During the month leading up to our wedding day I started
having nightmares. They say that marriage changes things, but for me the simple
thought of getting married again was enough to send my emotions reeling.
But the nightmares had nothing to do with Randy, and
everything to do with my past marriages.
In my nightmares I saw all of the ways that I had failed my
past spouses. And worried that I would fail Randy in the same way. In my
nightmares I saw all of the ways my past spouses had failed me. And worried
that Randy would fail me in the same way too.
That’s not fair to Randy or to me or to us. This
relationship is not those relationships. We will succeed in different ways and
fail in different ways, but our commitment is to one another, not to the past.
Marriage is hard enough without carrying around the baggage of past
marriages! So if you are considering divorce, I urge you to please,
please, please reconsider. Remember the love you had for one another on your
wedding day and do whatever it takes to get back to that moment and the
commitment you made to one another.
But the reality is that many of us are divorced. And many of
us are divorced more than once.
Because it’s so common, I figured I would find a wealth of
advice out there to help me navigate this new journey. So, about a week before Randy
and I got married, I googled “advice for your third marriage.” And I did find a
couple of articles, all of which included the statistics of how likely I was to
fail, but none of which told me why or how to avoid those pitfalls!
So I wondered, what advice was I hoping to find? What advice
would I give others in my situation?
1. If your past divorce was all your spouse’s
fault – DON’T GET REMARRIED!
Have you heard of the
5 stages of grief? Well, these aren’t
just for when you lose a loved one. These apply to so many things we face in
life, including divorce.
The five stages are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression,
and acceptance.
After my first divorce I was in total denial. I traveled to another country, moved to a different state,
changed jobs and friends, bought a house and got a dog and acted like the whole thing never happened. Denial
seemed easier than grieving the loss of my relationship with not only my spouse
but with the step-son and in-laws whose lives I would no longer be a part of.
And it was easier at first. Until I started dating again, and 3 years later
remarried, and all those feelings were still there, unaddressed. After 3 years!
And we had only been married for 2!
It was a huge reason why my second marriage didn’t work, though
I wouldn’t have admitted that at the time. I wanted to dwell in the stage of anger during that divorce, blaming him
and “his problems,” because that was easier than admitting I’d had any part in
yet another failed marriage. And if I could blame him, then I could justify all
of my wrong actions.
Which leads to bargaining. Bargaining is such a strange stage. It’s amazing what the mind will
come up with. Things like, “I can make this right by convincing my first
husband to marry me again” or “God if you forgive me for this divorce I promise
I’ll never get married again” or “If you can convince him to go to rehab I
promise I’ll stay in this marriage forever.” The “what ifs” and “if onlys” are
endless.
Depression of
course is the stage we are all trying to avoid and is why we want to jump into
a new marriage without going through all the other stages. If we meet someone
new while in the stages of anger or denial we can easily focus our energy on
the new, prospective spouse and pretend that everything is going to be puppy
dogs and rainbows. After all – it was their love we were missing all along.
WRONG!
Getting to the stage of acceptance
BEFORE getting remarried is the healthiest way to give your new marriage a
chance. If you are thinking, yes, but this new person is helping me get through
all these stages, then you are probably in a codependent relationship. Ouch,
right! Well, truth hurts. This is why we have platonic friends, family, and God
– to help us through the stages.
And the truth is, you are not the same person you were
before you were married the first time, and you never will be. Acceptance is
not about being okay with divorce or being glad you got divorced, it’s about
accepting your new reality and becoming the person you are now. Which you can’t
do when you are all caught up in someone new. (And if your friends are saying
this new person is your soul mate and you have to snatch them up before someone
else does – see #2!)
2. If your friends tell you to move in
together to “test it out”, or you are having an affair and your friends say he
is your “soul mate”, or any other advice that if you were in your right mind
you would know was ridiculous – GET NEW FRIENDS!
One day during a high school gym class we were sitting on
the floor watching a tutorial about how to keep score in bowling. Obviously not
the most exciting day we’d ever had, so some of my girlfriends were chatting
and giggling, as high school girls are wont to do. The gym teacher started
calling off names, giving out detentions. He called each of my friends and then
called me. I was outraged! “But I wasn’t talking!” I said. “It was my friends!”
He quickly replied, “Get new friends!” And off to detention I went.
I didn’t take his advice. And I kept getting detention.
While it seemed harsh at the time, the wiser I get the more
I see the merit in what he said. I wouldn’t trade those friends, but nor was he
asking me to. He didn’t tell me to ditch my friends, he simply told me to get
new ones. Because we are influenced by the people we spend time with.
I think it’s important to have a diversity of friends, but
when it comes to making huge life decisions like moving in together or getting
married or staying married, we have to be very careful about which of those
friends’ opinions we listen to.
The temptation is to listen to whomever agrees with you and what
you want, and to distance yourself from those opinions that tell you that you
might be (or definitely are!) wrong. But this isn’t hurting them, this is
hurting you. Because you are the one who has to live with the consequences of
your actions.
Moving in together is a serious commitment! Not one that
should be used to “test” the relationship. Affairs are selfish and cowardly and
if your friends tell you otherwise – GET NEW FRIENDS! The consequences of
marriage and divorce are life-long, and it’s important to surround yourself
with people who will help you see clearly.
So, as hard as it may be to hear, it’s important to have
friends who you can go to when faced with major decisions who will tell it to you
straight. And if more than one of your wise friends is telling you the same
thing, you’d be wise to listen!
3. If your divorce was pre-Facebook – IT NEVER
HAPPENED!
A friend of mine told me recently about a girl he is crushing
on, but this girl is “disillusioned” about relationships because of her past
divorce. My first thought was, ‘I know this girl and I had no idea she’d been
married before.’ Or maybe I did and I’d totally forgotten?
As Randy and I were talking about getting married my
instinct was to worry about what everyone else would think. Like my life is a
scene out of “
The Runaway Bride” and my entire community is talking about all
my past failures. And that they would certainly judge me if I were to put on a
white dress and have my father walk me down the aisle of a church.
But as we got closer and closer to our wedding day I
realized that “they” weren’t the ones who were worried about which marriage of
mine this was. It was ME who was feeling unworthy of dress shopping with my
mother and having bridesmaids and flower girls and a first dance.
That’s when Randy told me to stop calling this my “3rd marriage” because “this is OUR marriage.”
While some people will judge, most people will forget or
maybe never knew. In fact, some of you are probably reading this thinking,
“with all her world travel, when did Katie ever find time to get married and divorced,
not once but twice?!”
4. If your relationship is like an audition
for the Fast and the Furious 8 – SLOW DOWN!
In my experience, one person in the relationship is always
“ready” before the other – ready to get married, ready to move in together,
ready to change their Facebook status. But it’s important to be true to
yourself and when YOU are ready.
In our relationship Randy has always been ready before me.
He invited me to move to California after we’d known each
other for less than 2 weeks. I was ready 7 months later.
He proposed to me after we’d known each other for a year. I
was ready 5 months later.
We still ended up moving in together and we still ended up
getting married, but it happened when we were both ready.
Folks, this is forever. There is no reason to rush it. If
you don’t trust your partner to wait, then you have bigger issues. If you don’t
trust your partner to love you once they’ve seen all of you, then you have
bigger issues. If you think you are so in love that you can’t wait another
minute to be together, you definitely need to wait another minute!
Something about dating as an adult makes relationships
progress at warp speed. But remember when you were in high school and you dated
the same person for 4 years and YOU DIDN’T GET MARRIED during any of those
years?! Well, this is one time when adults should take the advice of teenagers.
We can enjoy a long courtship too!
5. Even if you know the secret ingredient to
her banana bread and how he likes his socks folded – YOU STILL HAVE A LOT TO
LEARN!
On about day 30 of our walking the Camino together across
Spain, Randy asked me, “Why do you always give me the heel of the bread?” And I
responded, “Because it’s your favorite!” And he said, “What gave you that
idea?”
We had spent over 700 uninterrupted hours together – more
than most couples spend in their entire courtship – and the whole time I
thought I was taking care of him, meanwhile he thought I was selfishly taking
the softest parts of the bread and leaving him the crust!
What no one likes to say (especially those of us in the
Christian sector) is that, if you’ve been married a couple times before,
chances are you are living with your partner before you actually tie the knot. The
temptation then is to think that you know everything there is to know about
being married to this person. Which is not even close to being true.
While driving home from our ocean-getaway where we went the
night of our wedding, Randy and I talked for the first time about what we
wanted his and mine and our relationship to look like with his children, who
are all adults. And even though his 19-year-old son lived with us for 6 months
and we had to navigate boundaries and other things with him, decision making is
different than relationship building.
There will always be new things to learn about our partners.
And we can either be fearful of this or excited by it.
I love how well I know Randy and how well he knows me. I
love that he knows I need time to transition from one activity (work) to the
next (being together). I love that I know coffee makes him sneeze and bread
gives him the hiccups. But I also love that every day I have the opportunity to
know him more and better.
We would do well in all of our relationships to approach
them with the mindset that there is always more to learn.
And my final bit of advice on the occasion of YOUR marriage
is: make it the marriage and the wedding of your dreams. If you want to get
married at the courthouse or in Vegas or in the park or in a big church
wedding, do it! If you want to wear a white dress or a pants suit or jeans or a
tuxedo, do it! If you want a big reception or a quiet escape, do it! YOU
DESERVE IT! Because whether this is your first or your fifth marriage is irrelevant to the fact that this is YOUR marriage and YOU are responsible for making it the marriage of your dreams.
CONGRATULATIONS!
