It isn't very romantic to ponder the idea that perhaps more marriages and remarriages would succeed if only couples were to walk down the aisle viewing their partnerships as business relationships as well as amorous alliances. We have all heard a plethora of reasons divorced couples give for throwing in the towel, "Well...we really, really, really loved one another, but it all just started to fall apart," or, "We just couldn't seem to see eye-to-eye anymore," or "We couldn't ever agree on anything and started fighting all the time," or "We just grew apart. We didn't want the same things anymore."
And yet, pick up the business section of any major newspaper and we are confronted with the tremendous amount of work that goes into building a successful company's brand, to making it profitable, and to keeping it competitive and viable in a changing world. Businesses constantly have to reinvent, retool, regroup, rethink and re-energize. Companies that are innovative, successful and long-lasting work hard at it and, in difficult times, are willing to do whatever it takes to stay afloat.
In Part II of my interview with Paula Bisacre, author of the new Journal for Stepmoms and publisher of RemarriageWorks.com, we discuss the work ethic necessary to have a successful marriage or remarriage, and the notion that there is much to learn from traditional business practices.
You were quoted in Smart Money's The Cast Against Remarriage on November 22, 2010. The issues in that article mostly centered around the financial consequences of remarriage: the tax burdens and shared costs of educating children, the mutual responsibility for long-term health care, the loss of either alimony or Social Security benefits for either partner. But there wasn't a single mention of the many well known psychological, social and spiritual reasons for marrying or remarrying: the health benefits, companionship, sharing your life with someone, not to mention the giving and receiving of love. Starting a business is expensive, time-consuming and risky, but people - in large part women - start them all the time anyway. Are people more supportive of and willing to undergo and endure the risks involved with starting a business than they are the risks inherent in starting a marriage? You certainly don't seem to be.
Interesting question. I just learned from the Small Business Administration's Small Business Training Network that 600,000 new businesses are started in the U.S. each year. In contrast, approximately 1,000,000 remarriages take place every year. According to Ron Johnson, of the SBA's Small Business Training Network, "These businesses are started by courageous people who seek opportunity, challenge and financial reward. Many will succeed, while many others will fail. What separates the successes from the failures? The answer may be in training."
Again, the theme of training and education shines through! And I think there is a lot more talk in our environment about the risks associated with starting a business than there is about starting a marriage. A cursory search on Google shows the following results:
- Risks of starting a new business: 68,600,000 / Risks with starting a new business: 20,500,000
- Risks of getting married: 716,000 / Risks with getting married: 40,000,000
- Risks of getting remarried: 1,630,000 / Risks with getting remarried: 527,000
Anecdotally speaking, while working on my Journal for Stepmoms, I received feedback that at least some stepmoms are nagged by the fact that writers can get "really negative" and are quick to point out that the divorce rate of remarriages is 65-70%. While acknowledging the validity of the statistic, they think it's depressing and discouraging, and they don't want to hear it so often. For some reason it just seems that people don't want to talk about the risks of remarriage.
But it takes more than just training. I wouldn't have started RemarriageWorks.com without my very supportive husband. I know not everyone can just walk away from his/her current job and start a new business. At RemarriageWorks we acknowledge that the statistics regarding the divorce rate of second marriages can be depressing and we definitely aren't out to sugar coat anything. Our goal is to openly look at the issues and identify how we can best support our audience.
However, it is still women who seem to dominate the conversation about remarriage and step and blended families. The online presence is definitely female. Children of divorce live more often with their biological mothers than with their biological fathers, and if the mother is remarried the primary male in the house would be a stepfather. But we don't see that many men, either fathers or stepfathers, stepping up to the stepfamily and blended family discussion table as publicly as the women. Why is that? Women can't succeed at this by themselves.
I used to think that it's a result of women talking more than men. But in 2007 there was a study published in Science, entitled, "Men Talk Just as Much as Women," which basically said that it is a popular stereotype that women are the more talkative sex. The same study found that "women tend to talk more about relationships. Their everyday conversation is more studded with pronouns. Men tend to talk more about sports and gadgets, and their utterances include more numbers."
At RemarriageWorks.com we try to address issues that are important to men as well as to women. Stepparents and biological parents, too. While we hear primarily from women, and I would say they happen to be our primary audience, we do have men in our audience, too. We aim to inspire hope and create community for all remarrieds. After all, any marriage, remarriage or not, takes two people.
When all is said and done, there is something quite romantic indeed about the concept of working at the success of a marriage, instead of leaving it up to luck, circumstances or the planets lining up correctly. In my final interview with Paula Bisacre, I ask why she left a successful career in a seemingly unrelated profession to become more deeply involved in the great conversation about stepmothering and stepfamily living. Click here to read the introduction to this interview series, "Men and women should live next door and visit each other once in a while," and click here to read Part I: "It's never too late to learn the skills necessary for a successful remarriage."
For More Info: Paula Bisacre is founder and publisher of RemarriageWorks.com, an in depth resource and support center for stepfamilies and remarriage adventurers, as well as author and publisher of the new Journal for Stepmoms.
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