After the Split: Tie, Tie Again : Our loving lips may murmur ‘Till death do us part,’ but more often it’s divorce that separates us. Undeterred, many keep tying the knot. Why? Some observers say we’re all just old-fashioned romantics.
So you’re in love. Again.
You’ve even popped the question. Again.
No big deal. Almost half the 2.4 million couples who say “I do” this year will not be saying it for the first time. And 15% of those will be taking their third, fourth (maybe even sixth) stab at wedded bliss, according to government figures.
Some may not be able to keep a straight face while mumbling “ till death do us part,” since they know it’s not death but messy divorces that split them from prior mates.
After all, this is America. You do it over until you get it right, right?
Not exactly.
Since marriage is not scientific, there is no provable method for “getting it right.” And no figures to show that those who keep trying ever do . Furthermore, there’s dispute in learned circles as to what “right” is, in the context of a long and successful marriage.
Is it happiness? Love? Companionship? An absence of pain?
And why is it that so many smart, sensible people--who have learned how not to repeat other kinds of mistakes--keep marrying again and again? Psychologists, divorce lawyers, anthropologists--even those with multiple marriages behind them--don’t seem to know.
But, of course, everyone has a theory.
Helen E. Fisher, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, wrote more than 400 pages on the subject in “The Anatomy of Love,” published last year.
After surveying courtship, sex and pair-bonding from prehistory until now, Fisher believes that “love is a primitive but elegant emotion, like fear or surprise.”
Brain physiology plays a big part: “There are two stages of love--infatuation and attachment. The infatuation stage is associated with a natural amphetamine high, caused by a chemical produced by the brain. After that comes the more calm attachment stage--an addictive need for the other person, produced by a morphine-like substance released in the brain.”
The reason for the high divorce and remarriage rate in America, Fisher says, is that “when the infatuation stage wears off, there’s a natural weak point in the relationship. Rather than recognize this weak point and work through it, we tend to abandon the relationship altogether.”
(And because divorce laws and social mores have been so liberalized in recent decades, it has become easier than ever for mates to shed and rewed.)
Lee Lacey, a three-time husband with five children, says he didn’t realize that shared interests were a key until the third time around.
He was rarely at home when his first wife needed him, because he was building his film production company into a business with offices around the globe. His wife, stuck in Los Angeles with the children, couldn’t tolerate his absences and what appeared to be his lack of interest in family life.
They divorced and he soon fell “desperately and passionately in love” with a fashion model, who traveled the world with him. “We had great chemistry--as exciting and fulfilling a relationship as anybody could want for about four years--until we married.”
That’s when the model decided she wanted a doctorate and a different career. Like his first wife, she no longer traveled with him and was not involved in his day-to-day life. “She was here; I was on the road. I wasn’t an available mate. She got her doctorate and left me in the dust. It was the most devastating moment in my life.”
When Lacey met his current wife of 14 years, he says, he finally knew what was needed. “Obviously, the bed is an important part of a relationship. But love cannot survive on that alone. In addition to great chemistry, we had an incredible amount of mutual interests and things in common. We could collaborate in life as well as in love.”
Lacey’s advice: “Be aware of why things didn’t work out before, so you don’t keep making the same mistake.” And have courage, he says, “because there is magic out there, and we never know when or where we’ll find it.”
Magic? Too poetic a concept for scrappy divorce lawyers, you might think. But you’d be wrong.
Stuart Walzer, a Century City divorce lawyer who’s seen thousands of marriage hits and misses, says remarriage is “the triumph of hope over experience.”
No matter how many times a man or woman fails at matrimony, Walzer says, most “maintain the fantasy, the unquenchable hope, that the next spouse will be the one who makes him or her feel complete--as if he has finally found the missing half. And sometimes it really does happen on the third or fourth try,” Walzer says.
“No one wants to be an isolated and lonely spirit, wandering through the universe.” Walzer believes too many people focus only on “what they can see, touch taste and feel”--rather than on their spiritual needs. The superficiality of their search is what leads them to make mistakes, he says.
Zsa Zsa Gabor, with eight marriages under her belt, states her theory simply: Don’t confuse love with sex. “I went with my current husband for five years before marriage, and we never made love,” Zsa says. “We are married six years now, and we are the happiest couple in town.”
Yes, but what makes it work? “Because most of the others I married too fast; this man I knew very well--and I didn’t get crazy with sex before I found out if I really liked him.”
Sex was also a culprit for Tess, a well-heeled Beverly Hills matron who jokingly refers to herself as “The Sixth Mrs. B.”
But it’s no joke.
“Someone should have told me that if a guy doesn’t get it right the first five times, he’ll never get it right the sixth,” she laments. She was a widow who’d loved her first husband “passionately until the day he died.” And Mr. B. was the first man to whom she was physically attracted after recovering from her loss.
“There was chemistry between us. And I knew how to have a good relationship,” she recalls. So she said “I do” after a whirlwind courtship and immediately started a life of “romantic craziness. I’d have dinner ready and he’d say, ‘Let’s go to Spago instead.’ Or ‘Let’s go to Europe for the weekend.’ We had fun for a few years--but that’s not love and that’s not marriage. That’s not even necessarily a real relationship.”
Tess says her first marriage was “the real thing,” and she continues to believe in the institution. “Just be careful to know who you’re getting hooked up with--and why.”
Some cynics laugh at naive pronouncements of faith in an institution so old that it predates the sun dial--and that they think is just as obsolete.
“I don’t believe people are constructed to be monogamous for 60 years,” says Charles Webb, a Beverly Hills marriage and family therapist. “When people first said ‘ ‘til death do us part,’ death probably occurred at the age of 30. But the long marriage in today’s culture is an uphill battle. There’s a desire for variety among people who have enough money and time to pursue it.”
What’s more, he says, “people have unrealistic expectations about marriage; they think it should be one nonstop orgasm.” So they keep searching, despite repeated failures.
Chaytor Mason, psychologist and professor emeritus at USC, describes marriage as “the greatest test of a person’s character. You live so close to another person that you are entirely without artifice, and your defenses are down. It can be frightening and potentially destructive--and those are signs that your personality can’t meet the test. You either correct the problem or the same situation will re-occur.”
But most people keep blindly remarrying, he says, “hoping to correct in the next relationship that which they screwed up in last.”
Joan Keay, advertising writer and admitted three-time loser at love, says she was such a person. “But at least I had a sense of humor--and anyone who’s married more than once should know how to laugh.”
First wed at 18, she defied her mother, who warned it was a lust that would never last.
Quickly divorced, she finished college and married an older, richer man. “My mom had said ‘Next time, marry someone who loves you more than you love him, so you won’t get hurt again.’ I figured maybe she was right. But Mother lied.”
While still married to the second husband, she “looked up one day during a job interview” and saw the love of her life: “Bong. It was all there. For both of us. He said, ‘Do you want the job or do you want me?’ I took him. I got a divorce and went right into marriage with this third guy. We left L.A. for Australia, where we both got work.”
But after three years, Keay says, the same old problems cropped up, and she walked out again.
Back at work in L.A., she was understandably skeptical about a fourth try when another potential mate appeared. “I said, ‘Holy Moses, I am really in trouble here. I think I love him, but he’s 19 years younger than I am.’ At least the others had some hope, but this has all the earmarks of disaster.”
She packed her bags and went to Johannesburg, South Africa, leaving the youthful swain behind. But he followed--and she couldn’t resist. After living together for almost two years, they married eight years ago.
“The one I thought was the dud is the one that’s working,” Keay says from Australia, where she and her fourth husband live. “That’s because we treat each other as caring human beings. We don’t belong to each other or allow ourselves to be sucked into each other’s craziness. We are each complete individuals on our own who elect to be together.”
She believes in lasting love--but no longer in the institution of marriage: “It’s like a piece of primitive art--a totem that you admire for the belief that others once had in it. But you know it doesn’t do its magic any more. It’s a totem that used to sit on top of the hut and make people safe; today it’s in your living room and it just makes a nice piece of art.”
