The Astonishing Speed With Which Men Remarry After Divorce
stephanie phillips | Canva Today, I awoke to wedding bells. I didn’t actually hear any wedding bells — do weddings still involve bells? — but I knew that a wedding would be taking place three states away sometime this afternoon. One of the people at the altar would be my ex-husband. We signed our divorce papers one year and six weeks ago.
I did not intend to write a story about the astonishing speed with which men remarry on my ex-husband’s wedding day
PeopleImages / Shutterstock
It’s a story idea that has been percolating in my queue, and today is my every-other-Friday off from my day job. In other words, the day I dedicate to writing and customer service calls.
I do not feel any deep-seated anguish about my ex-husband’s wedding. Should I? Should I be feeling something more about the second marriage of a man to whom I devoted 20 years of my life?
Mostly, to be honest, I feel relief that he has found another anchor. I know very little about the woman to whom he will be saying, “I do,” in a few short hours, but from what I’ve gleaned through my children, she seems to be quality anchor material. Someone I can trust to keep Dad moored when I send my kids down to visit.
The relief is entirely selfish. I need a break now and then, and I don’t want to spend said break worrying about whether or not my children are being satisfactorily cared for. My standards aren’t exacting. It’s important to me that someone is feeding them, occasionally paying attention to them, and not yelling at them all the time.
My feelings about my children’s soon-to-be stepmother are perhaps more complicated
I almost wish there was a twinge of jealousy in there, perhaps because I wish I still felt a twinge of fondness for my ex. Were that the case, jealousy — just a touch — would be a natural emotion to feel toward the woman who is marrying him.
But instead, I feel both gratitude and great trepidation. I’m grateful for all she’s already done for my children, including stuffing oversized stockings and wrapping generous gifts for them last Christmas. I feel trepidation for the daunting journey she has in store. I have already undertaken this journey; I’ve navigated the dizzying twists and turns. I’ve felt the exhaustion deep in the marrow of my bones.
I think sometimes about the plate-shaped indentation in our living room wall, tucked away behind the hutch I bought off Craigslist. Three shelves’ worth of happy family photos grace the front side, guarding our secrets. One member of our former nuclear family unit is now noticeably absent from these photos. But his memory still lurks behind them.
My ex and his soon-to-be wife just purchased a brand-new house in the suburbs with the money I paid to extricate myself from the threat of flying plates. The penalty that society exacted from me for choosing the wrong man. Or, perhaps, for refusing to shrink myself and accept my fate.
My kids have been visiting Dad and their soon-to-be stepmom for the past few weeks, and my son texted me recently to let me know that they were fighting. He wrote: I think they rushed into this a bit.
I was tickled by the wisdom and insight of my 11-year-old boy, but I also felt the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. I tried to discern if this was a “scary fight.” I doubted it would be, not yet, but he’d gone to the trouble of alerting me, and I wanted to confirm.
Sadly, my children seemed to know what I meant by “scary fight.” They assured me it was just an argument, but I wonder how long it will be before an indentation mars the clean, bright walls of their father’s new suburban home.
It could be years. It’s not as though I lived in a home where flying plates were constantly nipping my ears. It was exactly one plate, which flew exactly once, a decade into our relationship. Our daughter was two years old, and afterwards, I took her out for ice cream. I didn’t know what else to do.
I’d already been uncomfortably aware of the threat of violence for some time. I assured myself he would never hurt me. And he never did — physically, at least. In our darkest moments, which I can count on one hand, he “only” hurled objects past me and our children, with dizzying force and speed. Only one of these objects dented the wall.
I’m quite sure the woman who will, by the end of the day, call herself his wife is not yet aware of this. I’m still the villain for the foreseeable future, just as my stepson’s mother (an ex-girlfriend) was the villain decades ago. I saw the hard glint of barely contained rage she inspired in his eyes. The rage, of course, was justified because she was crazy.
Crazy. That was his favorite word during our divorce. Everything I did was crazy. If he texted me a question and I answered it, I was crazy. If he texted me a question and I didn’t answer it, I was crazy. Who knows what his new wife has been told about the depth and breadth of my craziness. I wonder if she’s ever wondered how this deeply deranged woman is managing to raise two such capable and well-adjusted kids.
Perhaps I flatter myself. Perhaps he never talks about me at all. Either way, she is destined to be Crazy Woman #3, and that’s when the dinner plates will start flying.
What I feel most when I think about my ex-husband remarrying, when I dig down, is extreme irritation
GaudiLab / Shutterstock
As my ex-husband carries his baggage from one woman to the next, there is nothing for me to do but watch it unfold. We all carry our own baggage, of course, and it will inevitably surface in any relationship, but only some of us are making concerted efforts to own and deconstruct it.
In the scant months that have elapsed between my ex-husband’s three most serious relationships — the first involving my stepson; the second involving a marriage, my stepson, and our two children; and the third involving a marriage and two stepchildren each — he has never taken the time to unpack and examine this baggage.
According to him, his baggage is entirely irrelevant to his current predicament. His current predicament is, of course, on account of a crazy woman. He might as well haul his baggage to the next woman, who might know what to do with it.
My ex-husband left seven boxes' worth of literal baggage at the house, now my house, for me to pack up. I knew I didn’t have to pack it up, but I didn’t want to store it anymore, and he had already moved to another state. I’d either have to pack it up for the dump, or for Goodwill, or for a UPS pickup. So I rustled up boxes and nestled childhood photo albums in and amongst socks and books. I considered it my last act of service. Unless you count raising our children for the next eight years.
I pictured these boxes arriving at his new home in the suburbs, symbols of the baggage his new wife would quietly absorb
If it were just my ex-husband hauling around and dumping his baggage, that would be one thing. But alas, his behavior merely reflects broader social patterns. There is a significant gender gap when it comes to rates of marriage and/or cohabitation after divorce, and an accompanying gender gap when it comes to the speed with which such agreements are reached.
The reality I see around me reflects the statistics. A friend who was among the first wave of people my age to divorce reported that her ex was already living with his girlfriend when the final papers were signed. Another ex’s girlfriend moved in less than a year after. Another ex, in his late 40s, met a woman in her mid 30s within the year, then quickly proceeded to marry her and have a baby.
Another got on the dating apps when my friend merely floated the idea of separation to him, not yet officially asking for one, and he moved in with a new girlfriend a scant few weeks later. They were engaged within the year. And of course, there’s my ex, who began cohabiting 10 months post-divorce and is marrying 3.5 months after that.
Of all of my divorced female friends, only one to date is getting remarried, seven years after her divorce. Most of the rest of us have no intention of remarrying, ever.
When I shared these stories in a note on Substack, someone asked a very good question: Who are the women these men are finding to cohabitate with and marry? In my own observations, most are quite a bit too significantly younger women who haven’t been previously married. They feel the social pressure of finding a mate and settling down, and they likely interpret the dizzying speed of their new relationship as a sign of true love, impressed by their new suitor’s hunger for commitment.
My ex-husband did not find himself a younger woman, but he did find himself a more religious one. A woman who might be more likely to fulfill her God-given role as her husband’s humble caretaker. A woman who, after being widowed, earnestly and eagerly auditioned to once again take on the role of Wife.
The unprocessed baggage awaits them all. While my divorced female friends and I have been busy attending therapy sessions, going to recovery meetings, embarking on spiritual journeys, building friendships and villages, and reveling in time and space to ourselves, our ex-husbands have simply glommed onto someone else to take care of them and keep them company.
And when it comes to the ones who haven’t, it’s usually not for lack of trying.
Gender disparities after divorce within heterosexual marriage are well documented and extremely telling
There are many men who insist they have shared the household and caretaking labor, including the emotional labor, but then feel compelled to run straight into another woman’s arms before the ink on the divorce papers has a chance to dry. It’s not, generally speaking, because they have found True Love. It’s because they find themselves rudderless, unable or unwilling to navigate the world without an emotional crutch.
I talk quite a bit about the myriad ways that marriage is failing heterosexual women, but in this regard, it’s also failing heterosexual men. Marriage is a pretty cozy arrangement for heterosexual men, to be sure. But what happens to the 40 percent of married men who find themselves divorced? Many simply haven’t been socialized to handle their own emotional and domestic needs.
Women, meanwhile, are more likely to exit a marriage with more friends and a greater capacity for emotional processing. If we are mothers, we tend to be better equipped for solo parenting — we’ve already served as the default parent for years. In fact, while our male counterparts feel lost and overwhelmed, we’re more likely to enjoy more bandwidth and more mental clarity, as there is one less person to care for and clean up after.
My grim but optimistic hope, when I first asked for a separation, was that my emotional withdrawal would plunge my husband to rock bottom. Perhaps that sounds heartless, but I didn’t see any other way he would feel compelled to claw his way out of the hole he’d been diligently digging for himself. He was dragging me down in the process, and I knew I had to get out, but I no longer operated under the illusion that I could carry him with me.
Alas, he never quite hit rock bottom. During our separation and subsequent divorce, he continued his slow descent. Then he found a woman with an outstretched arm, offering to pull him up. His baggage is hers to unpack now, as are the boxes filled with socks and books and childhood photo albums.
Today, there are dresses to zip up, hair to be done, shoe buckles to fasten. Today, there are flowers and smiles and trays of bacon-wrapped scallops. And tomorrow? She will begin traversing the well-worn paths of the women who came before.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Life Beyond Marriage.
