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.
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