This week we talked about divorce and remarriage. Not exactly the happiest topic but you can always find a silver lining in negative situations. The most unfortunate part of divorce is that most of the marriage could have been saved if they had put some more effort into it and waited it out through the rocky parts. It is a well stated statistic that a significant amount of couples that thought of divorcing but stayed married were happy with their marriages five years later. My instructor made a really interesting point when he told us that the marriage contract is the only contract we can break because we “just don’t want to keep it anymore”. How interesting. Something that affects the couple, their individual families, their children, their church, and their community can be broken just because two people want it to. Some say they divorced for the sake of the children. Researchers say though that unless there is violence involved in the relationship a couple should stay together if they want to protect their children. Even arguing parents are better than only having a single parent.
But each couple has to do what they feel is right. Couples make the best they can out of the situations they have created. Divorce is certainly not easy. There are different stages or “stations” that divorcees go through. There is the emotional divorce where a couple no longer feels like they are husband and wife. This can happen before they are even formally divorced. Then there is the legal divorce where the contract is dissolved. An economic divorce also takes place where neither spouse is supporting the other financially anymore. The co-parent divorce is complex for everyone involved. Custody can be to one parent or joint custody for both parents. It is difficult because the divorced couple still has some dependence on each other through their children. The community divorce is the separation between the shared community or friends of the exes. Finally, a physic divorce must take place. This one usually occurs last. It is sometimes really hard to cope with the fact that a marriage is over, completely over, even if that was what you wanted. Sometime this is where the “emotional baggage” that is often spoken of in these complicated relationships comes from.
Of course many divorcees don’t stay single. Many choose to marry again. These are called remarried families. When children from previous marriage are involved the dynamics of the family get more and more complex. The most important thing I learned about these families is that they ARE different than nuclear or intact families. We cannot compare them or their techniques because they are so different. They have different dynamics, different problems, and thus different solutions than nuclear families. They are also different in the fact that these families are formed through a loss. Whether from death or divorce the family is mourning a loss of one of its members. They cannot be replaced.
Some of the challenges these families face are: the adjustment of the children, financial struggles (especially if a spouse has to pay child support to their previous family), legal problems, unresolved emotional issues from a previous marriage, complex extended family relations and the unclear roles within the family. The solutions for these are not usually black and white. I hope no one judges these families harshly for the thing they have to deal with.
It is so important to remember that though the ideal is for families to stay together forever remarried families are wonderful! They can be just as good as intact families, though they may just require more work. In our Fathers plan remarried families can also be a family forever!
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