CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Epigraph
Part One: SECOND TIME AROUND
1. The Couple Relationship in Second Families
2. Unfinished Business
Part Two: WHEN THERE ARE CHILDREN
3. A Tie to the Past
4. Step-family Relationships
Part Three: THE ADULT VIEW
5. Inner Feelings
6. Showing How You Feel
7. Other People Have Feelings, too
Part Four: THE CHILD’S VIEW
8. Losing Out
9. Wicked Step-parents – What the Myths Mean
Part Five: THE SECOND FAMILY IN SOCIETY
10. Are We Alone?
11. What is a Step-family?
Appendix 1 – Second Families and the Law
Appendix 2 – Useful Addresses
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
One in three people in the UK today is likely to be involved in a step-family at some point in their life. In a ‘new’ family, children come as part of the package and it is common for the step-parent to suffer from feelings of isolation, guilt and anxiety. The established parent, too, has particular concerns and worries.
This book offers practical and positive strategies for coping with the emotional issues likely to concern a new combination of parents. Suzie Hayman uses personal stories to suggest ways in which you can come to terms with feelings, resolve problems and anticipate trouble before it starts. The book will help you to:
Being part of a step-family can be full of the most rewarding experiences. This book is an invaluable guide to dealing with the tough emotional issues so that you can relax and enjoy your new family.
After the Affair by Julia Cole
Better Relationships by Sarah Litvinoff
Loving in Later Life by Marj Thoburn and Suzy Powling
Sex in Loving Relationships by Sarah Litvinoff
Starting Again by Sarah Litvinoff
Staying Together by Susan Quilliam
Stop Arguing Start Talking by Susan Quilliam
This book is dedicated to the
memory of Jan Laithwaite
Second families are first and foremost the expression of the adult partners’ love for one another and their desire to create a ‘safe haven’ for their children and for themselves. They offer us strong evidence that ‘family values’ are alive and well in our society. The many stories of the happiness and security they have brought to men, women and children have prompted RELATE to add this book about them to its series dealing with human relationships.
Perhaps the most striking thing about second families is how much more varied they are than first families. They challenge many of our assumptions about what is necessary if people are to live happy and fulfilling lives together. They teach object lessons about the ways in which differences can be a source of rich experiences within families. Their networks of relationships and their sometimes complicated domestic arrangements reveal how resourceful people can be when they are committed to building families and creating environments in which young and old can flourish.
That is not to deny that second families may face intractable problems and can fail. There are many stories about such situations and a body of folklore which, if accepted uncritically, can be the source of great discouragement. One of the purposes of this book is to try to strike a realistic balance when exploring the nature of those families and to identify the issues and the influences that trouble them and fuel the myths.
The complicated nature of some second families, which cartoonists and comedians latch on to, can obscure the fact that basically we all have the same needs for love, security and success, and the same fears about others’ disapproval, and of isolation and failure. It is in going back to those basics that this book offers ways of thinking about second families that immediately make them more understandable. It is our hope that that understanding will help readers to find their own ways to fulfil their hopes for a family life that meets the needs of all its members.
Derek Hill
Relate Head of Counselling
Grant me the courage to change the things I can change, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Nieburh
I got married for the first time when I was 19. I had a white wedding with all the trimmings. I wore a long, white dress and a veil, and had four bridesmaids. It was in a church and all my family and loads of friends came, and we had this ginormous reception at a local hotel, with a band and a sit-down meal. It cost my dad thousands but he thought it was worth it and so did I. You see, I thought it was going to be the only wedding I ever had. I thought we were going to live happily ever after, no troubles in the world. Well, the second time I got married was in a registry office and I was 31. My mum was there and my sister but my dad and brother wouldn’t come. But I was happy because although I’d seen my first marriage go down I thought I knew exactly why. I thought, this time I’ll get it right. I was a lot more realistic about what to expect, like knowing that you don’t stay madly in love all your life. But the one mistake I did make was thinking I was starting all over again with a clean sheet. I hadn’t realised that a second marriage has problems of its own.
SAMUEL JOHNSON CALLED second marriage ‘The triumph of hope over experience’. When we settle down with a partner, most of us expect the relationship to be happy and fulfilling and to satisfy many of our needs. Whatever might have happened to us so far in our love-lives, when we embark on a second (or third, or fourth) partnership, we do so with hopes as high, if not higher, than when we set up home the first time. We may have different expectations from a second relationship but many of us still hold the same belief that we will live ‘happily ever after’. We may be right, but unfortunately our expectations often turn out to be unrealistic. One reason for this is that we tend to assume that good relationships come about naturally, without much effort on our part. There are pitfalls in any relationship, whatever the circumstances, but second relationships come with quite a few extra potential problem areas and knowing about them can be a great help. The aim of this book is to explore the problems and discuss why difficulties may arise in a second family. Once you understand why you and those around you feel and act the way you do, you can make changes, if you choose. You will find help with exploring and understanding second family relationships, as well as practical suggestions for ways in which you and everyone involved can actually do something to improve your situation.
This book is for anyone involved in a second (or third, or so-forth) family, where one or both of you have previously been involved in a significant relationship, married or unmarried. When someone has been in a relationship before, you can experience a range of problems that may vary in intensity. Either or both of you may suffer feelings of guilt, hurt, jealousy, envy, anger or fear of rejection. If children from one or both earlier relationships are brought to these new partnerships, it can heighten the problems. Two adults without children are just as much a family as any group that includes children, however, and the mixture of feelings may be present anyway – kids are simply a visible and indelible reminder that this is not a first-time match.
If there are children in your family, they are likely to need your understanding and help to come to terms with the changes they will experience as you establish and develop your second relationship. Their feelings and their reactions will obviously have an effect on how you and your partner manage your new partnership. But it is a mistake to think that on their own two adults will have no problems in a new relationship. Equally, children are not the only ones who might experience difficulties in adjusting to a second family, and focusing mainly on them will not solve all the problems that may arise. The fact is that the couple relationship is the main relationship in any family group, whether you have two or 10 children. If the couple have a relationship that is healthy and functioning, the family will also be healthy and functioning, or well on its way to being so. If any family member seems to be having a hard time, focusing on and ‘fixing’ the couple relationship is often the best way of setting it right.
You, or someone close to you, may feel the situation is fully under control and you do not need any adjustment. Or you may be in the throes of such extreme conflict that you are convinced nothing that anyone can say or do will ever make it better. Whichever end of the spectrum you are at, or at whatever point in between, you could find the information and suggestions in this book useful. It is worth noting, however, that the only person you can change is yourself. No amount of helping, hectoring or badgering other people is going to make them change if they don’t want to. But changing your own behaviour and feelings will often cause such an alteration in the balance of your family, that everyone around will fall into new and often better patterns.
Any group of people who are in contact with each other will have arguments and disagreements from time to time, and families (with or without children) are no exception to this. When your family is a second one, you may find these arguments seem more bitter, longer and harder to resolve. You may feel that all your problems are the fault of an ex-partner, yourself for not trying harder, or an unruly child. In short, you may well feel that the people in this situation are to blame. If you are going to make your situation better, there are three steps you can take that will carry you towards a solution.
The first is to EXPLORE – to look at what is happening in yourself and in those around you.
The second is to UNDERSTAND – to see why you feel and act the way you do and what you might do about it.
The third is to ACT – to make changes in your responses and behaviour to bring about the arrangement you would like.
Exploration, understanding and action are the three stages of change that counsellors use to help an individual, couple or family transform a problem into a solution. None of them work in isolation. Talking about a situation hardly helps on its own. Achieving understanding isn’t like being given a magic wand. Just because you know why you feel and act the way you do, doesn’t mean that everything will automatically be better or easier, although it does help. And rushing around without first seeing what you are doing and why may give the impression of improving matters without actually changing anything: once the dust has settled, everyone returns to being the way they were.
In this society there is still a certain resistance to talking about emotions and motives, to exploring and understanding. When a relationship has broken down, or when someone is having problems that might have started in an unhappy past life, they often prefer not to rake over painful ashes by trying to work out why. This is a bit like believing that you should do nothing if you cut yourself. If you have a painful wound, it is tempting just to slap a plaster on and do nothing else, because opening up and cleaning the area would hurt so much. Of course, if that is what you did, the wound would fester and the end result would be far more dangerous and painful. The same goes for emotional wounds. It is only by facing up to what has happened that we can heal them and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
This book is written in the belief that ‘raking over’ the distant and immediate past can only help you to make a better future. The idea is to give practical suggestions on how you can come to terms with your feelings, discuss them with the rest of your family, get support from family and friends, and make changes. We will introduce the techniques of discussion, negotiation and compromise and explain how anyone, even very young people, can take some control over their lives and make their voices heard, to make a second family a better one.
Before you go any further, try this exercise to get you into a receptive frame of mind for constructive change.
Imagine a bird’s nest, with an egg inside.
The egg is a fragile shell. It starts off as a beautiful object, shiny, round and perfect, until the bird is born. Then it cracks, breaks and is discarded, no longer useful.
The chick starts off as an ugly thing, a wet and bedraggled ball of fluff. But, as time passes, it grows into a fine and splendid creature.
The question to ask yourself is: do you see yourself as an egg or a chick? Are you something that was once whole and complete but has been broken and ruined by the ending of your earlier relationships, or other painful experiences in your past, and can never be put back together again? Or do you see yourself as something emerging from a hard time, who has to go through a period of feeling and looking rough before eventually blossoming once more?
Think about which one you feel like, and consider why you might have felt like an egg, if that was the one you pictured yourself as being. You may think you’re fated to be one rather than the other. In fact, you merely have to decide whether to see yourself as a winner or loser. Pick which one you want to be!
When someone says the word family
a variety of vivid images and memories, attitudes and feelings always spring to mind.
What comes into your mind when someone mentions ‘the family’? The picture most of us have is of two adults, one male and one female, married for the first time and living together, bringing up their own children. We might add grandparents in the background, and perhaps a cat and dog in the foreground, and set them in a semi-detached house in the suburbs. Even if our own family of origin had little resemblance to this description, we will still tend to feel this is the norm. Furthermore, we are likely to have strong feelings about the rightness or wrongness of this image, and any other presented to us, because family is more than just a description: the word itself has rich emotional associations.
When we say family, a variety of vivid images and memories, attitudes and feelings invariably spring to mind. Depending on your experience, these images may be of happiness or of wretchedness, or a complex mixture of both. If we look beyond what we would prefer family to mean, we might recognise that families come in a far greater range of shapes and sizes than 2 adults + 2 children (+ 4 grandparents, 1 dog and 1 cat!). Cast an eye over your neighbours, your friends and your relatives and you’ll soon see that very few families actually fit this idealised picture. Yet most of us who live (as most of us do live) in something different, still often feel that we are unusual. Shame at being different and fear that nobody else could understand how we feel frequently prevent us from sharing our difficulties and asking for help when problems come along. So we get stuck with a double load of distress: the problem itself, and the conviction that it’s a unique, impassable obstacle that’s probably of our own making.
When Henry and his second wife came for counselling, he recalled his own childhood. He remembered he’d always kept quiet about the fact that his mother had remarried, because he felt that this made him different from his friends.
My parents were divorced when I was eight and my mother took my three-year-old sister and me back to her home town where she married the man who had been her teenage sweetheart. He adored my sister, who became his little girl and soon forgot our father. I didn’t. I didn’t hate my step-father or anything. I could have liked him but I resented that he was there instead of my dad and he knew it and we never got on well. The real problem was that I had no one to talk to and I found it really hard to come to terms with my mixed-up emotions. Nobody in my school or my neighbourhood had a step-father, or so I thought, and I felt totally alone. I’m now in my forties, divorced, remarried with two children by my first wife, two by my second and four step-children, all living variously here, there and everywhere. I kept pretty quiet about the resultant problems until recently, when I went back to my home town and met up with some old schoolfriends and this subject came up. I couldn’t believe it – my two best friends both said they’d been in exactly the same situation as I had been, and felt the same. For one, his parents had divorced and remarried when he was the same age as me, and the other’s mother had died when he was five and his father had married again. Just like me, they had been convinced that everyone else’s family (mine included!) was ‘normal’ while each of theirs had been the only weird one. After talking to you for the first time, I thought about all my friends and colleagues and asked the ones whose family set-up I didn’t know about – you can ask about these sort of things nowadays! The eye-opener was that not one, single person – not one – was untouched by this phenomenon. Every single one was either separated or divorced, with children in various combinations, or they came from step-families, or they had brothers or sisters or cousins or friends or somebody in this situation. I used to think I was unique.
Once Henry had realised he was neither unusual nor odd, he felt able to ask for help. People who divorce and remarry or separate from a long-term partner often suffer from the impression that they are different. The image we still retain about relationships is that there is only one Mr or Mrs Right for each of us and once we have found ours, it is usual and normal to stay with them. This simply isn’t true. However unusual you may feel, the truth is that second families are as old as any other family unit and are hardly uncommon. Long before we kept written records, or even before we painted on cave walls or engraved stone tablets, husbands or wives would have died or otherwise been lost and new ones would have taken their place.
Only 1 in 20 households is a so-called ‘typical’ family:
a breadwinner father and a stay-at-home mother
bringing up their own two children.
Second families are neither new, nor are they particularly unusual, since diversity is far more common than we like to admit. Around 150,000 couples divorce every year in England and Wales. One in three of the 350,000 marriages each year is a remarriage for one or both partners. At any one time, only 1 in 20 households is a so-called ‘typical’ family of a breadwinner father and a stay-at-home mother bringing up their own two children. Most of us at some time pass through a stage of being in a family unit that fits into this pattern, but the fact is that by the year 2000 only 50 percent of young people will have spent their entire childhood in what many of us still consider to be a ‘normal’ home life. And it is these ideas of what is and is not normal that are really at the core of any problems in a second family. The relationships themselves may have inbuilt and inevitable difficulties, but much of the friction and tension comes about because a second family is operating in a world that still assumes that the traditional family is the norm. Second families do have inherent difficulties which we shall be looking at, but these difficulties are often caused or worsened by widely held prejudices. The main one, of course, is that the only unit in our society that can properly call itself a family is two adults married and living together, bringing up their own children.
The reality is that family is a much more elastic concept than this. A family can be two adults, married or unmarried, whose children have grown up and left them. It can be two adults of the same sex who have children. It can be two adults of the opposite sex who don’t have children. Children living with a single parent whose partner has left or died, is a family. So is a single adult child caring for elderly parents. A family can also consist of two adults, married or unmarried, either or both of whom have had previous relationships ending in separation or divorce. They can be living full-time with children who are related by blood to only one, or caring part-time for children who stay at weekends or during school holidays. All these are just as much ‘families’ as the ideal stereotype.
A dictionary definition of family
is a group nearly connected by blood or affinity.
When one or both of you have previously lived with another person, your relationship is just as normal and common as any other. But there are certain characteristics that can lead to problems. The main one is the very fact that one or both of you knows they are not the first person to have shared a home and a bed with the other. There are many occasions you may encounter in your life where you find yourself taking on responsibility once held by another person and stepping into someone else’s shoes. You could be given a job which used to be done by someone else or move into a previously lived-in house. If something is not brand-new, we often feel in the shadow of whatever or whoever was there before. You may find it uncomfortable to see the signs of their early occupancy and resent it when other people remark on how it used to be. You may find yourself deliberately changing things, not because they need changing but just to make your own mark.
You may feel all of the dilemmas you encounter are the particular, unique problems found in a second family, with or without children. In fact, many are the same, common or garden disagreements anyone experiences in a new relationship or when there are adults and children around. Ask any member of a second family about the causes of the problems they experience, and the chances are that one or more of the following will be mentioned. Look at this list and add your own:
Jealousy
Fear of rejection
Fear of comparison
Money
Relatives and in-laws
Holidays and festivals, such as Christmas or Passover.
When there are children from the previous relationships, the following are also frequently mentioned. Can you add any more?
Difficulties in managing a divided lifestyle.
Important decisions about children, such as schooling.
Discipline.
Disagreements over contact.
But taking someone else’s job or someone else’s house cannot throw up the range of confused feelings, reactions and behaviour as becoming the partner, married or unmarried, of someone who has had an earlier significant relationship. And when this also involves taking on other people’s children or having your own children accept into their lives an adult who is not their original parent, the difficulties can multiply. You may find that all the above feelings and reactions happen, but with very different consequences than just changing the wallpaper in your new house!
You may find it hard to face up to the feelings that really lie behind your arguments. Jan and Jed have been married for 13 years. In the first five years of their marriage they had frequent arguments that tended to happen when his first marriage was mentioned. The rows grew less frequent but they eventually realised that this was because they had each withdrawn from the other. When they came for counselling, each picked on different reasons for their disputes. Jed, who sees his children once a month and during school holidays, remembers arguments as mainly being about them:
Discipline was a major disagreement with us. I’m pretty easy-going and Jan likes to know what’s what. Whenever Tom and Jesse came to stay, there were always big production numbers about manners at table and whether they cheeked her or not, and bedtimes and stuff like that. She wanted me to back her up, they’d say she had no right to tell them off and I felt stuck in the middle and really awkward. I mean, I only saw them one weekend a month. I wanted it to be fun, I wanted them to like coming to see me. The last thing I wanted to do was come down on them like some Victorian father reading the riot act.
Jan says the rows were, for her, about something closer to home.
I was jealous of his first wife, I admit it. If he mentioned her or said anything about their life together, I’d fly off the handle. She’s really tall and slim and I’m short and I hated getting undressed in front of him – I thought he’d be thinking about her and wondering why he left her for me. I’ve always been a bit shy but I wasn’t like this with anyone else.
It took Jan and Jed some time to recognise that their difficulties were really about their own relationship and their feelings about it being a second marriage for Jed. Whether it’s money or decision-making, sex or children, or anything else that lights the touchpaper for your disputes, the reality is that none of these is the core problem. They’re something to focus your disagreements upon. What actually causes problems is unfinished business left over from that first marriage. Second families have difficulties because of what they are and how they got there. Jan felt second-best because Jed had once loved someone else and every time his children came to stay, they only reminded her of this fact. Jed felt guilty about leaving his children and so walked on eggshells with them, but he also felt he didn’t have what it takes to be a good husband, since he’d already failed once at that role. Both of them needed to take time to build up their own self-esteem and to value each other as husband and wife. Once their counsellor helped them to do this, they found they talked more but argued less.
Starting a new relationship in the shadow of an old one has several drawbacks. One is how you may be feeling after the ending of the first relationship. Divorce or separation is considered to be the second most stressful life event you may experience, whether as the partner who is leaving, the one being left or as a child of the separating couple. Only a death is seen as more traumatic. In fact, studies have shown that losing a parent or partner through death is often far easier to cope with both in the immediate and the long-term than through divorce or separation. When a partnership ends in death, the obvious response of grief is accepted by everyone around you. There is a process, from disbelief through anger, pain and loss to eventual acceptance and renewal, which presents itself for us to follow and we are usually helped and supported in that journey by everyone we know. The break-up of a family is also something to mourn, but anger and accusation often complicate matters. Any chance of being able to go through the natural, gradual stages of mourning and emerge on the other side is often diminished, generally because everyone concerned is hampered with guilt and feelings of failure. We may also be held up by the incomplete nature of the situation. A death, after all, is a final and finite event, an ending that has clearly happened with a body to be buried or cremated and a person to be missed. In a divorce or separation, the missing person is still alive and walking around and the relationship may take some time to put to rest.
It is often hard to follow the healing process because of the common belief that if something goes wrong somebody must be ‘to blame’. Most of us grow up with a nagging feeling that we don’t quite meet the required standard, that we are to be found lacking. Young people in particular believe that their parents are faultless and that they themselves are always in the wrong. You may have been lucky enough to have grown up in a family with people who helped you to feel good about yourself, where you were praised for doing things well more than you were blamed for doing things badly, and you would have become someone who valued her or himself. If you were not, the chances are you would have grown up with a tendency to think it was your fault when things went wrong. When a partnership breaks down, most of us are indeed quick to blame ourselves and feel we could have done better. Having said that, it’s very human to point the finger of blame at someone else as quickly as possible, when we believe in our hearts of hearts that we are at fault. This is why the ending of a relationship, where two people who once loved each other move apart, can so quickly become a bitter, life-and-death battle.
Reactions to a death and to the end of a relationship are almost identical. Losing someone is probably the most painful experience we can have. No one is surprised when we feel grief after a death. What is often not realised is that the death of a relationship we value is as disturbing as the death of a person we love. Getting over that relationship can take a long time. Realising how the experience might have affected you and how distressing it might have been can be helpful. When something or someone we value or are close to dies, we pass through several stages of grief. Because everyone’s reaction to loss is individual, you may pass through the stages in a different order, and you may experience a particular stage more or less intensely than other people might. You may also find yourself dropping back into a stage you had left behind, or getting stuck in one. Have a look at these, and see if any of them describe the way you are, or have been, feeling:
Shock and disbelief. You may feel numb, be in a daze and not be able to take in what has happened. At this stage, people often say ‘I don’t believe it’, ‘This can’t be happening’, ‘This doesn’t make sense’.
Denial. You may refuse to accept your loss and carry on as usual, as if it hadn’t happened. You may keep thinking the missing person is still there or be convinced they are about to walk in. You can feel cold and shivery as well as having a sensation of everything being rather ‘unreal’. At this stage, people often say, ‘It hasn’t happened.’
Anger. You may feel violent emotions, towards the person who has gone, those left behind or towards yourself. You may feel restless, panic-stricken and anxious. At this stage, people often say, ‘It was all so-and-so’s fault!’
Bargaining. You may feel you could have done something to stop the loss and would be prepared to do anything to make it better now. At this stage, people often say, ‘If only I hadn’t . . .’, ‘If only I had . . .’, ‘If I do such and such, perhaps things will be different’.
Depression. You may feel sad, hopeless and unable to raise the energy to do anything. At this stage, people often say, ‘Nothing matters’ or, ‘I wouldn’t care if I died tomorrow’.
Acceptance. As time passes, you will begin to come to terms with what has happened. You will again feel happy and whole. At this stage, people often say, ‘I never thought I’d smile again, but I have!’
If you have been having a hard time adjusting to a new relationship, this may have something to do with how you or your partner have adjusted to the loss of your old one. How we cope with loss often depends on the sort of relationship we had and whether or not we knew what was about to happen. Six features make it more likely that you fare well or badly when a relationship ends, and in any subsequent family. Consider these descriptions and discuss with your partner whether any of them might apply to your situation.
Loss is made far worse if other major life changes come along at the same time. You are likely to find it particularly hard to cope if:
You move house
You change employment or schooling
Your income falls
Family festivals, such as Christmas or Passover, occur
You lose contact with other people, places or animals you also value
Your ability to cope with grief and loss changes at particular times in your life, and some people have more resilience.
You are likely to weather a loss better if:
You have self-confidence and value yourself
You feel in charge of your life, not at the mercy of fate or luck
You are in good health
You are prepared to talk about your feelings
Whether you cope with loss often depends on the presence of family and friends, your willingness to use the help they might offer, and their ability to offer the help you need. You are more likely to cope if:
Someone is there for you when you need them
Your supporters can listen and allow you to cry without trying to belittle your grief
Your supporters can put their own feelings, opinions and needs aside while listening to you
Unexpected loss is far worse than having warning about what was going to happen. If your first family is broken up without warning, you may:
Not believe it has really happened and refuse to face up to the truth
Show immediate unhappiness and anxiety
Blame yourself and have a tendency to despair
Become isolated from friends and family
Keep thinking the lost partner is still there
Continue to feel lonely, depressed and fearful
When you feel happy and thought the relationship was a good one, losing a partner can actually be easier to bear. Surprisingly, this is true even if you find out your partner did not seem to share your feelings, as when the loss happens because they leave you. When the relationship has been argumentative, the loss of someone you might not really regret losing can lead to:
Feeling fine at first but a keen sense of grief later
Lasting hope that the lost partner will come back
Feeling that the loss was your fault
Depression and ill-health
No confidence in yourself as a parent or a worker
When you have been unable to do the ordinary things of life without your partner’s help, the reaction to loss is often to fall back into longing for the past. This can lead to:
Feelings of emptiness and insecurity
A sense of unreality
A longing for the lost partner to return
Loneliness and a feeling that the lost partner is still there
The conviction that it wouldn’t matter if you were no longer alive
YOU MAY NOW be beginning to realise that there are solid reasons for the dilemmas facing you. The next question you might want to ask is, ‘Can I do anything about this situation?’ The first step may be to consider what bothers you in this relationship and why.
Divorce can be the end of a marriage and separation the end of a relationship but very rarely is the break a clean and complete one. Indeed, a clean break is never clean and rarely a break! When a relationship ends you can be left with feelings of failure, anger and bitterness, and have an overwhelming need to have these heard by your one-time partner. What often happens, however, is that both sides are so wrapped up in their own grief and bitterness that they cannot listen to what the other one is saying. This can leave each of you with the burden of being unheard. You may feel stuck with the wish to get those feelings out, to have your say and make the other person understand your emotions. You could then get locked into a continuing battle that can go on, often for an astoundingly long time after the relationship is supposed to have ended. Even when you start or are settled into a new relationship, that unfinished business can keep pulling you back, recalling old ties.
Difficulties in ending an old relationship and making a new family are increased by the fact that, up to now, our legal system has made divorcing couples into adversaries. Instead of being encouraged to sit down together to settle and finish disagreements and to work together for everyone’s best interests, the system pits both partners against each other. This often puts them on a runaway course to spite and revenge. It is hardly surprising that the aftermath of a divorce or separation is frequently anger and bitterness, low self-esteem and a lack of self-confidence in both partners. Trying to build a new family on such shaky foundations, while dealing with problems left over from the old one, is far from easy. When everyone seems to expect you to make adjustments quickly and to be able to deal with what has happened the difficulties are even greater.
Ali visited a counsellor because he and his new wife were having problems. Ali married Romily a year after he went through a bitter and angry divorce from his first wife. He said they have a good relationship and love each other but he had confessed to still thinking of his ex, and she found this confusing and hurtful. He feels guilty and regrets the way his first marriage ended, with a bitter fight in court over money.
My mother and Romily think the whole thing is just past and gone, over and done with. But we were together for four years and while Romily is the one I love, you can’t just sweep four years of your life away like that. I need a bit of time but they won’t let me have it. The odd thing is that when we row, I sometimes find myself saying things to hurt Romily that aren’t really about her – such as saying she’s mean with money, which is the last thing she is. The person I’m really talking about is my ex-wife, not her.
Unable to resolve the arguments he never finished in his old relationship, Ali is trying to resolve them in his new one. Unfortunately, Romily would only come to one session of counselling and left saying that she would only come back if Ali and the counsellor promised not to talk about his first marriage. She didn’t want to see what the past had to do with their problem and this meant that little could be done. Many couples, however, find that looking back can help them to put their difficulties into perspective. They can then focus on the strengths that can be found in any relationship, if you are prepared to look for and enhance them.
You may think that any disagreements or difficulties you and a new partner are having are your fault or the relationship’s fault. You may find that any problems you are having overshadow the positive side of your relationship. In fact, it is likely to be leftover aspects of the past that could be affecting you, and the situation rather than the people involved that might be to blame. Use the following exercise to start working out what upsets you and why, and to strengthen the plus points.
This feeling of not yet having drawn a line and ended what there was between you, of perhaps not even having your feelings admitted to, let alone heard or understood, means that you may continue to feel connected to your former partner. This may be true even when you have no children to link you together – to require you to go on being in touch and to give a visible reminder that once there was something between you.
Even the happiest first-time relationships seldom start with a completely clean sheet. Events in your childhood or teenage years may affect your ability to make a happy and lasting relationship. Your past casts a shadow over your present and your future. Your relationships in childhood – with parents and with siblings – leave you with hopes and expectations for your adult intimate partnerships. But second-time families have all the baggage anyone brings to a relationship and the after-effects of the ending of a committed first relationship. Most second families come together in the shadow of a breakdown in a former relationship, and with the living presence of the former partner still looming over them. Statistics suggest second marriages are even more likely than first marriages to end in divorce.
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