down, might have been concerned about this slowdown but were nevertheless basking in contented, close, deeply satisfying relationships. On the other hand the completely asexual Hamiltons, who were clearly devoted to one-another, taught me that a lack of genital sexual relationships in the marriages of people in their later years is not necessarily a tragic outcome.  Actually, as reported recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, the results of a large scale study indicated that over one quarter of couples in their age-group (the early sixties) have not had intercourse within the previous year.  Still, there were many other couples who reported that their sex life was the same, or in some cases, even better.(See the article cited above). I was deeply moved by the Sternbergs' description of the intimate sexual relationship that these mates continued to enjoy in the wake of Nancy's traumatic breast cancer operation.

 
All in all, though sex is a perennially interesting topic, I found myself unable to make a defining statement about sexuality in older adulthood - aside from the observation that it didn't appear to be as crucial as was real affection between the members of the pair.

September Songs is meant to redress this failing. I must say that working on this book came as a surprise to me!  For one thing, I found that older couples were more contented and had more of a sense of well-being than did partners in earlier phases of the marital cycle.  The biggest surprise, though, came from the realization that many of the couples I was talking to wouldn't even have been alive if they'd been born at the beginning of the last century.  In 1900, average life expectancy was under 50 years.  In 2008, it's 77.6; in other words, couples are now living together, post child rearing, some 2 to 3 decades.

What is life like for these mates in their later adult years? What do they believe was the smartest thing and the dumbest thing they ever did in their lives?  What are the sexual issues that older couples face? How have their arguments changed over time? What is life like for long-married pairs when the years that have gone by are far greater in number than the years that they have left to live? This is (part of) what September Songs is about.