California Divorce and Family Law

Couple remarries after nearly 40 years of divorce

Even though it was a 41-year journey, Linda and Rich Parsons completed the circle, just as their newly exchanged wedding rings symbolized.

It only took about 20 minutes for the Rev. Dave Taylor to introduce the newly married couple following a ceremony Monday in First Congregational United Church of Christ.

The former Decatur residents were first married on the same date, at the same time and in the same place in 1965. For this second wedding, Rich Parsons even had the same best man: John Rea, now of The Dalles, Ore. Linda Parson's matron of honor was longtime friend Terry Claussen of Holdrege, Neb.

This was not a renewal of vows ceremony.

After the couple met at the home of a mutual friend - Rich Parsons was a student at Eisenhower High School, Linda at MacArthur High School - they dated for about 11/2 years.

"We divorced in July 1969," Rich said.

"But we were separated in the summer or fall of 1967," added Linda Parsons.

They drifted apart.

He went to Tampa, Fla., to the University of South Florida and stayed working in Florida as a mechanical engineer for Marin Marietta. He retired in May of this year. He never remarried.

She did remarry, but, "I'm not proud of that move." Linda Parsons worked for Jewel/Eisner in Champaign, then moved to Arkansas, where she owned a gift shop from which she retired.

So how did they reconnect?

Linda Parsons was doing genealogy and happened across information that his father, mother and brother had died.

"I felt like I owed him a phone call."

She initially lost her nerve to call, but the next morning, she said, "I grabbed myself by the boot straps and dialed the number, thinking 'You need to rehearse something.' "

They talked, continued talking, met and made extended visits and knew by the end of the year, they'd hit it off again.

"He asked me to marry him on New Year's Eve, just like he did 40 years ago.

"There's a lot of divine intervention here," said Linda Parsons. "The first time we laid eyes on each other (since 1975) was when he got off the plane.

Read it all at the Herald & Review.

Rebound Marriages No More Likely to End in Divorce

Many self-help books and well-meaning friends and relatives offer this advice to newly divorced friends: Don't marry on the rebound. Don't rush into or commit to a serious relationship prematurely. Wait until you are good and ready.

However, according to new research by Nicholas Wolfinger, associate professor in the University of Utah's Department of Family and Consumer Studies, "There is no relationship between 'the rebound marriage"—that is, a marriage that quickly follows on the heels of the end of another—and divorce. Rebounding into a second marriage is no more or less likely to increase the chance of another divorce than if a person waits a longer period of time.”

Wolfinger, author of Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in Their Own Marriages, published last year, notes that counseling against a rebound marriage, which, he says, “is intuitive” to most people, perpetuates the myth that marriages will end if one or both parties marry soon after a divorce.

“If you rush into a new relationship, others usually interpret it as you are not ready or that you are overly eager or that you haven’t searched long enough for a new partner. He will present his findings this week at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, in Los Angeles.

For the study, Wolfinger measured new relationship formation from the time the person remarried or started living with someone who eventually became their spouse. “Many second marriages are preceded by cohabitation,” he says. “You can understand the rationale—‘Let’s live together first’ or ‘Let’s not go through the fancy white dress wedding.’

Many factors that put first marriages at risk—lower levels of education and coming from a divorced family—are also challenges the second time around. “Second marriages have a number of additional factors working against them—the difficulties step kids represent as well as the fact that the second marriage is a population that has shown its willingness to get divorced. They have done it once and, in essence, they are willing to do it again,” he says.

Wolfinger says research indicates that many of the disruptions associated with divorce, like residential mobility, take place within a year or two. Much of the clinical literature on divorce, however, Wolfinger notes, “is vague in how long emotional recovery takes. It is safer to say different people recover at different rates,” he says.

From Physorg.com.