Marry me ... again

Ashley and Cheryl should consider the pitfalls before remarrying each other, says Suzanne Harrington.

JUST nine months after their divorce, footballer Ashley Cole allegedly wants to remarry his ex-wife, Geordie princess Cheryl: they have been photographed smooching, like a tabloid Burton and Taylor, all hair extensions and teeth.

The divorce was confirmed on Twitter, four years after their OK! magazine marriage. Should the happy-unhappy-happy couple remarry — they have been seeing each other for the past three months, according to the Daily Mail — there may be opportunities to sell ‘exclusive’ second-wedding photos to the gossip industry. How post-modern. Or is it?

It was Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, both fabulously talented and fabulously flawed, who made the remarrying-your-former-spouse concept famous. Passionately and destructively in love, they secretly remarried in Africa in 1975, just 16 months after getting divorced (they’d been practicing — she had been his second wife, he was her fifth husband).

They had been married for ten years prior to their first divorce, but such was their tempestuous, alcohol-ravaged relationship that their second marriage didn’t last either, and they re-divorced in 1976. Burton likened their relationship to rubbing two sticks of dynamite together. Or two clanking bottles, possibly.

Should Ashley and Cheryl retie the knot, let’s hope they have a more positive outcome than Burton and Taylor, or more recently, Eminem and Kim. You’ll recall how Eminem’s breakthrough track Kim contained fantasises about killing the woman he had married in 1999; they divorced in 2001, but remarried again in 2006.

That lasted just four months. There have since been rumours that the couple may be considering a third go, although this has been denied; but then again, Eminem did publicly state in 2003 that he would “rather have a baby through my penis” than marry again — before he married again.

But why do people remarry the person they have divorced? It is not as freakish as it sounds, nor is it the preserve of the emotionally incontinent over-privileged.

Ordinary people do it too. Just not many — Dr Nancy Kailish, professor of psychology at the University of California, conducted a survey of 1,300 people from 42 countries, including Ireland, with an age range of 18 to 95. She published her results in Lost & Found Lovers: Facts & Fantasies of Rekindled Romances.

“Of that group of rekindlers, 6% divorced and then remarried each other,” Dr Kailish says. “This statistic has held up for years, no matter how many times I run a survey.”

One rather touching story, reported in the UK press last year, tells of how Jan and Lee Jones, from Southend in Essex, divorced after 20 years of marriage in January, 2009. They had six children and were under financial and logistical pressures; the relationship suffered and broke down.

Lee moved out, but when their final divorce papers came through, they were both so devastated they realised they had, perhaps, allowed external pressures to cloud their judgement. They still loved each other, and six weeks later they remarried, to the great relief of their children.

At the other end of the scale, reported by the BBC in January, is Yorkshire couple Leslie Harper and Elsie Dunn, who were married in 1941, but divorced in 1954. For the next 50 years, the divorced couple had very little contact, but got back in touch with each other in 2004.

Last Christmas, Leslie proposed to his ex-wife and 57 years after they had originally split, the couple — then 90 and 93 — married for the second time. “The reasons for reunion are exactly the same as the people who didn’t marry earlier,” says Dr Kailish. “They married too young and had no coping skills. It’s two people who loved each other but didn’t know how to compromise back then and they had too many pressures: lost a job, parents disapproved, baby too fast (or twins), joined the military — situations that are gone later.

“But most people get divorced because they were not getting along and these reasons are reparable, usually.”

Equally, Dr Kailish’s research shows that there are some reasons why people do not remarry each other — failed affairs and failed second marriages, for example. Nor do ageing or having children together, or even hankering after the symbolism of marriage, guarantee a reunion.

“As I said, remarrying your ex spouse is rare,” she says. “It’s about someone who got away, someone they loved but couldn’t make it work. We like to return to the familiar if it was good. People don’t reunite with lost loves they weren’t getting along with.”

“As with any of the reunited couples, if the problems were caused by a situation that isn’t there anymore, it can work second time around,” says Dr Kailish. “But if they go back expecting change in their partners, it won’t work without marriage therapy. Taylor and Burton didn’t work the second time: [they both had the] same addictions.”

Addiction, once treated, would not prevent couples from successfully reuniting, she says.

So it seems that if your problems are circumstantial — external conflict arising from financial, career, coping/caring, or even an affair — you may have a better chance of reuniting happily than if the problems are an inside job, within the characters of the individuals themselves. But even then, there is little which good therapy cannot clarify, even if the same old stuff resurfaces second time around.

“Patterns of problems between couples can arise unless they try to resolve them differently,” says Lisa O’Hara, of Relationships Ireland (formerly MRCS, both may try to blame the other for what’s happened and may be holding the hope that if the other changes that somehow the relationship will improve).

“If we feel that our partner is not behaving in a way that is loving towards us, our defences kick in and we end up either criticising or withdrawing or trying to ignore it altogether.

“Couples who split up and find that they miss each other, and want to make a go of it again, will benefit from spending some time exploring what went wrong before, and how they could each take responsibility to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” O’Hara says. “This is when professional support could really help as the third party, ie, the counsellor, will slow the process down and work with them to get a deeper understanding of the dynamics (which are often unconscious) between them that caused tension and subsequent distancing from each other, which is the opposite of intimacy and closeness.”

O’Hara also suggests asking yourself the following should you be thinking of reuniting:

* Are you getting remarried because you understand better why it didn’t work out the first time, and feel that you are both now in a better place emotionally to deal with your differences in future?

* Even if things are better, are there still little niggles between you, and if so can you live with them after the wedding or are you hoping that these niggles will disappear — if so, are you being realistic?

* If you find that old behaviours are returning and you can’t address the matter between you both, then seek professional help before the relationship goes into decline again.

Are you listening, Mr and Mrs Cole?

Marry, divorce, remarry — a who’s who

* Burton & Taylor

* Natalie Wood & Robert Wagner

* Melanie Griffith & Don Johnson

* Eminem & Kim Scott

* Marie Osmond & Stephen CraignLarry King & Elene Atkins

* Elliot Gould & Jennifer Bogart

* Lana Turner & Stephen Crane

* Richard Pryor & Flynn Belaine & Jennifer Lee