Second Wife
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Second Wife
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Sarah Humphreys Collins is a writer and editor with nearly two decades of experience in the field. She's the former editor-in-chief at Elemental, Bumble Mag, Real Simple, and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
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A few years ago, I was having a drink with a (younger) former assistant of mine who was in love and newly engaged and therefore wise beyond her years about marriage. I was 35, perpetually single, and perpetually stymied. With absolute certainty, she declared, "You're clearly going to marry someone who's been married before." This made me feel really old and so depressed. But six months later, I met that already-been-married man. She was right, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
No woman, when she is young and naive and fantasizing about her future wedding — even a woman (like me) who claims she has never and would never fantasize about stuff like her wedding — imagines marrying someone who's been married before. The divorced guy is simply not the groom she pictures.
Second marriages are a tricky business. The baggage can be major and multilayered. I dated Ron, my now-husband, throughout his entire arduous two-year divorce process; I was with him when he flung his first wedding ring into the Hudson River (because what else do you do with it?). He has two kids who are now my step kids and an ex-wife who is a big part of their lives and, therefore, ours. It's complicated and sometimes frustrating, however, I believe it's made our marriage extra strong and special.
But let's back up a bit, to the day we got engaged. As we were driving back from the beach where he had just proposed, Ron turned to me and quietly said, "I have to tell you: I am so excited to be marrying you, but I'm not so excited about the wedding." I had spent the car ride calling my parents, texting my friends, sobbing sloppily about the fact that I, 39 years into my life, had finally found someone who made me happy beyond words. I went from elated to deflated. But I wasn't surprised. Ron had taken his first commitment seriously, and despite the general consensus from both sides that the marriage wasn't meant to be, he felt hypocritical about making a second commitment, with the second round of pomp and circumstance, in front of some of the same people. A hard truth to swallow, sure. But to me, his hesitancy (and openness about it) was further proof that he would make a solid and honorable husband.
It turns out that planning a second wedding is a great training ground for a second marriage. No matter how hard you try to push it aside, the specter of the first event — and, by extension, the first marriage, and first wife — hovers above you throughout the process. The discussions and decisions are different, the emotions are knotty, and, yes, it can be awkward. I'd venture to say it all feels less pure. But as I learned over the eight months from engagement day to Big Day, planning your first wedding with a previously married partner can also be surprisingly awesome. Here's what I mean:
No matter how hard you try to push it aside, the specter of the first event—and, by extension, the first marriage and first wife—hovers above you throughout the process.
As most everyone reading this can attest, the push and pull of who gets invites are epic. Ron and his parents had been through all this before and were okay with keeping their list tight and focused. (At least, they claimed to be.) This left me more energy to muscle, my parents. When I asked them to please whittle down their list because our venue held a max of 90, they emailed me back with a list of my friends they thought could be removed. Fortunately, while my parents didn't completely comprehend the idea of a small wedding, others who didn't make the cut seemed to. I estimate I felt 72 percent less guilty about leaving people off the guest list than I would have if it were the first wedding for both Ron and me. His status made him a great scapegoat: "Oh, you know, Ron's been married before. So we're keeping it small."
Ron's first marriage didn't come with just emotional baggage — it also came with full sets of beautiful china and crystal. (Yep, he kept them.) And since I had lived many years as a single adult foodie, I was well stocked in terms of kitchen gear. (At some point, you just suck it up and buy the Le Creuset yourself.) So when I sat down to create the registry , it was more random than rational — a loose combination of unrelated parts. We called it the Franken-Registry. I first selected some fill-in-the-blanks basics (salad tongs, a pitcher), then Ron's five-year-old daughter sat on my lap in front of the computer and helped me glam it up with picks like a flowery painted vase (ooh, pretty!) and salt and pepper shakers that could've been set decor on Dynasty (ooh, sparkly!).
As I wrote earlier, I didn't daydream much about my big day before it actually happened. But there were three things that I knew I wanted: "Running on Faith," by Eric Clapton, as the first dance; my guitar-playing brothers and smoky-voiced best friend to perform it; and a coconut cake. These elements meant something to me, and I received no resistance from Ron. As for a lot of the other details — rehearsal dinner, bridesmaids, welcome bags, parting favors, wedding announcement, #weddinghashtag — I didn't bother. I could have done it all, and I love brides who do. But when it's the second time around, expectations loosen. And I happily used that as an excuse to opt-out.
We figured these out last. While I don't think it's easy for any couple to determine what they're going to say to each other, many of the popular passages and templates didn't seem to fit. For one, Ron still felt a bit hypocritical about saying the same words again. And second, wedding vows are focused on the future — to have and to hold, from this day forward. They often include not-so-subtle warnings about what's to come, designed to keep you strong and united in the face of conflict, change, hardship, kids. But Ron and I had already endured hardship; we'd stuck together through his divorce and all the strains that accompanied it. And we already had kids. I love his son and daughter as my own and was already in full-on juggling mode (life balance — ha!). So our ceremony not only looked forward, but it also affirmed and celebrated what we'd been through and where we'd landed. I held tight to Ron's hands as our reverend spoke of the lifelong commitment we'd already begun. I turned to my stepchildren, the mini best man and flower girl sitting in their petite finery in the front row, and promised to always cherish and honor them and to create a safe and loving home for them. And then I walked back down the aisle with my dreamy husband, surrounded by my new family, heart bursting with joy, grateful to be a second wife.
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Brooklyn, NY
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Houston, TX
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New York, NY
Portland, OR
San Diego, CA
San Francisco, CA
Seattle, WA
Washington, DC
Mental Health
Addiction
Anxiety
ADHD
Asperger's
Autism
Bipolar Disorder
Chronic Pain
Depression
Eating Disorders
Personality
Passive Aggression
Personality
Shyness
Personal Growth
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Stopping Smoking
Relationships
Low Sexual Desire
Relationships
Sex
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Child Development
Parenting
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Trending Topics
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Neuroscience
The question is not whether you’ll change; you will. Research clearly shows that everyone’s personality traits shift over the years, often for the better. But who we end up becoming and how much we like that person are more in our control than we tend to think they are.
Posted November 5, 2012
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Reviewed by Lybi Ma
1. I never expected to be a second wife. No one does; no little girl longs to grow up and walk down the aisle to the strains of "Here Comes the Second Bride, All Dressed in an Ivory Suit." But here I am, married to a man who was married before. I am the grown-up woman he married as a grown-up man. We have an ordinary life. It’s not a series of glittering evenings drinking martinis in smoky bars. Instead it is the familiar routine of waking to an arm around your waist, the companionable bathroom talk with mouths full of toothpaste, and the idea that someone will know if you don’t make it home at night. Yet even though we have gallopped past our twentieth year of marriage , I am still considered The Second One by certain of our acquaintances. Go figure.
2. Not many people like a second wife. Not the wives of college friends, not old relatives who can't remember new names but who remember that they shelled out good money for a fancy gift the first time around, and especially not the original wife, who thinks of herself as the bona fide wife. But when a man marries for the second time he knows what he's getting into. He enters willingly, eyes open, arms spread--he's the emotional version of a skydiver. Emerging broken, bruised and bleeding from a previous fall when the parachute didn’t quite open, he is nevertheless willing to do it again and at an even greater risk-- everyone knows second marriages are risky. The surprise is this: when the moment comes, the man jumps with alacrity.
3. So why is the phrase “second wife” so unnerving? When even used-car dealers don’t regard themselves as purveyors of second-hand merchandise, when second-hand clothes stores are now consignment shops, why should I stick with the second-wife moniker? It’s not like I wasn’t married before, too. My husband is as much a second husband as I’m a second wife. In part, this is due to the fact that there is still a contingent for which a marriage without children is only slightly more honorable than a series of one-night stands. Yet we make as felicitous a stepfamily as you are likely to find.
4. Being a second wife and a stepmother is rather like learning to perfect a set of aerial maneuvers. There are seriously complicated stunts involved-- trapeze artists have less difficulty in learning when to disappear and resurface at exactly the right moments than your average second wife. And there remains a slight sense of imbalance. His first marriage counted. My first marriage--even though it lasted five years--did not. During my final two years in my first marriage, I was constantly telling my friends how I wanted to make my relationship work. Then I learned that marriages aren’t like cars, independent of the people in them, to be fixed according to an owner's manual.
5. I realized, several years after I remarried, that one of my oldest friends never quite forgave me for getting on with life after my divorce . Treating me with the resentment of a union official watching a house being constructed with non-union labor, my erstwhile friend watched me build up and remodel my life. She has never absolved me from the sin of being happy.
6. To sum up: I am married to a man I love and am lucky. We’d both been married before, but does that really matter? Should second wives post billboards proclaiming that we are not necessarily women who flounce through life wearing ankle bracelets, feather boas, and alligator shoes? As some statistics have it, we are one in every four married women you will meet. Yet we have to shake off the stigma attached to being The Second Wife and say, with a smile, “Yes indeed, I’m his second wife. But I’m his last.”
Gina Barreca, Ph.D., a board of trustees distinguished professor at UConn, is the author of 10 books, including the bestselling They Used to Call Me Snow White, But I Drifted.
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The question is not whether you’ll change; you will. Research clearly shows that everyone’s personality traits shift over the years, often for the better. But who we end up becoming and how much we like that person are more in our control than we tend to think they are.
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Once I entered my 30s, conversations about dating shifted. Recently, I was having conversations with two friends about how much things change. One was with a friend who is going through a divorce and expressed the feeling that she now has a scarlet letter when she decides to jump back into dating. Another is single in her 20s, and jokes that by the time she gets married she’s going to have to find a guy that’s back on the market after a divorce.
The funny thing is, I often made that same joke back in my 20s. I knew I didn’t want to get married until after 30 , but I didn’t actually anticipate that it would come true (spoiler: it did). In the same token, I saw friends leave unhappy marriages and end up with wonderful second spouses, and I also watched some of my closest friends marry people who had been divorced. The concept wasn’t foreign to me, nor did it have any stigma attached.
Last year, I got married – and I am my husband’s second wife. It’s a weird phrase to even say since I never really think about myself as such. We’re fortunate that only once during our engagement did someone refer to my husband as getting “remarried,” and I gave this woman a pass given her age and traditional sensibilities.
But, perhaps it’s that we live in a time where it’s not unusual to hear that someone had a “starter marriage” in their late-20s before settling down . I
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