Serial Marriage and Incompatability

If you’re like most people, you figure you’ll get married once – maybe twice – in your entire life. However, if you’re a serial monogamist (a person who engages in repeated serious relationships, one after the other), you might marry three, four, five, or more times during your life.

But what drives someone to become a serial monogamist? Do they begin with psychological issues, or do they simply end up with them? As several studies have shown, people who marry several times in rapid succession are more likely to experience psychological distress, regardless of gender, age, or ethnicity.

While it’s common to see serial marriage in Hollywood – Elizabeth Taylor was married eight times to seven different men, for example, and Joan Collins, Danielle Steele, and Rita Hayworth all married five times – it’s not so common among the rest of us. Statistics show that across the United States, five percent of people who have been married at least once have been married three times or more.

Education plays a significant role in serial monogamy, as well. Those with higher education levels have a lower likelihood of being married three or more times. Unfortunately, serial marriage is also linked with earlier death.

Many people who engage in multiple marriages, either long-term or short-term, have a perception that there is an “ideal” type of love – but they often fall short of believing that people can experience only one “true love” in a lifetime.

Sometimes diving into a new relationship is a way to become distracted from loneliness. In other cases, it’s related to a misplaced self-value that’s based solely on the way other people feel about you. Either way, it’s not necessarily healthy to become relationship-dependent. Serial marriage can have negative effects on others, including (and especially) children, grandchildren, and even ex-spouses.

When parents remarry, it’s not easy on children – even adult children. The parent-child bond can be intensely strong. A parent’s remarriage causes a shift in that relationship, and most adult children find it unnerving,

In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by twenty percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household finances, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family.

Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidens in a single convenient location, simply seeking to “maximize his reproductive fitness,” to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.

Women, by contrast, are not thought to be natural serializers. Sure, a lady might date around when young, but once she starts a family, she is assumed to crave stability. She can bear only so many children in her lifetime, and divorce raises her risk of poverty. Tune in and learn more about serial marriages!