About Me

Name: Hal Davis

Location: Plano, Texas, United States

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If you want legal advice, go to a lawyer. If you want relationship advice, go to a professional counselor. But, since you asked, here's a little relationship advice from a lawyer.

Way too often, I'll see folks come to me about a second divorce -- less than a year or two after their previous divorce. I've been curious about this phenomenon, and have been paying attention to some information tidbits that float by me.

At a conference for divorce lawyers a very interesting statistic was thrown out. I can't remember it exactly, and have been unable to run down the source, but the essence was something like this: "Of all relationships begun within 2 years of a divorce, in which the new relationship ends in a marriage, 87% of those new relationships end in divorce."

You may need to read that several times to really pull it apart, but the essence is that after a marriage, you need some time to re-set, to become an individual, before you can productively enter a new relationship.

The image that comes to my mind is that of a memory foam mattress "as shown on TV". You push your hand into the mattress, then remove your hand, and for a while the outline of the hand is still visible.

To me, it seems that whether it's a good marriage or a bad marriage, being married to someone leaves an imprint on you like on that memory foam mattress in the TV commercial. We form patterns of behavior and thinking because of the marriage, whether they're productive and helpful behaviors or not.

Then, when that relationship ends and a new relationship comes along, if it hasn't been long enough for the imprints of the previous marriage to fade, a lot of the behaviors and patters of the new relationship are reactionary: the primary filter is the extent to which the new behaviors or values or whatever are different from or the same as the previous patterns.

There's a lot to be said for long courtships, but there's also a lot to be said for just staying out of relationships for a while to give you a chance for the memory foam imprints to fade, before you go exploring new relationships.