Love, Again: second marriages and the triumph of hope and grace

My wife and I were married on the Sunday of a Labor Day weekend in 2005. On that same day this year, my cousin Scott married his girlfriend Sheila in a charming afternoon ceremony on the croquet lawn at our family ranch in Northern California. Eira and I were among the 120 friends and family in attendance to witness their vows and join in the celebrations which followed.

This was a second wedding for both Scott and Sheila; Scott’s four sons from his first marriage served as his attendants, while Sheila’s three children stood by her side in the ceremony. Scott and Sheila had married young, raised seven children between them, and then, with their youngest children barely into adolescence, gone through that terrible and wonderful crucible of divorce. After a few years of singleness — and single-minded devotion to caring for their children during the aftermath of the separation from their former spouses — Scott and Sheila were set up on a blind date by mutual friends who felt all but certain that a spark would flare. The flame kindled fast, and in due course we all found ourselves together on that lawn we love so much.

Scott’s first wedding, more than a quarter century ago, was the first church wedding I ever attended. I was sixteen when he, just eight years my senior, married the woman with whom he would have my four wonderful cousins. I was awed that day in 1983 by the pomp of the ceremony and the romance that seemed to undergird it; whatever cynicism about love I affected as a spotty-faced adolescent virgin was overwhelmed by the sentimentality of the service and the lavish garden party that followed. I cried at their wedding, and was teased for it.

I’ve never forgotten that day in the summer of ’83. Since then, I’ve been to perhaps fifty weddings, maybe more, including a few same-sex unions. I’ve been married four times myself, and been the first husband to four different women. I’ve performed four wedding services, using one of those mail-order minister’s licenses. I’ve been a best man only once, but an attendant several times; I’ve read poetry and Scripture. I’ve offered to do interpretative dance, but been turned down repeatedly. Bottom line: I like weddings.

But on Sunday, I was reminded that I am particularly sentimental about weddings between two folks who’ve done the whole thing before. I like witnessing the union of two people who’ve long since let go of their illusions about marriage; the romantic aspirations of the young are touching, but the willingness of those who’ve been to the show and had their hearts broken to commit again is a far more compelling spectacle to witness. Remarriage after divorce may still be a sin to those whose rigid adherence to a narrow reading of Scripture trumps their sense of grace and hope, but to the rest of us, it is an even greater testament to the power of love than the wedding of two comparative innocents.

When my own father remarried, I was nine. I remember having the predictable mixed feelings: I was happy for my Dad, and I liked (and soon grew to love) the woman who would be my step-mother. My own mother and father had had a blessedly amicable divorce, and Mom was enthusiastic about Dad getting married again. At the same time, like most children of divorce, a small part of me retained a fantasy that my parents would reconcile someday. Even at nine, I sensed that the divorce had been for the best. But what is best isn’t always painless, and in the difficult years of my childhood (years which would have been, I am sure, just as difficult had my parents stayed married), the idea that somehow all my problems would disappear if only Mom and Dad would get back together was a tempting one to which to cling. When Dad married Carol, it meant the end of that fantasy, and that stung a little. In time, that sting faded; the love I grew to feel for Carol, and for my wonderful sisters who would come from her marriage to my Dad, permanently healed the “divorce wound.”

On Sunday, I watched the faces of Sheila’s daughters and son; I watched the faces of Scott’s four boys. As all seven stood by their parents on the lawn, I saw the happiness and excitement in their eyes — and I saw, in a couple of them, a flash of something more bittersweet. I know these kids, who range in age from 14 to 25, well; I know how much they want joy for their parents, and how fond they are of the person who will be their new stepparent. And I’d wager a guess that they, like me many years ago, are wise enough even in their youth to know that mixed emotions don’t mean anything is wrong. They know that they are assured of the love of their parents for the rest of this life and perhaps beyond. And perhaps they already know that the new love that has come to their mother and their father will, like a re-charged battery, expand the capacity of their parents to offer love to everyone in their new, larger, blended family. If they don’t know that yet, they soon will, and that is indeed a happy thought.

I believe that marriage ought to be open to all: to those who love another of their same sex, and to those whose previous marriages have, for one reason or another, come to an end. (That doesn’t mean I think everyone ought to get married.) I love weddings of all sorts — on beaches and lawns, in synagogues and churches, in morning coats or sandals. But I confess a special attachment to those ceremonies where the bride doesn’t wear white; where the children born from earlier commitments play vital roles; where tears of joy sparkle on newlywed faces marked by the tender lines of age.