The second time’s the charm for some couples

Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century writer and scholar, said a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. At a recent wedding, it seemed that for a certain set, hope abounds.

Along a white sand beach of Mexico’s Mayan Riviera, the strikingly beautiful bride, a Russian concert pianist, married a handsome doctor. That it’s a second marriage for both of them was hardly a footnote to the proceedings. After all, half the guests were similarly paired gentlemen and second wives.

Hardly a surprise, given that the Centers for Disease Control reports 33 percent of all first marriages end in divorce or separation. And most liberated divorcés eventually climb back on the wagon. According to a report published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2007, roughly 70 percent of those who have been divorced end up remarrying.

But if trading one ball and chain for another might seem depressing, you wouldn’t know it from the couples at the Mexican wedding. The gentlemen clearly adored their second brides, and the ladies seemed charmed by their experienced suitors.

In a fantastically entertaining but sometimes cringe-inducing article for The New

York Times Magazine , author Elizabeth Weil wrote about her quest to improve what she called her “pretty good marriage.” She reflected on the idea that competition is inherent to many marriages, that marriage itself is a battleground for limited emotional and psychological resources.

“I began seeing (my husband) as my adversary, the person against whom I was negotiating the terms of our lives,” she wrote.

But I wonder if this gotta-get-mine mentality isn’t what gets most first marriages in trouble. According to the Journal of Economic Perspectives study, first marriages that ended in divorce lasted an average of 10 years (Mrs. Weil’s hovers shakily at the nine-year mark). Rather than hang-on through the tough times, many married partners today are prepared to split. Instead of applying the knowledge gained over a long marriage to fix what they have, they transfer those lessons onto a newer, fresher mate.

David Sarasohn, though, has been married to his first wife forever.

“Well, not since the Big Bang,” the associate editor of The Oregonian in Portland said in a “Modern Love” piece for The New York Times in December, “but since the Nixon administration — 35 years — a stretch long enough to startle new acquaintances or make talk-show audiences applaud.”

Their secret? Respect.

“It wasn’t a matter of basic human respect in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights sense, but of respect for someone who is in some way better than you,” he wrote. “Being married to someone you respect for being somehow better than you keeps affection alive. That this impressive person chooses you year after year makes

you more pleased with yourself, fueling the kind of mutual self-esteem that can get you through decades.”

Mr. Sarasohn must be possessed of a very wise and mature soul. How else to explain this kind of success in a single marital go-round? For many people, like the lovely couples at the Mexican wedding, achieving this kind of wisdom takes more than one try. But while they’re working out the kinks, there’s always Mr. Johnson’s hope. It springs eternal, after all. 

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