by David Duncan

Created on: July 26, 2011

Yes, second marriages can work.  For the record, my first marriage lasted five years and I truly was in love with my first wife, good friends, lovers, and confidants from the beginning.  Yet, we let our friendship and love wilt…that is we started letting life creep into our lives our individual and “we” time, starving our relationship.  Eventually, our bond grew very thin right before our eyes.  At first, you deny that anything could actually cause your marriage to fade.  But, ponder this for moment.  If you suddenly begin to spend less time with and lose touch with a really good friend, what happens to your friendship?  Simply, my first wife and me lost interest in the common likes and began to lose any desire to pull back out of our tailspin. 

Flash forward, ten years.  I had a decade to bring myself around and through some self-healing and truth-telling about my part in my first marriage’s failure.  Briefly, I took responsibility for my failure to give more of myself in the marriage.  I could blame it on youth and the passion for creating a “fast-track” career as soon as possible.  But, that is just crap.  I knew what I was doing.  My first wife did too. 

With a new mindset, I wasn’t looking for a new relationship, but it came my way by the way of a blind date set up by a close friend with my now second wife.  We hit it off right away, but I was going to college, she was busy working and raising a daughter on her own.  We grew a long-distance friendship and engagement over two years before getting married. 

What did we both bring to our marriage?   Besides a real desire to remain together through everything, we both now have the maturity to finally understand and embrace social and time management skills to control how much all our other commitments crowd into our love and devotion for each other.  Family, peer, and business pressure on our time is given its priority, but never ahead of our time for each other. 

Marriage is so many wonderful things.  Yet, at its core, it is a bond spawned from a friendship.  You simply have to “fall in like” to eventually fall in love with your spouse.  Then you have to fight for and nurture that love forever if you are going to stay together. 

It will be our fifteenth anniversary on New Year’s Eve.  Has life, friends, relatives, and work tried to creep into our relationship from time to time over this time?  Oh yes, you can’t have three grown children and six grandchildren, busy jobs, and a large social circle and not have life sneak in once in awhile.  A happy and lasting second marriage takes a better commitment and more prioritizing.  But, it can and is done often.

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