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Isabel Clayton of Lakeland married her high school boyfriend when she was 20 and endured an unhappy marriage for 33 years before divorcing. She eventually met a man online, and after a courtship, they married five years ago.
"It's wonderful," said Clayton, 63. "I tell him all the time I wish we met years ago because our lives would have been so much easier."
Alice Wilson of Lake Wales had a similar experience. She wedded at 17 and persisted in a trying marriage for 37 years, partly for the sake of her children. By the time she divorced, she was embittered and couldn't imagine marrying again. But three months after the divorce, she met David Wilson through co-workers, and her outlook changed dramatically.
The pair have now been married 14 years.
"I just feel so blessed to have gotten him into my life," said Alice Wilson, 70. "I don't have the bitterness in my heart and hatred I did when I first met David."
Alan Ford, pastor at Abiding Savior United Methodist Church in Winter Haven, has presided over his share of weddings in 25 years as a minister. Discouraging statistics notwithstanding, he said many second marriages work out.
"I'm seeing some wonderful, really great second marriages," he said. "Some people made a horrible choice when they were younger, and when they got older, they found somebody who really suited them well and had a great relationship and even, I would say, grew spiritually together."
While some might bring along emotional baggage from a collapsed first marriage, people in their 30s and older might also enter a second marriage with more realistic expectations than they brought to the first one. Howie Keefe of Mulberry said he was better equipped for his second marriage at age 67 than his first at 22.
"No guy knows where he's going until he's 50 years old," said Keefe, 86. "You're just out there - 'What am I? Who am I?'"
Keefe, who was single for 18 years before wedding his second wife, Midge, said the interval stripped him of his illusions of finding an ideal mate.
"You're not going to find everything in one person; I guess that's what I found out," Keefe said. "When you go with a lot of different partners, you learn that nobody has all the interests you might have, and you don't look for that any more. You look to compromise more on your second marriage."
Clayton agreed that a marriage later in life has benefits.
"I guess you get experience, and you see life different," she said. "You don't have as much stress as when you're younger and you're trying get ahead in your career and save for the future. I guess that's sort of what makes a later-in-life marriage better. It gets all the stress out of the way. It's not that you don't have it, but you deal with it different."
Carolyn Black-McVicker, 62, said her experience of a bad first marriage followed by a fulfilling second one is common among women her age. She said her first marriage ended in part because "I had become a liberated woman, and he had remained a very chauvinistic male."
She said her second husband, Alan Ross McVicker, is masculine yet tender, a combination she appreciates.
"For women of my generation, practically everyone I know is divorced from her first husband," said Black-McVicker, a Lakeland psychiatric social worker.
"We all woke up one morning and said, 'What are we doing? We're not going to do this any more.' ... All of the women in my family, most of us remarried and had second husbands and that was the charm."
By Gary White
The Ledger
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