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The Midlife Second Wife ™

~ The Real and True Adventures of Remarriage at Life's Midpoint

The Midlife Second Wife ™

Tag Archives: Remarriage

(Older) Women in Love

13 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Love, Midpoints, Remarriage, Transitions, What's the Buzz?

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boomers, Cindy Joseph, Love, Lynn Forbes, Remarriage, Tammy Bleck, WHOA Network

What do we talk about when we talk about love? I recently had the honor to participate, via Google Hangout, in a lively panel discussion on the WHOA! Network. I loved talking with these accomplished, thoughtful, and insanely fun women about what it really means to find love at 50-plus. We talked about the lessons of our past relationships. We talked about the exhilaration of discovering that one amazing person who is perfect for us—and our surprise in realizing that person happens not to possess some of the qualities and life experiences we’ve toted around on our preconceived checklist of “must-haves.” We talked about the courage it takes to make a commitment, to upend our lives in order to start a new one with THE ONE.

Lynn Forbes, a co-founder of WHOA!, moderated our chat, which features model and entrepreneur Cindy Joseph and writer Tammy Bleck. You can view the short clip above to eavesdrop on what we had to say, but you can also watch the full conversation right here:

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The ‘L’ Word

20 Saturday Oct 2012

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Love, Midpoints, Relationships and Family Life, Remarriage, Transitions

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Dating, Divorce, Life, Love, Relationships, Remarriage, Sweetest Day

morgueFile image/KConnors photograph

NOTE: KatieCouric.com published an edited version of this post as “Learning to Love Again” on Monday, Oct. 22, 2012.

As many magazine articles, advice columnists, and situation comedies will tell you, it’s tricky being the first person in a relationship to say, “I love you.” Remember George Costanza? George was left holding what Jerry Seinfeld called a “pretty big matzo ball” because he failed to receive the much coveted “I love you return.” But what’s funny on television is actually quite terrifying in real life. It takes a huge leap of faith and nerves of titanium to say the “L” word first.

Take that terror to the tenth power if you’re divorced.

I know whereof I speak. After 26 years of marriage, my first husband and I divorced. Fast-forward six years, and I meet him. You know, The One. But let’s digress a moment, because playing with these numbers has given me an epiphany.

When I met The One, I was one year shy of my seven-year cellular renewal cycle—you know, that “Aha! Moment” your body supposedly has when all of its cells slough away, leaving you with an almost brand-new self. In truth, as Nicholas Wade wrote in a New York Times science article seven years ago, some cells—“the neurons of the cerebral cortex, the inner lens cells of the eye and perhaps the muscle cells of the heart”— remain unchanged. Now that’s what I call something of great constancy. The cellular structures of the brain, the eye, and the heart—three essential components in registering romantic love, if you ask me—remain constant. The cells in the rest of our bodies hit the refresh key, as it were.

Interesting. But the brain, eye, and heart theory didn’t pass the constancy test in my first marriage, I’m sad to say.

Then again, you never know. I like the idea of considering, given multiples of seven, that perhaps anything is possible. Believe me, I have mapped this out. I was married at 21 and divorced at 47. (Okay, so I’m a year or two off.) But everything did seem possible when I met The One, skipping along as I was toward my next seven-year cycle of renewal. The One and I had a lot in common: we made each other laugh, we sang lyrics from the Great American Songbook while cleaning up the kitchen after cooking together, and the attraction we felt toward one another left us in awe.

And then, two-and-a-half months into the relationship, it happened.

I did it. I’m the one who said it. After a hesitant sigh, he replied, as gently as he could, “I’m sorry. I’m just not there yet.”

Talk about your matzo balls. I could have opened a deli.

“Forget it,” I countered hastily. “I shouldn’t have said it. I understand what you’re saying/feeling/thinking.” (I was trying to fill in as many blanks as I could to cover myself.) “It’s all right.”

I wanted to believe that his reaction stemmed from emotional baggage. Our arms were filled with it. His divorce, however, was more recent than mine. I had reached the point where my baggage, as Dr. Terri Orbuch (The Love Doctor) says, could fit in the overhead compartment. Him? Not so much. He needed a skycap.

Or maybe it was something else. Maybe (Heaven forefend!) it was a case of “he’s just not that into you.”

And so he left, leaving me to wonder if I’d blown it. How could I have misread the signals? Everything pointed to love. All of the signs were there: the caring, the fondness, the intimacy, the long, meaningful conversations, the seeming trust, the genuine enjoyment in just being together. If that’s not love, what is?

I decided I wasn’t going to let this get to me. I was happy, he was happy. (He was, wasn’t he?) We had a date for the following evening; in fact, we had several events lined up into the next month. I wasn’t about to bring it up again.

Until one day I did.

“I blank you.”

“What?”

“I said ‘I blank you.’”

“What does that mean?”

“It can mean whatever you’d like it to mean. Fill in the blank. For my part, I know what it means but I’m not telling you. More cake?”

He laughed, and that was that. We were back on an even keel. “I blank you” became a running joke between us. He even started saying it to me.

The weeks flew by. Before I knew it, October was here, the month containing the second most dreaded Hallmark holiday (after Valentine’s Day) for single people: Sweetest Day.

I remember the scene as though it were yesterday. I had cooked dinner, something from my collection of Barefoot Contessa cookbooks. I bought him a maroon hooded Oberlin sweatshirt, not because he went to Oberlin, but because I did. I still lived in that quaint college town, and he loved its cultural vibe as much as I did. I wrapped the gift and bought a card. I presented both to him with a flourish. Here’s the card:

© Marian Heath. Used with permission and slightly altered, as it was the day I gave it to The One. Where would we be without Post-It Notes?

After he finished laughing, he became quiet. He looked at me across the table and said, “Marci, I’m not saying this because it’s Sweetest Day. I don’t “blank” you anymore. That’s silly. I love you.”

There it was. Four months after meeting him on Match.com, he told me he loved me. The matzo ball dissolved.

Four years after that first sweetest day together, we’re still celebrating. We’ve been married for two years. At the risk of tempting fate, by our seventh wedding anniversary, I fully expect the constancy theory to hold—my heart, my head, and my eyes will see what I’m seeing right now: He’s The One.

© Marian Heath. Used with permission.

RELATED:

‘When they Fall, they Fly’

“Outliers of Outloving”

“Secrets Of A Successful Marriage: Marlo Thomas And Phil Donahue”

“Secrets to a Happy Relationship”

 

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The Midlife Second Wife Joins “Katie” as a Featured Blogger on Monday, Oct. 22

18 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Love, Relationships and Family Life, Special Events, What's the Buzz?

≈ 43 Comments

Tags

ABC Studios, blogging, BlogHer, Divorce, Katie, Katie Couric, Life, Love, media, Relationships, Remarriage, talk shows, Twitter

The elegant set of ‘Katie.’ The show is taped at ABC Studios in New York and syndicated across the United States.

(MONDAY, OCT. 22, 2012)—UPDATE: I learned late last night that the segment featuring Dr. Terri Orbuch has been postponed and will be rescheduled. When the producers announce a new air date I will let you know. Hope you can tune in to watch Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon speak with Katie Couric and see both women engage in a bit of competitive sport!

The call came on a Monday in August, about a week after I had returned home to Richmond following the BlogHer conference in New York City. On the line was Brittany Jones-Cooper, a producer of Katie, Katie Couric’s new syndicated daytime talk show.

She and Couric had been at the BlogHer conference—Couric was featured in one of several keynote interviews, engaging in a lively discussion with BlogHer cofounder Lisa Stone, and issuing a clarion call for bloggers to participate in her new show. The television legend certainly came to the right place!

And, it would seem, so did I.

Back to that phone call. Couric’s producer had seen my blog, liked what I wrote, and asked if I could be in ABC Studios in New York on Thursday for a taping. Couric has employed several ingenious methods of integrating social media into her program; one way is to have two bloggers in the audience for each show. The theme of this particular program would be divorce.

Now as we all know, I happen to know a little bit about that subject.

And so it was that three days later, my husband John, who grew up about 20 minutes outside of the city, drove me into Manhattan. A bonus of the trip? We’d take some time to explore all of the landmarks of his youth—something I’d wanted to do ever since meeting him.

What a whirlwind! Just arrived backstage at the ABC Studios, still wearing my traveling clothes. TMSW got dressed and made up in record time!

I’m in the cobalt blue jacket, wearing a necklace and an Apple MacBook Pro. At my right is blogger Deesha Philyaw, of ‘Co-Parenting 101.’

You’re reading about all of this now because the program I was invited to attend airs on Monday, Oct. 22, at 3 p.m. on NBC12 in the Richmond market. You’ll want to visit the Katie website to check your local listings; in some markets the program airs at 2 p.m.

Katie Couric chats with the audience before the taping. Check out her gorgeous shoes!

The featured guest? One of my favorite actresses—the smart, sultry, simply ageless Susan Sarandon—as admired for her social activism as she is for her award-winning performances. Single after a long-term partnership with actor Tim Robbins, she turned 66 earlier this month; she shares her thoughts about commitment, relationships, and what it’s like to be an older—albeit steadily working—actress in Hollwood. Also on the show is Dr. Terri Orbuch, aka ‘the love doctor,’ offering useful marital advice—from a surprising source.

After the taping, Sarandon and her two dogs, Rigby and Penny, posed for pictures with Katie. Remind me to tell you a cute story about Rigby!

The colorfully-garbed audience of ‘Katie’

I’ll be tweeting LIVE during the broadcast beginning at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. If you’re not already following me on Twitter, please hop over to the next window and click “follow.”

The producer also asked me to write an essay for the program’s website about finding love after divorce. (I happen to know a little something about that, too.) KatieCouric.com published “Learning to Love Again” on Oct. 22, 2012. The post appears as “The ‘L’ Word” on this blog.

I hope you’ll have a chance to tune in or follow my LIVE tweets during the broadcast. Enjoy! And as always, thanks for reading!

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The Light Shines On: Our Second Wedding Anniversary

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Love, Midpoints, Relationships and Family Life, Remarriage, Second Weddings, Special Events

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Anniversaries, boomers, Life, Love, midlife, Relationships, Remarriage, Weddings

"The Midlife Second Wife" "weddings" "relationships" "ceremonies"

Marci, aka The Midlife Second Wife, with John on their wedding day. Photo credit: Roger Mastroianni

Where does the time go? It seems only yesterday when I received an “interest” notification via Match.com from “arts&sportslvr,” and here we are, about to celebrate our second wedding anniversary. (Those keeping careful notes will want to know, for the record, that our nuptials took place on August 14, 2010.)

So much has happened in two short, swift years. We moved to another part of the country and set down roots by buying a home. (I also started this blog, which celebrates its first anniversary later this month.) We continue to grow together and learn together and hold each other close when buffeted by life’s vicissitudes. We embrace one another’s neuroses. (Thank you, Wendy Swallow.) We celebrate every triumph, no matter how small. We listen to each other. We support one another. We are a duo, a couple, a unit, a team. We are each other’s best friend.

Do you see the flames in the separate candles we are holding? We are about to create one unified, eternal flame. It still burns strong and bright, despite a few clouds, despite some wind and rain. When we decided to get married, we knew there would be challenges to face—how could there not be? We were each of us starting over, from scratch, midway through our lives. The light at the end of the tunnel seemed so dim, so seemingly light-years away, that we simply had to trust that it was there. It is there. It flickers, sometimes brightly, sometimes with just a pale fire. It is, in the words of our wedding poem (Wendell Berry’s “The Country of Marriage”):

a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

We are nothing if not brave. What else can we be? We are human and we live in this world and we have faith. And we are together, thank God.

On what will be our second wedding anniversary—and on every day of our lives together—I say to “arts&sportslvr:” Thank you for joining your candle to mine, and mine to yours.

I love you.

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Breaking Eggs, Making Omelets: The Midlife Marriage Proposal

23 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Midpoints, Relationships and Family Life, Remarriage, Transitions

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Life, Love, midlife, Remarriage

MorgueFile Image

Someone very wise once told me: “If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.” Two years ago today, my husband John proposed marriage while we were enjoying a breakfast of omelets at one of our favorite haunts in Oberlin, Ohio—the Black River Café. We had been dating for a little more than seven months. We were each in our 50s. We were about to break a whole lot of eggs.

Nothing worth having in life is without sacrifice, which is what my sage friend was getting at. John was most definitely worth having. There were, however, a few built-in challenges. At the time of John’s proposal, he had been out of work for a year and in the midst of a nationwide job search. The chances were slim-to-zero that he would find a position in his field that would keep him—I mean us, for we were becoming an us—in Northeast Ohio. I was quite aware that by accepting his proposal, life as I knew it could change seismically. The metaphor represented by our breakfast was not lost on me.

I’ve written about this subject before, in an essay for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, so I’ll try not to go over old ground. What strikes me about this lovely little anniversary we’re marking today is not so much the eggs that we broke (for that you can read the essay), but the omelet we’ve made and continue to make.

Tom Hanks’ character Forrest Gump famously said: “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” With all due respect, I think that somewhat misses the mark; it suggests that you just sit back and let life come at you, like a barrage of chocolate-covered confections. Sure, you make a selection from the sampler, but it’s already there for you, prepared and preconceived. Or, if you like,  preordained.

For my money, life is more like an omelet. You have to break something (or break with something)—a routine, a way of life, the place you’ve lived—to create anew. You can fill it with whatever you like, and it sustains you. But the key difference is this: you are an active participant in its making, rather than a passive recipient in the taking.

So what is this omelet that John and I are making, anyway? It derives, as I said at the outset, from a whole lot of broken eggs: a move to a different part of the country, a new job for him, a new career path for me, a separation for both of us from our children.

This omelet/life of ours is spartan because of where we’re starting from—we won’t get fat off of it.

A year-long layoff brings with it debt; an inability to find work in a new city means a career change and a sporadic income. We’re building this new life with an eye toward nutrition rather than frills. What do we need? What are the essentials? What can we postpone or get by without? We allowed ourselves a wedding, to mark the life-moment for us and for our children so we would all have a real, glorious memory—but we have postponed a honeymoon. We rented for almost the first year of our marriage, then bought a house that we could afford, not one that would have given us more space. We curtail what we spend on entertainment, on clothing, and on anything that doesn’t contribute to getting us back on solid financial ground.

No, we’re not getting fat from this omelet. But from these limitations comes a real awareness of what is most important in life: our love, our life together, our health and our happiness. This life, now, with its challenges and limitations, is delicious.

Remarriage at life’s midpoint brings with it an awareness of something else: ephemerality. I should add then that our omelet/life is notable for its shelf-life. We know we won’t live long enough to celebrate a 50th wedding anniversary. If we make it to our 80s, we could swing a silver anniversary. But no one knows this better than we do: You can get married in your 20s and 30s and have no guarantee of a golden wedding anniversary. So the bottom line is this: we don’t know how many years we get together. None of us do.

And this is why John and I celebrate these sweet little milestones in our life together.

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The Triumph of Love: A Talk With Author Wendy Swallow

12 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Love, Monday Morning Q & A, Relationships and Family Life, Remarriage, Second Weddings

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Life, Love, Marriage, Premarital Counseling, Relationships, Remarriage, second marriages

Several months after John and I became engaged, I was assisting a journalist at the New York Times with a story—part of my regular duties as director of communications for the music conservatory where I worked. During our e-mail exchange, I mentioned that I was getting remarried, relocating to Virginia, and would soon be leaving my job. She wrote back to wish me luck and tell me about a book that crossed her desk when she was an editor at the Times Book Review. She found it “extremely interesting and well written,” she wrote, and sent me a link that led me to Wendy Swallow’s The Triumph of Love Over Experience: A Memoir of Remarriage. Something told me to read it—most likely the voice inside my head suggesting that after a quarter century of marriage and seven post-divorce years on my own, advice from a person who had been in the trenches might be useful. Deeply in love, John and I share a common sense of how to be in the world and of the world—with the same values, faith, and politics—and we operate from the same zone of trust and honesty. We’ve always been able to communicate easily and openly about our relationship. Still, advice from an expert is always welcome, and I was curious to see how someone else navigated the waters we were about to enter. I should mention that Wendy and her second husband each had two sons when they remarried—all of them teenagers.


THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE OVER EXPERIENCE: A Memoir of Remarriage

By Wendy Swallow
296 pp. Hyperion.

Her book was a comfort to me, a survival guide, user’s manual, and road map all in one. I have recommended it countless times—and not just to second couples—anyone in a relationship will benefit from reading it. Regular followers of this blog already know that I’ve cited Wendy’s wisdom before. One of my favorite quotes appears on the “Secrets to a Happy Relationship” page, which you can find at the top of the blog. When I began formulating the editorial objectives for The Midlife Second Wife, I determined that mine would not be the only voice you would hear; a section devoted to interviews with experts was therefore essential. Wendy Swallow is the first person to whom I reached out. I’m pleased and honored that she agreed to do this interview. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation, which took place on Thursday, December 1, 2011:

Wendy, thanks so much for participating in this interview. I’ve been looking forward to our conversation for some time. So have some of my readers. One of them sent me this e-mail:

I’m not in midlife … and not a second wife, but I’m having thoughts and fears of a second marriage. I’m 43 and said that I would never remarry, but I have recently found someone who I would consider marrying and I’m scared as hell!

Based on the research you did for your memoir of remarriage—and based on your own happy experience—what do you say to people who are genuinely frightened by the prospect of “stepping off the cliff and hoping to be able to fly?”

Those fears need to be taken seriously. That doesn’t mean you give in to them, but you listen to them and examine them. You have to trust your gut on this stuff, but you also have to really believe strongly—and the research bears this out—that the people who do best in a remarriage are those who have really worked to process what happened in their first marriage and their divorce, and who have grown from those experiences. That means perhaps going into counseling, accepting your role in what did not go well in your former relationship and where those problems lay, and in your ongoing relationship with your ex—even if the person that you left seems mostly to blame for the marriage’s failure from your perspective. Everybody has to look at how they contributed to the marriage not working out—even going so far as to ask why you married that person in the first place. This is especially true if you have children. I believe strongly in this. I don’t think it’s an easy process to go through. But if you want to grow and be able to marry again, this is an important piece of the puzzle. You have to keep those lessons in front of you. Researchers find that people who do not do well in remarriage never really learned the lessons of their first failed marriage. The statistics for second marriages succeeding are not great. And for those who remarry a third time, the odds that that marriage won’t work increase, and they go up for each subsequent remarriage.

I know. The numbers are pretty grim. Your reminder that we learn the lessons from our past experiences is critically important. What other conscious decisions must a couple make, and what actions must they take, for their second marriage to have a shot at success?

One of the things Charlie and I told each other early on was this: “I just want to be clear: I’m not rescuing you.” We were mostly talking to ourselves. We married our first spouses because we wanted to help them be more stable in the world. After my marriage ended, it ultimately became more important to me that I be really stable and happy in my single, divorced life. I knew this for myself, but I wasn’t sure that Charlie saw that.

There’s a moment in the book where I write about how we went to counseling with a minister. At the very first session, she managed to surface the whole issue of money, because we had a wealth disparity in our relationship. It wasn’t a bad thing—we didn’t think that money was something we’d have to spend a lot of time worrying about. But we had slightly different attitudes to this disparity in our relationship—we had two alien cultures coming together—and we recognized that it could create challenges in the future. It took—it always takes—compromise and communication to work those things out, so having these counseling sessions helped us; even if you think you know what you’re doing, a little premarital counseling can go a long way.

I want to return to the topic of compromise, but first I have to say something about premarital counseling. In our case, that train had left the station; that’s why I was so glad to read your book. How risky is it to take on a second marriage without going through couples’ therapy first? What advice do you have for those who are leaving it to their own devices?

I do think there’s a lot of good literature out there, and many excellent books that deal with stepfamilies, so there are a lot of resources. You can get counseling in various ways. A wise, good friend can be helpful. Definitely you have to talk to each other.

Before I left my first husband, I remember talking to a friend who remarried. I asked him what worked in his second marriage that didn’t work in his first. He said that when he married his second wife, he told her, “If you have a problem with something I’m doing, tell me right away. Don’t let it snowball.” That was their mantra.

I really thought about that. If you establish that you can talk about the difficult issues together early, then that’s good.

Very early on, our kids got into this habit that we worried about at first: drinking milkshakes at 10 at night and watching South Park in the kitchen. At first Charlie and I hung around, but then we realized they had more fun without us there. So we started taking our dog out for a long walk while they had their time together. It was perfectly natural; we didn’t like South Park. We’d leave the house with the dog for those long walks, and that was when we could talk without people hearing us or wondering why we were huddled together and whispering. We were both working full-time and running all over D.C. with these kids to play practice, SAT prep—we had very little downtime with each other—so those walks were very helpful in giving us a chance to download. His boys would bring their issues to him, mine to me; kids communicate with their own parents, mostly. Sometimes there were things I needed to know, and I wanted to anticipate what level of support was required of me.

That’s a great example of using every opportunity to keep the lines of dialogue open. Let’s get back to the subject of compromise. It’s undoubtedly important, but is there such a thing as too much compromise?

I think you have to trust your gut. You might agree to compromise on something but it doesn’t sit right with you. Trusting your gut has two actions:

1. Listening to your inner feelings, and assessing those feelings. How fair are they?

2. Acknowledging that there may be something you either need to bring back or learn to deal with. Which is it?

It’s not enough to listen to your gut—you must assess your feelings. Let your rational, less emotional brain think about it. Once you’ve done that, ask yourself what you really think will be different after your compromise—what outcome are you looking for?

There’s a famous moment in our family when we all learned a lot about compromise. My youngest stepson, Sam (the second-youngest of the boys) was advocating for a cell phone; he went to a school that was farther from home than the others. We worried about the cost of four cell phones, thinking that if we got one for Sam, we’d have to get phones for all four boys, as they were close in age. It begged the question: Who is ready for something, and who isn’t?

Each boy got his own computer when they started high school; before that, they had to share. And they would be taking their computers to college. We thought we were being fair and equitable. But after much discussion about the cell phone, Sam turned to us and said, “Can no one be special anymore?”

The truth is, each boy was different and had different needs, but we were trying to homogenize everyone. Benjamin called it “the kindergarten effect.” When we all moved in together, I had a cubby for each boy, color-coded toothbrushes and towels. The boys saw it as infantilizing. The house would have run more smoothly if the Wendy-scheme had worked, but the boys weren’t in that place.

Sometimes you set out with a plan that you think is fair and equitable, but life is a lot messier than that. The boys picked up on the fact that we wanted to be fair and equitable—and they appreciated it—but we were also able to articulate that within the family, some had specific needs.

The lesson is, compromise is a double-edged sword. Sometimes an imposition of the will of one person over the other has to be negotiated.

Here’s another compromise-related question, and a timely one, with Christmas only two weeks away: How do you handle the holidays?

In the early days we had a little trouble, because although Charlie and I tried to organize things well in advance, not all parties involved were planners—they would do things at the last minute, or not consult with us, so the matter of who was even going to be with us was often up in the air.

We did okay, though. One of the things we decided early on was that because our kids were teenagers, we were not going to pretend to make a happy family out of the six of us just because we were cohabitating. Both our sets of boys spent time with their other parents. Both of us had joint custody, which was nice. Sometimes we just had his kids, sometimes just mine, sometimes all four, sometimes nobody. We’d have four different alternatives in a two-week period. My older sister, who is a minister, says, when something is stressful:

“I’m trying to hold this lightly.”

This Christmas we’re expecting to have all four boys together for the first time in four years; all four of them without other people. We’re still waiting for word on the fourth and hope we get him. But we’re “trying to hold it lightly.” If it doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world.

I learned from my first marriage that the good moments in life are not necessarily going to happen on a designated day. Many wonderful moments take place on completely average days.

The other thing is, we really didn’t want the kids to feel the stress of two families on the holidays, so we would accept that the kids were happy with the parent they were with. We’d have a night two weeks into December where we did something special together, like decorate the tree. We learned to get very flexible.

People get into trouble when they have a preset romantic notion of how something should look, whether it’s marriage, or what a holiday is supposed to look like. Life is way more variable. What is precious in life is not a perfectly decorated tree with all people in their seats at the table. Life can be messy.We’ve had holidays where we didn’t even put lights on the tree. It just has to be good enough as it is.

Whatever it is, Charlie will always say, “Let’s make this fun.”

Our first Thanksgiving in a restaurant was kind of sad for me; it wasn’t with my big family. Charlie found this cool restaurant and we were seated way up high. It was a lovely experience, but partly it was because he said “Let’s just make this a really cool event they’ll always remember.

One day we were trying to choose a movie to rent, deciding which one would be the most fun. The boys said, “Let’s do several movies!” It wasn’t what I had in mind, but I took Charlie’s line and asked myself: “Is there some way to have fun here?

Compromise again, which takes negotiating. Pro and Con lists are great tools for that—especially for working through big decisions. For a couple about to get remarried, what in your view are the top three things that should appear on the Pro side of their ledger? And what top three items on the Con side of the list suggest trouble ahead?

On the Pro side, I think that these must be at the top of the list:

1. Both parties need to be tolerant, patient, mature, and capable of self-examination.

In my first marriage, I didn’t understand how mature I had to be in the world. In my second marriage, I learned, partly from working for many years, that there’s something about the business world that enables most people to deal with people even if they don’t like them. A lot of the attributes about how we behave outside of the family can help us be better members of our own family. I don’t think I should give voice to all of my angry moments. I do a lot of waiting, so I don’t feel so strongly about the issue and can then address it with my more mature self.

2. Each person needs to be truly loving. They have to really love each other—love all of each other—the whole ball of wax.

None of us are perfect. We will all disappoint each other at times. But who is really there for me? And who am I really there for? Charlie and I didn’t get married for three years; we didn’t make any rash movements. I had worked so hard to recover from my first marriage that it took my brain time to catch up with my heart in order to accept him with all of his baggage. I knew that it was going to take time. Research bears this out: Rapid remarriage is dicier statistically than thoughtful, careful remarriage.

I knew that there was a whole process that Charlie had to go through—that he and his ex had to go through—without me coming in.

3. Your kids have to be in a place where they will be able to cope with your remarriage.

Charlie and I did not move in together before we married—not for moral or religious reasons, but because I was not going to ask my children to be at the kitchen table with a stranger every morning unless I was sure that this was a permanent thing. And his kids were really not ready; it was a little harder for them when it did happen because their parents’ divorce was more recent.

Not all kids are going to be ready for their parents to remarry. I know marriages that have sort of gone forward without everyone at the table. It’s not that they won’t be successful; it’s just that things will be tougher. It can be painful. I’ve watched a couple of families whose kids went into battle mode. Our own kids did not need to make us unhappy; they were very relieved that their parents were happier once they remarried.

Now, for the Con side …

1. Any impulsive behaviors

One example of an impulsive behavior would be getting together when it is motivated by something other than “this is the smart thing to do.” One thing I found in my research is that women are more likely to remarry partly to solve financial problems. Many women come out of a divorce living a more reduced life, and they struggle significantly. Women are somewhat motivated by financial concerns; who can blame them? But if that is the main motivation, that’s a problem.

Another impulsive behavior is getting married in the first blush of love before you know who somebody is—acting impulsively towards remarriage rather than thinking it out carefully and taking the time to know who you’re marrying. When you remarry, it’s not just the person you’re marrying; it’s their larger family. It’s their baggage. It’s their divorce.

2. Wrangling over property and money from early on in the relationship

We’ve all heard stories of someone who married a person who dictated everything, including where they will live, because the person they are marrying is very established in their lives and their career. If one party is having to give up everything and the other is not giving up anything, that’s destabilizing. It makes you wonder why they’re not compromising. One area where this comes up in a big way, even subconsciously, is property.

When the kids and I moved into Charlie’s house (partly for financial reasons) there were advantages. It was closer to my job. We would be only two blocks from my ex, which was a huge boon for my kids. But it was their house. When we moved my stuff in, I put it all in the living room, then I asked for a shelf or two. We worked it all out, negotiating so that decisions weren’t made automatically and arbitrarily. If one person in a proposed remarriage is unwilling to compromise on some of this stuff, that’s a problem.

The issue of property is interesting. When I was interviewing people for my book, I met one couple that fought because the husband needed a home office and he took away his young step-daughter’s playroom. By the time I’d met them, she was a grown woman who no longer lived at home, but she still hadn’t forgiven him. It’s all about territoriality. People identify certain things, rooms, and buildings with different stages in their lives.

3. The person you remarry doesn’t share your basic values and integrity

Here’s another thing I learned from my divorce. My ex and I had less trouble deciding about how to deal with our kids afterward because he’s trustworthy. He had issues, but trust was never one of them. He never once missed a support payment. He never stood the boys up. We shared the same values on education and on who the boys would become. We shared the same religious life. We shared the basic values.

If either party lacks integrity, then there’s going to be a lot more distrust in a marriage, and trust is the most important thing. You have to really know a person to know if they’ve got a spotty trust history.

Wendy, you’ve written a book about divorce and a book about remarriage. Do you have any plans for a third book about relationships?  

I never really meant to write a memoir to begin with, and then I wrote two even though I thought I shouldn’t write one until I was 80 and my parents were gone. I don’t think I’ll write another book about relationships; I’m not really sure I have anything more to add to the literature at this point. I’ve just spent four years writing my first novel. I’m working with my agent, and hoping it will be published in the next year or so. Part of me wants to do more non-fiction. We now live in Nevada half of the year, and I’ve become very interested in climate change, especially as it relates to the West. When my kids were young, I had all sorts of story ideas in my head about families and kids with issues. Maybe if I ever have grandkids …

You’ve now been remarried for ten years. What would you tell your younger self if you could travel back in time to the eve of your wedding?

It would be to have confidence. I’d say, “Trust yourself and trust Charlie, because it’s all gonna be fine. You’ve made an excellent choice. Trust it and rejoice in it.” 

Wendy Swallow is an author and journalist who recently retired as an emeritus professor of journalism after nearly 20 years of teaching at American University in Washington, D.C.  She started her career as a reporter and editor on the financial desk of the Washington Post, covering the savings and loan crisis, local business, and regional environmental issues.  In academia, she researched and wrote about advertiser pressure on newspaper coverage and the influence of new technology on journalism.  More recently, she has turned to writing about family issues.  She has published two books with Hyperion, Breaking Apart: A Memoir of Divorce (2001) and The Triumph of Love Over Experience:  A Memoir of Remarriage (2005).  In addition to many newspapers, her work has appeared in MORE, Washingtonian, Ladies’ Home Journal, Readers’ Digest, Parenting, The National Journal, Washington Journalism Review, Journalism Quarterly, Journalism Educator, Newspaper Research Journal, and Extra!  She is currently working on an historical novel and divides her time between homes in Reno, Nevada, and Washington, D.C.  She and her husband Charles Shepard have four grown sons.

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Where’s Home for the Holidays When You’re Divorced?

21 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Food for Thought, Relationships and Family Life

≈ 102 Comments

Tags

Christmas, Divorce, Family, Holidays, Home, Life, Remarriage, Thanksgiving

The turkey I prepared in 2010, when my stepsons celebrated an early Christmas with us.

When my first marriage ended, the day before Thanksgiving in 2003, I took a deep breath upon returning from court and began meal preparations for my first major holiday on my own. I set myself (and my raw nerves) to the comforting task of marinating pears for a compote, then started on the bread-sage stuffing. Why? Because for as long as I can recall, I’ve cooked elaborate dinners for the holidays.

During my first marriage, our family shared hosting duties for the holidays, but the times when it wasn’t my turn didn’t mean I was off the hook. I contributed side dishes and desserts to the groaning board so the burden of cooking an entire meal wasn’t borne by the host. That, however, was all in the past. My son would join me, and my cousin, for my first post-divorce Thanksgiving. That was it. Taking the smallest turkey I’d ever roasted out of the oven, I marveled at its lightness. And cried.

One month later, at Christmas, I said goodbye to all that and performed a variation on the theme. My cousin brought her nephew, my son came with his girlfriend at the time, and I rounded out the rest of the table with a young violinist from the Ukraine, who was studying at the conservatory where I worked. She brought her mother along. And, for the first time in my entire life, turkey was not featured on the table. Instead I prepared a standing rib roast from one of Ina Garten‘s Barefoot Contessa cookbooks.

This was my new family dynamic, and the start of a new tradition.

It can’t have been easy for my son, who at the time was in his early 20s. He was now required to divide all of his holidays in two; the first half of the day was spent with his father, the latter half with me. Those mornings and early afternoons dragged on so! It seemed strange to be alone in the house on a holiday. I probably hugged him far too long and far too tightly when he arrived. But so it went, each year, until the year I remarried.

My new husband had taken a job in Virginia, and I was now living nearly 500 miles from where I grew up and lived my entire life—and 500 miles from my son. Whereas holidays had presented a mere logistical inconvenience, now the geographical stakes were raised to challenging heights. Would I be able to spend at least one holiday with him? And what of my husband’s sons? How and when would we see them? The oldest is in graduate school in Illinois; the youngest had just started college in Ohio.

As it turned out, I wasn’t able to see my son at all that first year after our move. His work schedule simply didn’t allow him enough time off to make the trip. I cannot tell you how that rocked me. Things fared a bit better with the other boys; they drove to Virginia the second week of December to have an early Christmas with us. But again, what orbits they had to navigate! The eldest and his girlfriend drove from Illinois to Ohio to spend time with his mother and brother. Then, with his brother in tow, he drove from Ohio to Virginia. Then it was back around and up to Ohio to drop his brother off, and westward to St. Louis, so his girlfriend could see her family. And back to Illinois. It was like a 1930s movie, where a map of the United States with moving, dotted arrows illustrated a character’s travel progression from Point A to Point Whatever. The mind reels.

Last year, John and I decided that it was our turn to give the kids a break and do the driving. We left for Ohio early in the morning the day before Thanksgiving. Once there, we stayed with my son and his girlfriend. John’s sons joined us the next day, and we all enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner together in a suburb of Cleveland. In a restaurant. For Thanksgiving.

That took some getting used to. Never in my life had I set foot in a restaurant on a major holiday; it went against every cooking and baking gene in my body. I had always felt nothing but sadness for Ralphie and his family in A Christmas Story, forced to eat Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant after the Bumpus hounds devoured their turkey.

The meal was traditional enough and tasty enough, I suppose. But that was hardly the point. The goal was to be together: one scattered family gathered for a few brief hours around a table laden with food that might (or might not) allow us (allow me?) to pretend we were in the old homestead, however new that homestead might be.

It was more than enough that we were together and healthy.

It’s true, as the old song says, that there’s no place like home for the holidays. But when you create a new family, and circumstances toss your family hither and yon with no viable base of operations, it helps to remember another song—one that can serve to brighten your thoughts with a clarity that allows comfort and joy to shine through:

Home is where the heart is.

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Secrets of a Successful Marriage: Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue

04 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Relationships and Family Life, Remarriage

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Byron Katie, Huffington Post, Life, Love, MarloThomas, Marriage, Phil Donahue, Remarriage

Marlo Thomas—award-winning actress, author, activist, producer, philanthropist, and social media maven, and Phil Donahue—pioneering television talk-show host, Emmy Award-winner, and writer, put a whole new spin on “meeting cute” when Thomas was a guest on The Phil Donahue Show in 1977. Romantic sparks flew, and wedding bells ensued three years later. It was Thomas’ first marriage and Donahue’s second, effectively making her a midlife second wife. Thirty-one years later, they are still married. What are their secrets for a happy marriage?

Thomas, who has emerged as a formidable presence on the social media scene with a website on the Huffington Post, a Facebook fan page, and more than 19,000 followers on Twitter, recently interviewed her husband for Huff Post’s “Mondays With Marlo.” The premise for the live webcast is brilliant: Several days before a guest is to appear, Thomas invites people to submit questions via her social media sites and then, during the webcast, via a live comment stream. She curates and moderates the questions, presenting them to her guest. To my surprise, she read mine:

Marriage, especially remarriage, represents many things: the renaissance of romantic love, the renewal of hope, the reinvention of each partner. Phil, when you and Marlo got married, how do you think you influenced her reinvention? How did she influence yours?

Charmingly discomfited by this and other personal questions—Donahue is clearly far more comfortable fielding queries about his career, politics, and the Occupy Wall Street movement, for example—he nevertheless attempted a game answer. And Thomas joined in:

Phil: Well, Marlo wants this marriage to succeed. That is very obvious. …It’s really impressive. This is her first marriage, and she’s very proud of that.

Marlo: It’s my last marriage, too. And so how did we reinvent each other? Part of my reinvention was that I wanted to get married to someone. That was new.

Phil: Well, I’ve reinvented. I no longer leave the towel on the floor. I call at night if we’re separated: ‘Hi. You good? Okay.’ That was part of my rehabilitation.

So that’s easy enough to do, wouldn’t you say? Stay connected when apart, and don’t leave the dirty towels on the floor. And I love that Thomas said that her marriage to Donahue is her last marriage. But the secret to a long and happy marriage? That question came from a viewer named Florence. Here’s what they had to say in response:

Phil: Don’t think the worst of your spouse. In other words, I think we go to war not for what is true, but for what we think is true.…Don’t go to war for what you think your spouse is going to do.

Marlo: That’s such good advice, and I have to take it, too.Whenever I think I know exactly what you’re thinking I’m completely wrong. I do think that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

“Don’t think the worst of your spouse.” It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But is it simple to implement?  It is so easy for us to jump to conclusions, or to allow old insecurities and fears to surface, and with them, old ways of interpreting information. Remember the baggage post from last month?

Let’s have someone else weigh in on this.

TIME magazine has called Byron Katie “a spiritual innovator for the new millennium.” A friend told me about her books several years ago. In Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life, Katie writes:

It’s not the problem that causes our suffering; it’s our thinking about the problem.

Our thinking. Thinking the worst of our spouse. Thinking that can spiral into problems greater than whatever is at hand. Turning that thinking around is the key to a long, happy, and successful marriage. That, staying connected, and not leaving the wet towels on the bathroom floor.

To view Marlo Thomas’ interview with her husband, Phil Donahue—her special guest on “Mondays With Marlo,” click here.

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