Finding the Right One After Divorce

Tauber Edward M.

Description

There are 23 million divorced people in the United States today. More than 80 percent of these people will remarry, and many of those marriages will fail. Divorce recovery experts Edward Tauber and Jim Smoke draw on their 30 years of experience as divorce counselors and a survey of more than 600 individuals to explore why people end up divorced again and what they can do to successfully remarry.To help readers avoid making the mistakes others have made, the authors present 13 wrong reasons to remarry, including:lonelinessneed to be neededto provide fathers or moms for kidsto prove the divorce wasn't their faultthey've found their "soul mates"Tauber and Smoke provide practical guidelines based on biblical principles to help people find partners who share values, have compatible personalities, agree on child-raising principles, and more. Includes helpful "Ready2Remarry" self test.

Informations

• Publié par: Harvest House Publishers, Inc.
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780736949231
• Langue: English

Extrait

HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS
EUGENE, OREGON
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from The Message. Copyright by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.
Verses marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Verses marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, IL 60189 USA. All rights reserved.
Cover by Terry Dugan Design, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Cover photo Anthony Harvie/Photodisc Red/Getty Images
FINDING THE RIGHT ONE AFTER DIVORCE
Copyright 2007 by Edward M. Tauber and Jim Smoke
Published by Harvest House Publishers
Eugene, Oregon 97402
www.harvesthousepublishers.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tauber, Edward, 1943-
Finding the right one after divorce / Edward M. Tauber and Jim Smoke.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7369-1936-4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-7369-4923-1 (eBook)
1. Remarriage-Religious aspects-Christianity. 2. Mate selection-Religious aspects-Christianity. 3. Marriage-Religious aspects-Christianity. 4. Divorce-Religious aspects-Christianity. I. Smoke, Jim. II. Title.
BV838.T38 2007
248.8 46-dc22
2006030634
All rights reserved. No part of this electronic publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means-electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other-without the prior written permission of the publisher. The authorized purchaser has been granted a nontransferable, nonexclusive, and noncommercial right to access and view this electronic publication, and purchaser agrees to do so only in accordance with the terms of use under which it was purchased or transmitted. Participation in or encouragement of piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of author s and publisher s rights is strictly prohibited.
Contents

Introduction
1
The Greatest Problem from Divorce
2
Post-Divorce Syndrome
3
Choosing the Wrong One
4
Blind Spots and Pressures
5
Wrong Reason 1: Rescue Me
6
Wrong Reason 2: I ll Show You
7
Wrong Reason 3: Stop the Dating Game
8
Wrong Reason 4: Somebody s Going to Move in Here
9
Wrong Reason 5: Romance Me, I m Yours
10
Wrong Reason 6: Jump-start My Life
11
Wrong Reason 7: Feelin the Pressure
12
Wrong Reason 8: It s Time
13
Wrong Reason 9: A Fish on the Line
14
Wrong Reason 10: Found My Soul Mate
15
Wrong Reason 11: Money: That s What I Want
16
Wrong Reason 12: For the Children s Sake
17
Wrong Reason 13: It s a Couples World
18
Marrying for the Right Reasons
19
Get Whole!
20
The Ready2Remarry Test
21
What s Stopping You?
22
You Are Not Alone!
Notes
Recommended Reading and Statistical Sources
Introduction

Okay, you re divorced. Are you ready to move on? To start dating? To contemplate finding the right one for you? To consider remarriage? Some of us who divorce are afraid to try it again. We don t trust our own judgment. Others are so eager to find someone they race out and hook up with the first prospects who come along. Whether you re hiding out from the opposite sex, on a mission to remarry, or somewhere in-between, you need to know the facts.
First the good news. About 80 percent of divorced people do remarry. Many of the 20 percent who don t, stay single by choice. So the task of finding someone to remarry is not insurmountable. Now the bad news. The challenge is finding the right one. More than 40 percent of remarriages end in another divorce. Remarriages that fail last an even shorter time than terminated first marriages. And some of the successful remarriages are because the people want to avoid a repeat divorce. Sadly, government statistics reveal that the rate of divorce and redivorce is no different for Christians than for the rest of the population.
As you can see, there is a reason we didn t title this book Finding Someone After Divorce. Most divorced people already accomplish that. What many do not accomplish is finding the right one. This book takes you through the primary reasons remarriages fail and reveals what you can do to help make your next marriage successful.
The valuable information we present is based on our more than 35 years of combined experience working in the counseling and divorce recovery fields, personal experience, an extensive independent survey of divorced people, and government statistics.
Ed s Story
I ve been very successful in most aspects of my life. I earned a Ph.D. from an Ivy League school. I was a full professor at a prestigious university. I had an industry career as a research director for major corporations. I had a profitable consulting practice. I was able to retire at the age of 43. I have lots of friends. My parents loved me. And I didn t have a dysfunctional family while growing up. My life has been, generally speaking, very good. The one area where I didn t succeed-in fact, I failed dismally-was marriage.
Yes, I am a recovered divorceaholic. I ve been married several times. After my last divorce, I decided to do something different. I studied the reasons why I and so many other people divorced. I wanted to know the primary causes of redivorce and how divorced people can have happy remarriages.
I discovered that if you want to find the right person to marry, you have to avoid the pitfalls that divorce creates and learn from your past experiences. If you remarry when you re not ready, you dramatically increase the risk of getting another divorce. In fact, you ll likely marry the wrong person for the wrong reasons and eventually find your dreams shattered once again. And it s not any easier in a repeat divorce than it is in the first one. I know from experience. I don t want you to go through what happened to me. I want to share with you what I ve learned about gauging how to know when you re ready to remarry and when you re not-and what you can do to find the right person to love.
Here s the promise of this book for you if you re divorced or one of the redivorced: Spend a few hours reading and understanding what happened to me and to many others, and you ll increase the odds of finding the right one for you and reduce the chance of another divorce.
I think you ll find our message ultimately hopeful and helpful.
Whether you have been divorced once, twice, or more times than you want to talk about, you can learn a lot from the mistakes trotted out on these pages. How do I know? I know for sure because today I am very happily married, and I m sure I will never be divorced again. I accomplished this successful marriage by studying what went wrong previously and acting on the insights I learned. What I gained from this journey into my past motivated me to write this book so you can avoid my mistakes and the mistakes of others.
As I reviewed my less-than-blissful wedded history, I saw recurring themes. I was so distraught after each divorce that I made bad choices out of neediness and desperation. I wanted someone else to solve my problems and fix my loneliness. I never gave myself time to heal and become independent. Maybe these marriages failed because each time I married, I was not ready to remarry and ended up marrying the wrong person for the wrong reasons. I wondered, Am I alone in this? I began asking other redivorced people what had happened to them. Most I spoke with agreed with me on two things: They married before they should have and for the wrong reasons. They, too, suffered the consequences.
Today, I know a great deal about marriage and divorce. I ve spent some years counseling divorced people and researching their behavior. I teach with Jim Smoke, my coauthor for this book, in our well-known divorce recovery program in California. I spend my days studying divorce. In our divorce recovery program, we have many participants who are redivorced. I have interviewed more than 100 such people. To develop a broader base of statistics on the subject, I employed a professional research company to help me conduct a national survey of 500 divorced and redivorced people. Questions I asked included: What were your reasons for remarrying? What were your circumstances at the time you remarried? What s your remarriage and divorce story? Using this information, I was able to confirm why so many remarriages end in divorce: Many people-perhaps most-were not ready to remarry. As a result, they married the wrong person for the wrong reasons.
I came across some very telling stories, and, amazingly, the people I interviewed were eager to describe what had happened to them. Many of their stories and comments appear in this book. You ll glean a lot from their insights. These divorced people were just like me; they wanted to tell what went wrong. When each person got a divorce, whether it was his (or her) first or a subsequent one, that individual was angry, bitter, and resentful. He blamed the other person and had trouble identifying what had really happened. After some time passed, though, this person was able to gain greater clarity about what went wrong, about the role he played, and the circumstances that led to the failed remarriage. He finally had time to reflect and separate facts from emotions. Now, each time someone tells me a story of a marriage that occurred even when there were obvious red flags, I want to ask, Why would you marry under those circumstances? But I don t ask because I know the answer, and so do you. Once you re in the throes of a relationship, logic goes out the window and you only see what you want to see. That s why if you want to do any better, you must look at this subject with a hard, cold eye before you get too deep into a relationship. Otherwise, you ll soon be so emotion