Divorce and remarriage have become normal life experiences in the United States, with about 43 percent of first marriages ending in divorce within 15 years and about 75 percent of spouses remarrying at least once, though the patterns depend on social class, age, race, and gender (Bramlett & Mosher, 2001, 2002). The system transformation required in divorce and remarriage is so complex in changing the status, relationships, and membership of families that we consider each transition to require an entire additional phase for families going through them. And an entirely new paradigm of family is required for conceptualizing divorced and recoupled families. This chapter will discuss the cycle of divorce and remarriage, describing families transforming and reconstituting themselves through marriage, divorce, remarriage, and re-divorce. If we visualize a family traveling the road of life, moving from stage to stage in their developmental unfolding, we can see divorce and remarriage as interruptions that put families on a new trajectoryadding additional family life cycle stages in which the physical and emotional losses and changes must be absorbed by the multigenerational system. The family, now in two or more households, continues its forward developmen- tal progress, though in a more complex form. When either spouse becomes involved with a new partner, a second detour occurs-requiring additional family life cycle stages in which the family must handle the stress of absorbing two or three generations of new members into the system and redefining their roles and relationships with existing family members.
We all carry into our new relationships the emotional baggage of unresolved issues from important past relationships. This baggage makes us emo- tionally sensitive in the new relationships: We may put up barriers to intimacy, becoming self-protective, closed off, and afraid to make ourselves vulnerable to further hurt, or we may become expectant that the new relationships will make up for or erase past hurts. These stances complicate new relationships.
In first marriages, the baggage we bring is from our families of origin: our unresolved feelings about parents, siblings, and extended family.
In divorce and remarriage, there are at least three sets of emotional baggage:
1.From the family of origin
2.From the first marriage
3.From the process and aftermath of separa- tion, divorce, or death and the period between. marriages
To the extent that either remarried partner expects the other to relieve him or her of this baggage, the new relationship will become problematic. On the other hand, to the extent that each spouse can resolve his or her own emotional issues with significant people from the past, and manage the extremely complex structure of the present, the new relation- ship can proceed on its own merits.
Over the long haul, remarriage appears more. stressful than divorce (Ahrons, 2007), especially the father's remarriage, which underscores the impor- tance of taking a family life cycle perspective when working clinically to keep focus on the longitudinal course of family life. For poor families, separating and recoupling, often without the legal protections of marriage, become even more complex. Linda Burton and her colleagues, who have been studying such families for many years have described their brittleness and the many difficulties for families living on the edge in the changing membership and structure of recoupling (Cherlin, Burton, L. M., Hurt, T., & Purvin, 2004; Bur- ton & Hardaway, 2012; Burton & Tucker, 2009; Burton, Cherlin, Winn, Estacion, & Holder-Taylor, 2009).
As the first marriage signifies the joining of two families, so a second marriage involves the interweaving of three, four, or more families whose previous family life courses have been disrupted by death or divorce. More than half of Americans today have been, are now, or will eventually be in one or more recoupled families during their lives (Kreider, 2006). At the turn of the twenty-first century, families with stepchildren living in the house- hold constituted about 13 percent of U.S. families (Teachman & Tedrow, 2004), although, of course, this does not begin to convey the extent of recou- pled families, remarried or living together, and the number of children in multi nuclear families who spend part of their time with stepsiblings. Indeed, stepfamilies are becoming the most common familly form, and estimates are that there will soon be more multi nuclear families than first families in the United States (CDC, 2008). Estimates are that one third of children will live with a stepparent, usually a stepfather, before adulthood (Amato & Sobolewski, 2004). Half of the marriages that occur each year are remarriages. Almost 50 percent of first marriages are expected to end in divorce and the majority of divorced individuals (more men than women) remarry (Kreider, 2006). Indeed, though stepfamily relationships have been neglected in family research and are not generally as strong as first family ties, remarriage creates an enlarged pool of potential kin who may come to have very important family bonds. These numbers do not include the frequently recoupling families of the poor who can rarely afford marriage and often have changing constellations of mothers, "other- mothers" and only sometimes fathers in the picture (Burton & Hardaway, 2012).
Overall our society still does not recognize transformed and reconstituted families as part of the norm. Only recently has family research included these families and norms for forming a recoupled family are only beginning to emerge. The complexity of remarried families is reflected in our lack of positive language and kinship labels, the shifting of children's sibling positions in the new family, and society's failure to differentiate parenting from stepparenting functions. The built in ambiguity of boundaries and membership in remarried families defies simple defi- nition, and our culture lacks any established language patterns or rituals to help us handle the complex relationships of acquired family members. The kinship terms we do have, such as "stepmother," "step father." and "stepchild," have such negative connotations that they may increase the difficulties for families trying to work out these relationships. In fact, the term "step" derives from the old English word for bereavement or loss, so it is meaningful to the context in which families are reconstituted into new family constellations. Constance Ahrons calls post-divorce families "binuclear," a term that is descriptive and non stigmatizing. We have expanded this to refer to multi-nuclear families, because in recoupling there are many times when three or four or more house holds must be considered at one time.
