You need to know: Remarriages don’t have an insanely high divorce rate.
Do you know anyone who is heading into a second marriage? I talk to people all the time who are—and who are subconsciously expecting that they have a high chance of failure. Because that is what they’ve heard.
Just as for first marriages, no one knows what the exact divorce rate is for second and third marriages. But it turns out all those super high divorce rates you’ve heard—66%, 72%, etc.— are an urban legend. We detail more in The Good News About Marriage but the bottom line is we traced all those references and they tie back to sources that don’t exist.
My favorite example was from Dr. Jennifer Baker who is a well-known researcher that was quoted in a popularly-referenced Psychology Today article as saying she discovered these super high divorce rates. When we asked to look at her study so we could see her methodology, she emailed us back saying “Unfortunately, these statistics are not mine, and even though I have asked the website to remove my name as a source, I’ve been unable to get them to do so.”
It would be funny if it hadn’t caused so many people to give up on their second marriages.
So if you’re in a second or third marriage, please know that although no one knows exactly what those divorce rates are, they’re a whole lot closer to first marriage divorce rates than people think. Based on Census Bureau data, the divorce rate for remarriages is probably more like 30%.
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