Second Chances

Statistics say love isn’t better the second time around—that more second marriages fail than first ones. Tell that to these Bethesda-area couples who found the second time’s a charm

By Jody Jaffe

I begin this story by spitting three times over my right shoulder. Ptew, ptew, ptew. Not to do so would be courting the evil eye. I grew up with old-country grandparents who spit anytime anyone said anything approaching positive. The baby is pretty? Ptew. You got a new car? Ptew, ptew. She got into Harvard? Ptew, ptew, ptew.

What I’m about to say trumps a pretty baby, a new Lexus, even Harvard. And God knows I need the protection because it’s dumb luck, not a carefully laid plan, which got me here.

So here goes: I’m deliriously happy in a second marriage.  And I’m not alone. Without even trying hard, I found five other Bethesda-area couples, firmly in love and happy in their second (or in one case, third) union.

We are—ptew, ptew—beating the odds big-time. The statistics are grim; enough so to make you wonder why anyone does it. At best, 60 percent of second marriages fail, according to Psychology Today. But that, says Diane Sollee, founder of the D.C.-based Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, is misleadingly optimistic.

“The problem is,” says Sollee, “you factor all those late-in-life marriages after you’re not going to get divorced anymore, and that brings the average down to 60 percent. But if you look at marriages of a certain age, with children of a certain gender, then the average is 85 percent to 100 percent.”

One hundred percent!  It’s going to take a lot more than spitting to protect me and my fellow joysters from divorce court. Time to break out the red ribbons, yet another weapon in the Jewish arsenal against the evil eye. My grandmother tied them around everything—my crib, my carriage, my bike, my luggage, my car handle.  But now that I think back, she did not tie one around me when I walked down the aisle the first time.

Which is a good place to begin an examination of why my second marriage—and those of the others—hasn’t fallen victim to the statistics.

The joke in my family is that it should have been a clue when my first husband and I began marriage counseling before we were married. We thought we were being modern and proactive. As children of divorce, we wanted protection against the fate of our parents. A counselor, we thought, would give us the tools to fix the bumpy road of our differences. Spitting would have been just as effective.

“I don’t want to pick a partner to fill my holes like you and Dad did.” Ouch. Those were the painfully astute words of my 22-year-old son, Ben. He was ruminating on his future with his boyfriend, Mike. Ben is delightfully exuberant, hasn’t found a hyperbole too grand, spills something at almost every meal and thinks the floor is his dresser. Mike is reserved, soft-spoken and precise; he stacks his plates in a neat pile when he finishes at a restaurant.

Ben was worried because empirical evidence—his childhood—indicated that opposites repel rather than attract. That’s because he hadn’t been around in the early days of his parents’ relationship, when we both delighted in our differences.

“That’s the infatuation period,” says Randy Jaffe, a California marriage and family therapist. Randy is also my cousin, who didn’t think my first husband and I were a good match from the start. “In a relationship, you want to have a vibrancy that has a back and forth connection. When I saw the two of you, there was such a subdued aspect…he was so reserved and you’re more gregarious. That doesn’t mean you have to pick someone the same as you. You pick someone that enhances you, and you enhance.”

Once the infatuation wears off—and it always does, says Jaffe—the differences can become irritants. “I had one couple, [and] the woman would tend to embellish stories. In the beginning, her husband found it charming and funny.” By the time they started seeing my cousin professionally, the husband would attack his wife anytime she veered an inch from the truth. Their differences were driving them apart.

Ditto for my first marriage. We were opposite in almost every way, so there was a lot to be irritated about after the infatuation wore off. And worse, as my son observed, we’d unknowingly chosen each other for the wrong reason—to fix, rather than enhance, one another.  As the daughter of a manic-depressive father, I’d been attracted to my first husband’s stability and responsibility. Any good shrink would have told me I needed to develop those traits in myself, rather than marry them.

But being different didn’t kill our marriage, or any other marriage. It was how we managed—or in our case, mismanaged—those differences. “You’ve got to learn how to deal with it when you disagree,” says Sollee. “We never say ‘resolve’ conflict, we say ‘manage.’”

According to Sollee, newer research has shown that all couples—both in successful and failed marriages—have about 10 irreconcilable differences. “There is no such thing as a compatible couple,” she says. “All couples are incompatible.”

It’s only when people realize they are marrying another human being with innate differences that a marriage can work, she says. “It’s the idea of marriage as a team, as opposed to becoming one at the altar. What a team understands is that it’s not only normal to disagree, but can add a wonderful value. You can make your own decisions if you stay single, but if you get married, you get another perspective on everything.

Society has made everyone think that romance is about finding your exact match. That is Match dot com caca. You can match people up to 98 percent, but it’s that 2 percent. Like, if you’re on a boat and you have 98 days of perfect weather. If you don’t know how to deal with those two days of bad weather, you’re going to sink.”

And forget about love rescuing a sinking ship. Love, say the therapists, may be the engine that drives the boat, but if you don’t have the navigational skills (i.e., conflict management), bad weather will slam you straight into the rocks. That’s what happened with Judy Pearce of Rockville, 57, an English professor at Montgomery College. She married her first husband when she was 24.  It lasted 10 years.

“We were too stubborn; neither of us understood how to compromise and negotiate,” she says. “It didn’t have anything to do with our love for each other. It was our inability to live together on a day-to-day basis…like he never closed the cabinet doors. It drove me nuts. But the thing we did really well together was travel. Both of us liked the journey, the destination was not as important. Unfortunately, when you live together that’s the destination. We couldn’t figure out how to turn living together into the same kind of journey as when we traveled.”

In 1983, she asked him for a divorce, which was emotionally devastating for them both, but legally easy. “He typed out the divorce papers on the dining room table, and I signed them and left.”

In 1997, she met her second husband, Dennis Taylor, then a music professor, now a lawyer. “I picked him up on the Rockville Metro platform.” She’s joking, sort of. Judy Pearce is a serious and thoughtful person; the kind who takes a few extra moments to formulate her thoughts before speaking. Frivolity—and picking up someone on the Metro—would seem to run counter to her. But there was a man on the platform reading a book—God: A Biography—that had confused her. She walked up to him and said, “Would you mind talking with me about it?”

“I really cared about the book,” Pearce says, “I would have said that to a stump that was reading it.”

They talked about the book. He rode to her stop, had coffee with the friends she was meeting and left. No exchange of phone numbers.

Enter kismet. The next morning, she stepped into a Metro car going back to Rockville and, to her surprise, the man was there. To his as well. “He had no idea that I’d be there,” she says.

They took it very slowly—seven years before they married—because he was just coming out of a divorce and had two young daughters. “He was trying to find his way in the world,” Pearce says.

The marriage therapists would be nodding their heads in collective approval. Jaffe says it’s at least a two-year project to get to know someone well enough to become committed. And that’s only after you’ve taken the necessary inventory—who you are, what went wrong and what you want in a relationship—that should be a requirement for second marriage licenses. 

“I’m not the same person I was when I couldn’t stay married to John,” Pearce says of her first husband. “I’m still stubborn and opinionated and high maintenance and, in some ways, really hard to get along with. But I’m also more willing to recognize that I’m wrong, more willing to negotiate, compromise, try to adjust and accept. I didn’t know how to bend without breaking. A good therapist helped me see that with John I felt like I was giving up too much of myself. With Dennis, it feels like I’m giving of.” 

People change; it’s a basic rule of human nature. Who you are at 18 is not who you will be at 40. Sometimes that’s good for a relationship. “An awful thing for men,” says Sollee, “is that they think they are going to be married to the same woman forever. They’re not. Every morning it’s a different woman. We are all constantly changing.”

And sometimes that’s bad for a relationship. “If you think ‘I’ve married my soul mate’ because he’s a Democrat pig farmer and so are you, well he could become a Buddhist,” says Sollee. “He could go further left or become a right wing, evangelical Christian. I knew a husband who told his wife he wanted to become a priest, and he wasn’t even Catholic.”

It wasn’t that dramatic for Gaithersburg resident Martin Cunniff and his first wife. Neither joined a monastery or switched political affiliations. But sometimes it’s the subtle shifts—like losing weight and feeling more attractive or getting a promotion—that can create havoc in a relationship. And sometimes just plain getting older can rearrange a relationship.

“When you are changing in your life,” says Cunniff, 45, “you’ve got to make sure whatever relationship you’re in is going to change as well. If I was to meet me as an 18-year-old, I wouldn’t have liked me.”

Cunniff met his first wife when they were law students at the University of Florida. “We were very much the same. She was a lawyer, same firm. Bad idea. We had similar backgrounds, suburban Americans, Caucasian. We had the same training, the same way of thinking. We worked the same type of law. There’s being of like mind and then there’s being of the same mind.  I had always thought I should look for people who are not so much like me.”

As his first wife grew more confident in her job, she grew unhappier in the marriage. They drifted further apart, until she asked for a divorce. “It didn’t totally come out of the blue,” Cunniff says. “We were always pretty honest, and when she said, ‘I think I made a mistake, I don’t want to be married,’ I truly appreciated her honesty. She said she felt like she was a different person than when we met.”

Their divorce was amicable and they remained friendly. So much so, that he and his second wife, Karen Chen, once stayed in her apartment in another city (she wasn’t there). His first wife died of breast cancer on Sept 10, 2001.  “I walked out of that funeral thinking there just couldn’t be a worse day, and then the next day [Sept. 11] there was.”

Cunniff met Chen 15 years ago at the 15 Minutes Club. “It was one of those D.C. bars where after work, it’s all suit and ties. As the night wears on, it turns to a younger crowd.” He and his friends had gone from work—in their suits and ties—to celebrate winning a case against the U.S. Marshals for improperly serving warrants on the homeless. He spotted an attractive Asian woman at the bar and employed “The Kierstan Stratagem,” named after a friend who maintains the best way to meet someone is to say the first thing that pops into your mind.

“It’s a Zen-like concept,” Cunniff says. “As a lawyer, you overanalyze everything. I was trying to appear to be spontaneous, though I’m not sure lawyers can be spontaneous. It’s the one and only time I tried it and it worked for me. I said something stupid like ‘I must look like an FBI agent, being the last person with a suit and tie.’ She agreed.”

She also agreed to give him her phone number. He took her to a Mexican restaurant on their first date, and that was the last time they’ve eaten Mexican food. “She hates it,” Cunniff says.

It was the differences, however, that drew them together.

“We joke about how we don’t overlap,” he says. “Things that I’m good at, she’s not, and things that she’s good at, I’m not. We think differently, we analyze information differently.”

They married three years after they met. Everyone came to the wedding party in costume. The bride wore a medieval gown. “There was only one logical choice for me,” Cunniff says, “Henry the Eighth.” There was an Elvis, a Batman and three Pancho Villas.

“Half the crowd was Chinese, half was generic American,” he says. “We put everyone in costume, it made it easier to talk.”

Cunniff says he and his wife are happily married not only as a result of their differences and love for one another, but also from lessons learned from the first marriage. “When you’re finished with any relationship, you take stock and see what, if anything, [you] can learn here. I made a conscious effort not to bring my work home with me. Rarely, if ever, do I talk to my wife about the cases I’m working on. Because in my first marriage we worked all day with the same people, the same work, so naturally that’s what we would talk about when we went home. Then all of a sudden your whole day and night is about some stupid piece of legislation that I’m sure was important to our client, but not to us.”

The other things he learned were never to compare wives, and to put a time buffer of at least six months between divorce and a new relationship. “It’s OK to date people, but wait to get serious, to let your mind calm down a bit.” That’s it for lessons from Cunniff. “As a lawyer,” he says, “I’m not real big on giving free advice.”

There’s that pesky time buffer again; all the therapists say it’s a must.  “I don’t see a lot of rebound second marriages working,” says Jaffe. “You shouldn’t jump out of one, thinking it’s a soft landing by finding someone else.”

Lucky for me, there’s an exception to every rule, or piece of advice. Otherwise, I’d be part of the 85 percent to 100 percent-ers. I met my second husband, John Muncie, in May of 1998, one month after my first husband and I decided to divorce. I’d asked fellow mystery writer, Laura Lippman, if she knew any single men at the Baltimore Sun where she worked at the time. “I know two,” she’d said. “One is heartfelt and kind and deep-thinking. He’d be good for later on. The other is funny and brash, the kind of editor who stands up in the newsroom and shouts, ‘Hey Lippman, are we going to edit this @#$%ing story or what?’  He’d be good for dating practice.”

I’d been married for 18 years. “I’ll go with dating practice,” I said. She gave him my e-mail address and he wrote me that day.  His messages were funny, charming and brash, just like him. They would be the foundation of the novel we later wrote together, Thief of Words, a  roman à clef (except I didn’t do what our heroine, Annie Hollerman, did) about baby boomers finding love the second time around.

When John and I finally met on that sunny Wednesday in May—over chicken Caesar salads at a Baltimore art museum restaurant—we couldn’t stop talking. We met the following weekend, and every weekend thereafter. We were living together within a year.

John doesn’t fill my gaps, except that he can read a map better. The difference, this time, is that I don’t need him to read it. I can do it myself. But even better, we read it together, as a team. I learned this from my first marriage: You can’t have a team if both partners don’t feel equal. John and I are similar in personality and values, the amorphous notion that can cover everything from religion to the way you travel. We love to take unexpected side roads and never follow an itinerary. The same could be said for how we live and perhaps that’s why we’re so happy together. But even something so fundamental as that would not have been enough to fix the No. 1 reason why second marriages fail: kids.

Once again, luck was on my side. I had two sons. Daughters, according to Sollee, can be murder on second marriages. “I once heard [leading divorce expert] E. Mavis Hetherington say that if, during the first four years of your remarriage, you have a female child between the ages of 11 and 14, the divorce rate is 100 percent. What is it about us girls? Girls are the moral watchdogs. Boys are more, ‘Hmm this is interesting. She’s [Mom] got a boyfriend, I want a girlfriend.’ Girls get nest-y, boys get adventurous.”

Again for every rule, there’s an exception. Bob Drogin, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, was dating Frankie Joaquin, an editor for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. She lived in Manila and he lived in Silver Spring. He had two children, Casey, now 15, and Caroline, now 12. They wanted to make sure the relationship was serious before she visited him at his house.

“I deliberately didn’t bring the kids into the situation because I didn’t know what was going to happen and I didn’t want to confuse them,” says Drogin, 55. When Joaquin, 43, finally did visit his house six years ago and got to know the kids, Drogin says Caroline immediately fell in love, but Casey was suspicious.

“I talked to them and said, ‘I’m in love with Frankie and I’d like to ask her to stay here, what do you think?’ Caroline said, ‘Oh great! She can be my roommate!’ Casey said, ‘I’ll get back to you. I’ll sleep on it.’ The next day, he said it was OK. Caroline was the flower girl and Casey was the ring bearer and did magic tricks at our wedding. Now the three of them gang up on me. It worked out better than beautifully—perfectly.”

The Drogins are our next-door neighbors in Silver Spring and close friends.  Over the years, we’ve shared many meals, and I’ve watched Frankie and Casey and Caroline laugh and cuddle on the sofa. Those kids love her as much as she loves them. It’s inspiring to watch. I’d be jealous if I didn’t have the same situation.

At age 50, my husband John became a parent—to my two sons, then aged 10 and 13. “It was the most courageous thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “And the most difficult. I was scared every day for the first year. I wanted to get it right and I had no clue what those two monsters would do at any moment. After the first year, I realized they weren’t monsters after all. They were my kids.” 

John has been a part of their lives for the past nine years. When he turned 60 in February, my older son Ben wrote him a letter—“the most important letter of my life,” says John. Here is part of it:

“You gave me the chance to see that you can express love without being a complete ass.  In the Thanksgiving and Passover speeches you gave, in the wonderful letter you wrote me for my 21st birthday—and most of all in how you treat my mom, my brother and me—you model a way of love that is totally non-sentimental, but totally giving and compassionate. It’s never a question of demonstrating love for all to see. It’s just about doing it, and doing it nobly. And I am trying to emulate it in my relationships.”

If I hadn’t fallen crazy in love with John that first afternoon at the Baltimore museum, watching him interact with my sons would have done it.  Because if kids can be the biggest deal breaker in a remarriage, they can also seal the deal.

That’s what did it for Pam Parker, a senior planner for the Montgomery County Environmental Protection Agency. She lives in Olney with her second husband, Pete Hrycak, and a changing configuration of their combined six children. “The thing that was very attractive to me was that there were kids everywhere. We had a great time and we always made sure the kids were taken care of first. We went crabbing together, had big barbecues. Those are really happy times. It was always about the kids.”

Finally, there’s David Nellis, 57, of Kensington. He didn’t beat the odds.  His second marriage failed for all the aforementioned reasons, and a few more. The first time around, he says, he was too young. “We were babies,” he says. They met when they were 19.  The second time, he was older, but he admits, no wiser. He was swept away by her beauty.

“In retrospect,” says Nellis, who is a partner in the marketing firm ROI (Return on Investment), “I was flattered that somebody like that was interested in me. I was thinking with a part of my body that I can’t mention, but it’s the dumbest part of my body.”

Two weeks later, they moved in together. “I’m susceptible to being in love with love, looking for an easy, fast tract to marital bliss. But we were so terminally incompatible; no amount of therapy, glue or Jesus Christ coming down from the heavens could help.”

Two failures were enough for Nellis. He didn’t think he’d marry again. Then he met Nycci Safier, a vivacious blonde with big curly hair to match her big, enthusiastic personality. Yes, that other part of his body was talking to him—“I can tell you exactly what she was wearing the night I met her—Oh my God, she was hot”—but, this time, so was his brain.

 “She’s smart and she’s funny and she’s empathetic. She’s got a spectacular laugh, the best laugh you ever heard. All the other things that I’d tried to force before, this felt effortless. This felt perfect.  There are geese that mate for life and I had to mate a couple of times before I met my goose.

“This is the happiest I’ve ever been. I’m telling you my wife is a godsend.  If there was one of those machines like on ‘The Jetsons,’ where you could punch in all the emotions, all the traits, and the smarts—she’s it. It’s more like two strikes and this one’s the grand slam. She’s the best friend I’ve ever had.”

And that’s exactly how I feel about John. He is the best friend I’ve ever had. I’m so lucky to have found him that I must be tempting the gods. Which brings me to the only way to end this story.

Ptew, Ptew,Ptew.

Jody Jaffe, who teaches journalism at Georgetown and Washington and Lee universities, co-wrote the novels Thief of Words and Shenandoah Summer, with her husband, John Muncie. Their pen name is John Jaffe.