This is one of the best articles I have ever read. Read, digest & act. Off you go!

You may think you know more the second time around, but statistics prove you don’t. In fact, there’s something about the decline and fall of a marriage that keeps folks from learning from their mistakes. Making remarriage work takes much more than you think.

Americans are an optimistic lot. Perhaps nowhere is our optimism more apparent than in our approach to marriage. For one of every two of us, certifiable love can be expected to end in tears. Still, 90% of Americans marry. Indeed, surveys consistently show that for virtually all of us, men as well as women, marriage holds an honored place on our wish list, something we believe is necessary for attaining life happiness—or its slightly wiser sibling, fulfillment.

If our optimism steers us into marriage, it goes into overdrive with remarriage. Despite disappointment, pain, disruption, and sometimes even the destruction of divorce, most of us opt to get back on the horse. An astonishing 70% of the broken-hearted get married all over again. If you count among the remarried those who merge lives and even households without legal ratification, the de facto remarriage rate is much closer to 80%. Americans don’t divorce to get out of marriage. Yet a whopping 60% of remarriages fail. And they do so even more quickly than first marriages.

If the divorce and remarriage rates prove one thing, it’s that conventional wisdom is wrong. The dirty little secret is experience doesn’t count when it comes to marriage/remarriage. A prior marriage actually decreases the odds of a second marriage working. Ditto if you count as a first marriage its beta version; three decades of a persistently high divorce rate have encouraged couples to test their relationship by living together before getting married. But even the increasingly common experience of prior cohabitation actually dims the likelihood of marital success.