IF ALL you need is love, as the Beatles say, perhaps it makes sense that a shrinking share of Americans are even bothering with marriage. In 1960 85% of American adults had been wed at least once; last year just 70% could say the same. Young people are proving particularly reluctant to try: 28% of men aged between 25 and 34 in 2010—and 23% of women—will not yet have tied the knot by 2030, according to estimates from the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank.
There are several reasons for this change in marriage trends. More women are working outside the home, and for fairer pay, so a husband is no longer a meal ticket. And attitudes to cohabitation have shifted: almost a quarter of young adults now live with a partner. Given the exorbitant costs of both weddings and divorces in America, living "in sin" seems increasingly sensible, particularly for the many youngsters who are now drowning in college debt.
But while a larger proportion of Americans are shying away from saying “I do”, those that have done it before remain keen to do it again. Last year 40% of new marriages included at least one partner who had made vows before, according to a new Pew study. Divorced or widowed adults are about as likely to remarry today—57% have done so—as they were in the 1960s. The prospect is certainly more appealing than it ever used to be, as rising divorce rates have yielded a larger pool of possibilities. So In total, 42m adults in America have been married more than once, up from 14m in 1960. “It’s fascinating that among those people eligible to remarry, the share that do has been stable for such a long time,” reckons Gretchen Livingston, one author of the new research.
A breakdown of the data reveals that men are more likely to remarry than women, and the age difference between partners widens the second time around. It also turns out that trends in longevity have helped nudge more older adults to call it quits. Divorce rates for older Americans have doubled since 1990; in 2011 more than 28% of those who reported divorcing in the previous 12 months belonged to this age group. But older singletons do not necessarily stay in the lonely hearts club for long. Half of divorced seniors (those over 65) had remarried in 2013—up from 34% in 1960.
Specialist dating websites make finding new people easier for those too creaky to hit the dance floor. Maturesinglesonly.com says more than 7m people aged 40 and older have sought their help since 2002, while match.com reckons about 30% of its American users are aged over 50.
That so many ageing Americans are finding new love may have surprised the young Beatles, who wondered whether it was possible to receive valentines at age 64. But the four band members ultimately had nine wives between them, and Paul McCartney has been married more than twice—as have 8% of Americans.
Just 29 of every 1,000 divorced or widowed Americans had remarried as of 2011, down from 50 per 1,000 in 1990.
The invitations are in the mail. Jennifer Beltz and T.J. Gurski of Commerce Township, Mich., are defying the odds — they're taking the plunge a second time.
"When I got divorced, I said, 'I'm never getting married again," says Beltz, 41, who works in marketing.
That sentiment seems to be quite common among those jaded by a failed union: A new analysis of federal data provided exclusively to USA TODAY shows the USA's remarriage rate has dropped 40% over the past 20 years.
"Pretty much everyone, regardless of age, is less likely to get remarried than in the past," says sociologist Susan Brown, lead author of the analysis, by the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.
The analysis of data comparing 2011 with 1990 shows that in 2011, just 29 of every 1,000 divorced or widowed Americans remarried, down from 50 per 1,000 in 1990; 2011 was the most recent year available for the review.
The remarriage rate has dipped for all ages, with the greatest drops among those younger than 35: a 54% decline among ages 20-24, 40% for ages 25-34. Much of the drop is due to the rise of cohabitation and older ages for first marriage — almost age 27 for women and almost 29 for men.
"Cohabitation has opened up options for people that weren't there 20 years ago," Brown says. "It affords the benefits of marriage without the legal constraints."
A generation ago, cohabitation was often called "living in sin," but that taboo has faded. Unmarried couples of all ages are moving in together — 7.8 million, according to 2012 Census data. And 37% of cohabiters have been married before. Between 1990 and 2012, the percentage of unmarried couples living together more than doubled, from 5.1% to 11.3%.
Even so, it's not as if everyone previously married is forgoing the institution; almost one-third of all marriages in 2010 were remarriages, according to an earlier analysis by the Bowling Green center.
Gurski, 46, who will marry Beltz in November on Captiva Island, Fla., says he "definitely knew I would remarry."
However, many divorced people are hesitant to risk tying another knot.
"Marriage wasn't even in the discussion," says David Smith, 58, who works in Internet marketing and Web design. He and partner Sue Stebbins, a business consultant, have lived together in Norwalk, Conn., for five years. Both are divorced; he has three grown kids.
"We really wanted to be liberated from anything that reminded us of our past," she says. "Rather than something outside of you giving you that commitment, it's a choice daily to form that commitment."
"We actually didn't want to get married again," says Guccione, whose two sons are 18 and 21. "We decided to live together and the boys live with us and we were content to stay that way."
But earlier this year, they started "talking about it back and forth" and decided to take the leap. Her sons will escort her down the aisle at the county courthouse; they'll have a party to celebrate Nov. 16.
Some couples worry about the odds of a successful remarriage, but long-term data is relatively non-existent because of federal cutbacks that stopped data collection. "There is no good, recent data on divorce among remarried couples that I know of," says marriage researcher Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
However, new research does suggest those who have been divorced once are less likely to stay in an unsatisfying marriage a second time.
"It's not that the couples are less happy with each other and it's not that they're fighting more than first-married couples," says psychologist Sarah Whitton of the University of Cincinnati. "It seems that if a relationship starts deteriorating, they're quicker to move towards divorce." Her study of 1,931 married individuals was published this spring in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
Remarriage is "difficult and different" from first marriage, says relationship expert Maggie Scarf, a Yale University fellow who outlines the hazards in her new book, The Remarriage Blueprint. Scarf conducted lengthy, face-to-face interviews with 80 remarried individuals to see how their marriages fared.
"In the first marriage, the couple has time alone to set up their own culture — the way they do things. But in the second marriage, you have a single parent who has been living alone with his or her children and they are deeply, deeply bonded and have a culture of their own. The stepparent walks into that and doesn't know the first thing about it.
"The American delusion is you can pop in a new parent like a replacement figure and you have a new first marriage. You actually have a very different marriage," Scarf says.
Krissy and David Coleman of Lebanon, Va., ages 37 and 38, were well aware of the relationship troubles that can happen because of the kids. That's why before they married last week – both for the second time – the five kids they have between them, ages 7 to 18, were an integral part of the courtship.
"We dated the kids, too," she says. "When we went out, our children went with us. It was very important that if somebody was going to be in my life, they have to accept my children."
Not every stepfamily is The Brady Bunch; experts say the two biggest factors complicating remarriage are money and children – even if the kids are adults.
"It's much, much harder than a first marriage," says David Olson of Minneapolis, a professor emeritus of family social science at the University of Minnesota. "You see this cobweb of relationships. Just one little decision impacts that whole system. It's not only more people, but it's more decisions, and they're more difficult. People are bringing a lot of bad history with them."
Olson is co-author of the 2011 book The Remarriage Checkup, which surveyed 50,000 couples taking a class to prepare for remarriage. Two-thirds were age 41 and older and half said they were living together.
"Cohabiting isn't going to make it easier," Olson says. "In many ways, it makes it more complicated. ... It doesn't signal to the kids 'this is permanent.' "
Buttars, 28, was married for a year and had no children. Fortune separated after five years and divorced; her daughter from that marriage just turned 4. "I want her to know that no matter what, we're promising to stick it out," she says. "When you promise something you make it work."
Fortune, a hair stylist, says she married at 18, which was "absolutely" too young, but in Utah, "being married really young is very common."
Money issues are driving increasing numbers to seek legal help, such as pre-nuptial agreements or cohabitation agreements as they consider the possibilities for their relationship, says Alton Abramowitz, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.
"Everybody comes in with different agendas," he says. "People come in who have been through a divorce. They don't want to go through it again. If they get remarried, they do not want it to be as messy as the last time. They want everything figured out now."
Couples need to share credit reports and discuss all types of financial issues, including future caregiving responsibilities and how much the previous divorce impacted their financial lives, says Brent Neiser, senior director of the Denver-based National Endowment for Financial Education, which has produced a downloadable pamphlet for those about to remarry.
"People entering remarriage may have a higher level of awareness of the financial issues because each has gone through a financial history with another person. Some of that history is good history; some is bad. They probably have a hit list of personal finance issues," he says.
Paula and Michael Bisacre, of West Friendship, Md., celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary earlier this year. When they met, she was a divorced mother of two and he was a widower with three children. The kids now range from 16 to 28. In 2006, she started a website, RemarriageWorks.com, to help others sort through the continuing challenges — from step-sibling rivalries to estate planning.
"It changes, but I still think there are challenges," says Paula Bisacre.
Beltz and Gurski say they're prepared.
She has two kids, ages 5 and 8; he has four, ages 18 to 23. They live by the motto hanging on a plaque on the wall of the home they purchased together earlier this year: "You call it chaos, we call it family."
"We know there's going to be trying times and hurdles we have to go over, but we're willing to do that together," Gurski says. "We like the idea of a solid commitment like marriage."
Nearly two thirds of ex-married men would consider doing it again
Americans, who have lost a little of their ardor for marriage, are still pretty game to remarry. About 40% of all the new marriages in 2013 were not first marriages and in half of those cases, both spouses had ridden in that rodeo before. And new analysis from Pew Research finds that men are much more enamored of remarriage than women are.
“Most currently divorced or widowed men are open to the idea of remarriage, but women in the same circumstances are less likely to be,” says the report, which draws on figures from a survey it conducted in May and June. Almost two thirds of men either want to remarry or would at least consider it, while fewer than a half of women would.
Perhaps it’s not surprising then that more guys do get remarried than women. Almost two thirds of men who have been married before and got divorced or were widowed wed again, whereas only a smidgen more than half of the women do.
There are lots of possible reasons for the gender discrepancy. Women tend to live longer, so they may outlast all their potential suitors. Or, since women now have more economic freedom than they did 50 years ago, they may feel less need for a partner. And while women still bear the bulk of the home care duties, once liberated, they may feel disinclined to enter into another legally binding agreement to look after somebody else.
However, the Pew analysis seems to suggest that the guys are being the shrewder partners, at least financially. “On key economic measures, remarried adults fare better than their currently divorced counterparts and about as well as those in their first marriages,” says the report, which gets its figures from analyzing American Community Survey data. Only 7% of people who are remarried live in poverty, compared to 19% of people who are divorced and still single. “Homeownership, which often reflects wealth, is also much higher for the remarried than the divorced—79% versus 58%.”
Of course, it may not be that the spouses are more financially stable because they are married. It might be that more financially stable people are in a better position to attract partners, build sturdy relationships and get married.
Slightly less than a quarter of all people who are married in the U.S. today are actually remarried people. Fifty years ago, they only represented about 13% of married people. In the same half century, marriage has fallen quite markedly out of favor among the young. But so far, the majority of people who have tried it are willing to give it another go.
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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.
