Remarriage: tricky subject. Some people are happier than they have ever been, others are not. Plenty are miserable, ranting on internet message boards about how they hate their skids (stepchildren), how their skids hate them, how they are jealous of their skids, how they feel guilty because they don’t love their skids. They are angry, frustrated and bleakly sad. As one woman puts it: “These kids are a pain. That’s all, really.”

Is it? Obviously message boards don’t represent the whole truth because gloriously content remarried people, with or without happy and well-adjusted skids, tend not to seek an outlet for their emotions. So what do we know about remarriage? Well, we know that it often involves the creation of a new family and, if there are children, the simultaneous maintenance of established ties – and we know that, statistically, it is risky. The marriage most likely to succeed is the one where both parties are first-timers. If one party is a second-timer it is less likely to succeed. If both parties are second (or third, or fourth) timers it is even less likely to succeed. In Britain, 40 per cent of marriages fail, but for second marriages the failure rate rises to half, and for third marriages it is close to 60 per cent.

Remarriage is truly, as Dr Johnson put it, a triumph of hope over experience. Yet people still do it. In 2005, 98,580 couples in England and Wales married for at least the second time: given that so many of these marriages will fail, it is worth asking what goes wrong and how they might be saved.

Those who study relationships agree that the seeds of failure are often sown early on and lie in people’s motives to marry again. If you are seeking a replacement marriage in the belief that this will bring you stability, you need to understand what went wrong the first time, says Val Sampson, a counsellor who runs a website that helps couples to rebuild their relationships: relightmyfire.org.

“It’s astonishing how many people don’t understand why their first marriage didn’t work,” she says. “They abandon one ship and leap on to another in the hope that the second marriage will rescue them from the first. Men, especially, tend to shoot straight into a second marriage: remarriage rates are twice as high for men as for women. If you haven’t understood the dynamics of what went wrong before, and taken responsibility for your part in it, you’ll carry a lot of unsorted stuff into the next relationship. Then the chances of it failing again are pretty high because you’ll make the same mistakes.”

Sampson believes that the reason why men head straight into a second relationship is that they tend to rely on women for what she calls their emotional care. “Generally speaking men don’t have such a highly developed sense of how to take care of themselves emotionally as women do, and they often rely on a woman to do the emotional care within a relationship. When they are on their own, they usually feel vulnerable and seek to replace one emotional carer with another fairly quickly. Women are better at getting emotional care from friendships than men are.”

Attention should also be paid to infidelity, she says. “Should you be marrying a man (or a woman) who had an affair during their first marriage, how do you know they won’t do it again? The key is look at the reason behind it. If there was only one, the chances are that there was an unaddressed problem and the affair offered an escape. The question to ask then is, what was the problem, and can we prevent it happening again? If there were serial affairs – ie, more than three – he (or she) is showing real problems with intimacy and this is not a safe relationship to enter into, as they will only be capable of cracking the first part of a relationship. The problems will be deep-rooted, and counselling is the only way out.”

Another common factor in marital breakdown is personality, says Penny Mansfield of the family relationship organisation One Plus One. “Some people fall in love and it’s great, then it’s not so great and they leave. So often the seeds of instability are to do with a person who is always seeking something new and falling in love, then getting bored. But just because you’ve had a partner who didn’t want a stable relationship and was attracted elsewhere doesn’t mean that you’re not the kind of person who would like to stay married to one person.”

Unsurprisingly, the factor most likely to upset the dynamics of a second marriage is the presence of children from previous relationships and the tensions that emerge from step-parenthood. “If you have children, your new partner has to take on a parental role which will be complicated. You have to deal with a lot of permutations that take a lot of thinking through,” says Mansfield. “There’s baggage from the past. Children can resent the fact that their parent has a new partner, and there is a much bigger cast of characters than in a first marriage.”

Mansfield is careful to point out that stepparenting can be a happy experience, but for many people the sheer normality of stepfamilies has done nothing to ease the tensions within them. Stepchildren, unsettled by their parents’ separation, can resist their parents’ new partners.

Professionals refer to blending families, or bringing together two sets of children into one household if only on an occasional basis, which is notoriously difficult when families have different values and standards of discipline. It is no coincidence that Relate’s fastest-growing service is family therapy – evidence in itself of the prevalence of the problems that stepfamilies face.

Sharon Chapman is a Relate couples counsellor who has been married to her second husband for ten years, and has a son by her previous relationship and another by her husband. There was a two-year gap between the relationships, which, she says, enabled her to assess her earlier relationship and recognise the patterns she would not want to repeat. In blended families, she suggests, the issues that matter most to children often mix practical considerations with their emotional upheaval.

“They might be worried about moving house or who’s going to share my bedroom? I won’t be the youngest or oldest any more – where will I fit in this new family? The key is to listen to their concerns.”

There is no set time limit within which you can expect to win the affection of a new partner’s child, she says. “Obviously it is an ongoing and ever-changing relationship, but I think that if, after some months, they still seem to be reacting badly to your presence, you need to start seeking help. This could be professional, or it could be by talking to friends who have had similar experiences.”

Children also often feel as though they’re losing a parent, says Chapman, so you have to factor in time for them to spend with the absent parent. “From personal experience, that is a question of keeping the two things separate. While I’m apart from my child’s father, my son still has the right to have that relationship. He sees his dad every other weekend and that relationship is their responsiblity, not mine. Any discussion about money or access has to be kept separate from my child. That’s difficult. A parent can be so desperate to make the other parent understand the pain they caused that they lash out through the child, but the person they’re hurting is the child.

“Parents often say that they waited until their children were old enough for divorce not to affect them. That’s a myth. There is always an impact because family relationships have changed and that can make children of any age feel insecure. To feel confident when you leave home you need a secure base to come back to. If that feels rocky or dissipated, leaving becomes very scary.”

Chapman’s son, now 12, was 18 months old when she separated from his father. “It would be easy to say that he was too young to know what was going on. That’s untrue; he is affected by it. I’d like to think that now we’ve managed to create an extended family – he has two sisters who don’t live with us, and a brother who does – and as the years have gone on we’ve become more flexible.

“The challenge is different parenting styles. He may be allowed to do something at one house and not in another – but as long as he’s safe, that’s fine. It’s about being open and honest. I don’t think my husband would consider himself a stepparent because he thinks of himself just as being a parent. My eldest son would consider himself to have two dads. You have to be adaptable. Children are robust and they do get on with it as long as adults are mindful and respectful, keep talking to them and listening, and engage them in decisions.”

Do’s and don’ts of remarriage

DO use other adults – grandparents, aunts, uncles, close neighbours – to spend time with children and listen to them during the difficult transition period
DO remember that pets are an important part of continuity and moving them to different homes can distress children
DO be aware of what might go wrong
DO look at things through children’s eyes
DO recognise that the parenting style in one house may differ from the other

DON’T start a new relationship until you understand the failure of the first
DON’T criticise your ex in front of the children
DON’T expect to love a stepchild instantly, or that they should love or like you
DON’T make a child take sides
DON’T allow the reputation of stepparenting as difficult to stop you from making it work

Relate’s Guide to Stepfamilies, by Suzie Hayman, Vermilion, £8.99
relate.org.uk
oneplusone.org.uk
Families Need Fathers: fnf.org.uk

I do (again): the couples who made it work

MADONNA and GUY RITCHIE
Divorced from Sean Penn in 1989 after four years of marriage, Madonna met the film director Guy Ritchie at a dinner party given by Sting and Trudie Styler in 1998 and they married in Scotland in 2000. They have a son – Rocco, aged 6; an adopted son – David, aged 1; and Madonna’s daughter by Carlos Leon II – Lourdes, aged 10. Madonna has said she and Ritchie almost split because of her unrealistic expectations of marriage

KATE WINSLET and SAM MENDES
The actress and the director of American Beauty married suddenly and secretly on the West Indies island of Anguilla in 2003 after two years together. She had divorced the director James Threapleton, whom she had met on the set of the film Hideous Kinky, after three years of marriage in 2001. Kate has a daughter with James – Mia, aged 6; and a son by Sam – Joe, aged 3

LIZ TAYLOR and RICHARD BURTON
Taylor was famously married eight times to seven different husbands, all of whom she divorced except for Michael Todd, who died in a plane crash. Her first marriage, to Conrad Hilton, lasted less than a year. She married Burton twice and her last husband was Larry Fortensky. Burton once said: “It makes me mad when I read stuff hinting Liz is a scarlet woman because she’s been married five times. She’s only had five men in her life.”

ROD STEWART and PENNY LANCASTER
The couple married last month after being together for seven years. Lancaster, 36, is the singer’s third model wife after Alana Hamilton and Rachel Hunter. Stewart, 62, has a son – Alistair, aged 1 – with Lancaster, as well as six other children. Kimberley Stewart, his daughter with Hamilton, has praised Lancaster for making Stewart a better father

RONALD and NANCY REAGAN
The only American president to have been divorced, Reagan had three children with the actress Jane Wyman. They divorced in 1948, reportedly because of arguments about his political ambitions. Reagan met the actress Nancy Davis in 1949. They married in 1952 and had two children. Nancy has said: “I don't know if it was exactly love at first sight, but it was pretty close.”

ANDRE AGASSI and STEFFI GRAF
The tennis champions have been married since 2001. They began dating after each won the 1999 French Open. They now have two children and live in Las Vegas. Agassi had had a string of high-profile relationships, including one with Barbra Streisand, and a two-year marriage to the actress Brooke Shields. Graf has not been married before but had ended a seven-year relationship just before they met

My ex is still so hostile

STEVE GRIFFITHS, 39
Company director, Berkshire
I was married for nine years, it wasn’t working and it was a question of whether you sit there being unhappy for the next 15 years while the kids grow up or take the decision to get out while you still have time to rebuild your life. I knew it would be devastating financially and emotionally, but six years ago I left my wife for somebody else and remarried a year later.

I needed the security of knowing there was somebody else with whom I could set up a new life. I couldn’t have done it if it had meant moving into a one-bedroomed flat and living the bachelor life. That would have horrified me.

My kids are now 10 and 7, and my wife and I have a three-year-old daughter. It hasn’t been easy. The hardest part is keeping in touch with my older children; we’re dealing with hostility every day. People assume time is a great healer, and while the initial crisis of screaming, shouting and tears goes, you’re left with the dull thud of pain of not being able to see your children.

On top of that there’s a financial strain. I was a reasonably successful, high-earning director of a fairly big company. My ex got the equity in our house, which was a six-figure sum, and I was paying her £2,500 a month. If you have an affair, that rush of adrenalin and that first flush of love can be the most wonderful thing in the world, but you also have to get through a lot of agony and perhaps earning £100,000 a year but having to live on £200 a week. That’s a big ask. I was made redundant, and now run my own business, and we’re still paying off debts. And we went into it with our eyes open.

My older children get on well with my new wife, though my eldest has a degree of reticence: she’s more in tune with her mother’s hostility, and there is an extreme amount of hostility. We don’t insist on cuddles and kisses for hellos and goodbyes with my new wife, we don’t ram the stepmother down the children’s throat, though our decision to have another child has helped the relationship between my wife and the older children: they worship our youngest and acknowledge her as their sister. That’s joyful to watch.

The children understand. I have a fantastic marriage and I live for my family. What goes wrong is the pressure that gets put on me because I can’t see the children when contact orders haven’t been kept. Then my wife has to sit with me, this relatively confident man, broken, crying in her arms because the children aren’t here. There’s an immense amount of pressure on second marriages because children are involved. It can feel like my wife and I against the world and that can be a dividing factor or a binding factor. But I made my decision and I have no doubt it was the right one.

— The author’s name has been changed

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