Happily Ever After

I was researching a project when I came across a website called divorcerate.org. According to divorcerate.org, the oft-quoted “50% of all marriages end in divorce” is actually inaccurate. In reality, between 40 and 50% of all first marriages end in divorce. Second marriages have a fail rate of over 60%, however; while third marriages dissolve more than 70% of the time.

The statistics feel wrong to me. I mean, I can understand first marriages failing – people are often young and idealistic when they first marry. They think that love and marriage will be some sort of fairy tale and fun all the time. When they discover that isn’t the case, disillusionment sets in. But you would think that second and third marriages would involve older and wiser people.

I dug a little further, just to see if the first website was corroborated. I found that there are numerous websites dedicated to this topic and all of them agree that subsequent marriages do, indeed, have higher fail rates than first marriages. The psychology-based ones aver that after a failed marriage, most people do not seek solitude, but rather look immediately to enter into another relationship in order to validate their worth and attractiveness. They urge readers to instead study the first marriage and try to figure out what went wrong before committing to someone else. Other sites believe that, after failing the first time, partners are not as invested emotionally – they already know that “happily ever after” does not exist.

This all holds a lot of interest for me. You see, I was married to someone else before I married Big Bren. When I married my first husband, whom I shall call C, I did so for all the wrong reasons. C was my college sweetheart. He was a wonderful guy, but a wounded man. His life read like a novel. His father, who was married, had an affair with a young woman in his village. When she became pregnant, her family threatened to disown her unless she got rid of the child. As this was in the 1960’s and abortion was not readily available in Guatemala, his mother did the next best thing: she gave birth to him, then left him on his father’s doorstep. His stepmother, who was childless, took him in and raised him. But – perhaps out of anger at his father – she never let him forget that he was the product of adultery and that his birth mother had not wanted him. As a result, C had serious abandonment issues.

I started dating C when I was 19 and he was 22. By then, he had already gotten a girl pregnant, who had – ironically – left him with the child and fled to California. I was undaunted by the fact that he already had a kid; it made him more mature in my eyes. I was also unphased by the fact that his ailing stepmother lived with him.

By 21, though, I had decided that I was going to law school and that I was going to do so outside of New York City. C suffered a meltdown. The sweet guy whom I fell in love with turned into a passive aggressive a-hole. He would make dates and not show up. He didn’t return phone calls. In my desperation, I offered him the one thing that I knew he wanted: a commitment.

We got married secretly in the City Hall by my law school (until today, only 5 other people ever knew we were married). For a while, things were good. He would drive up to see me almost every weekend. We spent hours on the phone every night. Soon, though, I started to see that I was missing out on the whole experience of being away from home for the first time in my life. My friends were out clubbing every night. Although I have never been a drinker, I loved to dance, so, I started to go with them. And I started to meet other people. People who were in law school, like me. People who did not have children. Or sick parents who would, necessarily, have to move in with us.

I don’t know exactly what happened to us. I do know that what he’d always feared came to pass: I abandoned him. First, physically, by moving away and then, I began to pull away emotionally. He resorted to what he always did when things were not to his liking – he ran away. As soon as I graduated from law school, I filed for a divorce. I wanted an annulment, but I could not bring myself to say that he defrauded me into marrying him. I knew well enough what I was doing. I later learned, though, that while I was out dancing, my husband was cozying up to another woman and had had another child, so I would’ve had grounds after all.

One thing I can say with certainty is that the statistics and the psychologists are wrong in my case. I did not rush to marry the first man who asked after my divorce. In fact, I did not marry Big Bren until five years later. But it makes me wonder whether I “fixed” what was wrong the first go round. I honestly do not know. Was I just attracted to the walking wounded? Over the intervening years, I have learned that there is no cure for the wounded when they won’t admit they’re hurt. I’ve also learned that if you don’t face that which you fear, it will rear up and bite you at some point. Other than that, I guess only time will tell.