The late Paul Newman said that marriages can work as long as both spouses don’t go crazy at the same time. The observation bears remembering because so many people launch marriages that end in divorce because they believe what can be called the divorce myth of unhappiness: “Being very unhappy is a good sign that the marriage will end in divorce.”

Most married couples come to know that the road of marriage goes uphill and downhill. For them, even the word divorce never passes their lips. In the alternating current of married life – the give and take — for many spouses who don’t divorce the memories of the rough stretches – the uphill climbs – very often, in hindsight, make the marriage and the commitment that goes with it even more worthwhile.

Married people who divorce are unhappy, but the outcome of divorce is not necessarily the end of unhappiness, let alone the beginning of happiness. No married person can foresee the avalanche of changes a marital breakup causes — “processes and events over which an individual has little control that are likely to deeply affect his or her emotional well-being.” These include the response of one spouse to divorce, reactions of children, disputes and disappointments about child custody, support and visitation, and financial worries and woes.

“All marriages have their ups and downs,” says David Popenoe. He cites recent research using a large national sample that found that 86 percent of the people who were unhappily married in the 1980s, “and stayed with the marriage.” Five years later, three fifths of the formerly unhappily married couples rated their marriages as wither “very happy” or “quite happy.”

A 2002 study by University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite challenged what is termed the “divorce assumption,” that is, “that a person stuck in a bad marriage has two choices: stay married and be miserable or get a divorce and become happier.” Waite’s researchers also found that two-thirds of the unhappily married spouses reported that their marriages were happy five years later. In addition, the most unhappy marriages reported the most dramatic turnarounds: among those who rated their marriages as very unhappy, almost eight out of 10 who avoided divorce were happily married five years later.”

“The study found that on average unhappily married adults who divorced were no happier than unhappily married adults who stayed married when rated on any of the 12 separate measures of psychological well being. Divorce did not typically reduce symptoms of depression, raise self esteem, or increase a sense of mastery…Even unhappy spouses who had divorced and remarried were no happier on average than those who stayed married.”

Says Waite, “Staying married is not just for the children’s sake. Some divorce is necessary, but results like these suggest the benefits of divorce have been oversold.”

That second (or third or more) trip to the altar so often means a stepfamily, and with this, the hope the children of earlier failed marriages are better off in step-families than those headed by solo mothers and fathers.

Second timers (and third timers) launch some 1300 new stepfamilies each day, yet despite their hopes these new ventures crash even more frequently than first attempts. Yet despite this, many people believe this divorce myth: “Following divorce, the children involved are better off in stepfamilies than in single-parent families.”

“Stepfamilies tend to have their own set of problems, including interpersonal conflicts with new parent figures and a high risk of family breakup,” said David Popenoe of Rutgers.

Buoyed by high hopes of marital happiness, second and third timers fail to appreciate that the new marriage comes freighted with baggage from the failed marriage.

Elizabeth Einstein, a marriage and family therapist and the co-founder of the National Stepfamily Resource Center, suggests that many couples “need to slow down the marriage train” until the new partners resolve critical issues about the blended family. “People bring emotional baggage that’s never been dealt with, and that only gets more complicated” in the stepfamily. Unresolved loss, grief and anger, jealousy over the new person in the house and disagreements about discipline work against the stepfamily and the second (or third) marriage that supports it.

“While many families manage it pretty well, the evidence is pretty convincing that, on average, children often do not fare better in step or blended families,” says Prof. Scott M. Stanley of the University of Denver.

Stepfamilies are not like nuclear families, and stepparents are not replacement parents. This statement contains dynamics that make step parenting, even under the best of conditions, very difficult.

Alimony jokes are the stuff of nightclub comedy routines, but often alimony is not a consideration in a many divorces.

A divorcing woman should not count on alimony because in most cases, women do not get alimony at all. Generally, permanent alimony is awarded to stay-at-home mothers whose contribution to the marriage was child rearing, woman who have been out of the marketplace for a long time and whose stale job skills make it very hard for her to find employment. A young employed woman in a short-term marriage stands a very good chance of getting no alimony.

Probably the most popular – and durable — divorce myth concerns the durability of second marriages, that is, that second marriages are more successful than first marriages. “Because people learn from their bad experiences,” the popular wisdom goes, “second marriages tend to be more successful than first marriages.” That seems to make sense, and hope springs eternal. Moreover, since three-quarters of the men and woman who end marriages spin the roulette wheel of romance again within three years, it offers hope that the second time around the promised land of wedded bliss is at last in sight. Alas, it’s wrong. “Although many people who divorce have successful subsequent marriages, the divorce rate for remarriages is in fact higher than that of first marriages,” says David Popenoe, who heads the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. Popenoe, who has codified many of the popular divorce fictions, says the divorce rate for second timers jumps to 60 percent and for those going to the altar again a third time, 73 percent.
Even before the grind of daily living begins, marriage, “the second time around,” as the song goes, comes freighted with problems and liabilities. And even before that, people contemplating a second marriage seem particularly prone to selecting a new partner without thinking through the first failure. “Going into a second marriage without realizing why the first one failed is like NASA building another rocket before finding out why the last one exploded,” observes one social commentator. In lieu of honest soul searching, very often former spouses assign blame to the first partner, and they think that the secret to marital happiness is simply a matter of finding Mr. Right or Mrs. Wonderful, mythical creations that exist nowhere except in their imaginations.

Very often, the monotony of daily living, which is a fact of life, includes the demanding management of unfinished business from the first marriage, for example, when a new husband stumbles in his perhaps unsought role of stepfather to his second wife’s children, or when a mother finds herself in a tug of war between her children from the first failed marriage and the expectations of her new husband. When a second marriage begins with one or both partners having minor children from a first marriage, heroic adjustments must be made. This becomes even more complicated when additional children enter the picture. The Brady Bunch (“yours, mine and ours”) looks funny on television; in real life, the success of a stepfamily demands hard work of all involved.

In second marriages, the climb becomes even steeper when a spouse finds himself caught, for example, between the financial demands of a former wife, who is the custodial mother of his children, and his new wife, who believes the first wife is just being greedy. Moreover, the management of money may not reflect the same level of trust had in the first marriage. In the first marriage, the partners think his money and her money is their money. This does not always happen in second marriages. Money management and agreement about it are fundamental to all marriages. When trust is absent, the marriage heads for trouble.

And finally, divorce the second time around does not hold the fear that divorce the first time does. As bad as divorce is, people do survive it. The “two-time loser,” as one twice divorced woman put it, describing herself, “knows the ropes.”

Some divorcing spouses imagine that a day in court is a day of vindication, but it is not. Judges have heard it all before, and rarely does the court recoil in righteous indignation when one side or the other recounts the wrongs a spouse visited on the marriage. That’s one reason to avoid litigation. The other is cost. Litigation is war, and like war it bankrupts the belligerents.

Only a tiny fraction of all divorce cases ever go to court, and with good reason. According to one source, in states with equitable distribution of assets (41 of the 50), each of the parties usually receives about half the assets, and it is very unusual for one party to receive more than 60 percent. “Given that he legal fees for a litigated divorce often exceed $160,000 total for both parties, and assuming that a skilled litigator might be able to get an extra 2 percent of marital assets awarded to his/her client, a litigated divorce make economic sense only if total marital assets are more than four million dollars,” according to Ronald B. Standler, the author of “Litigated Divorce in the USA As a Waste of Assets.”

Equitable distribution means fair, not necessarily mean half or even equal. Equitable distribution considers the financial situation of each spouse. This routine is more flexible, and in many jurisdictions judges exercise discretion in dividing the marital pie. For example, in one common situation, a court may award the custodial mother the marital home and give her husband cash assets even when that distribution is not equal. Courts can use equitable distribution to take into account liabilities that may accrue to one partner by virtue of the length of the marriage. For example, a court may favor a stay at home mother whose long years out of the workforce have made her employment problematic.

In most contested cases, lawyers continue to negotiate in search of a settlement even as they prepare for the courtroom battle because the preparations are part of the jockeying for position.

Moreover, aside from the staggering cost of a court battle, reputable lawyers know that couples who end their marriage in the courtroom part ways with a lasting hatred for one another than makes parenting after the divorce all but impossible.