Here Comes The Bride Again Second Weddings, While Sometimes Complicated, Offer Freedoms That Weren’T There The First Time
You’re madly in love. You’re going to marry. Anew. Time to get the rings, the dress, a tux, the hall, a cake. Or not.
If this is your second time around the dance floor, ladies and gentlemen, relish your freedom. This time, you’re the boss. Stuffed your size 8 frame into your mother’s teensy lace dress last time? Don shorts and hit the beach. Ran to a Justice of the Peace at 18 and missed the party? This could be your big blowout.
But being older, wiser and possibly better funded won’t wipe out complications. Yes, Cupid has struck. Yes, you feel young again. But you’re not a kid anymore. You have kids.
And kids top the list of concerns for folks who remarry. When Beth Reed Ramirez of Anaheim, Calif., remarried, she said, “We had to pick a day when we knew my ex-husband couldn’t mess it up by not delivering my daughter on time. It’s amazing the games people do play.”
Parents who remarry should get their children involved, said the Rev. Roger Coleman of Kansas City, Mo. He designed a Family Medallion and special ceremony integrating children in the remarriage. He first used the full ceremony and medallion for athlete Bo Jackson’s wedding in 1987.
Today, more than 10,000 couples a year use Coleman’s charm, which has three connected circles at the end of a silver chain, a symbol of two families merging to create a third.
Coleman got the idea while performing courthouse ceremonies in the early 1980s. “I was stunned. I had more children than adults at my weddings. I’d see the kids having all of this acting-out behavior. They couldn’t behave themselves for 10 minutes.
“It began to dawn on me: They came thinking something important was going to happen, but nothing I did acknowledged them at all. I was seeing confusion, anger and a feeling of not being part of something. So I developed a little medallion.
“I started to hand them out to the kids and I got a whole different type of behavior,” he added. “And the guests acted differently. They would come up and start hugging the kids afterward. It became a tremendous bonding experience. It incorporated the realities that many people find themselves living with.”
Some church leaders accused Coleman, a member of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), of promoting divorce. (Not all religions take kindly to remarriage. The Catholic Church stopped excommunicating divorced and remarried members in 1977, although a divorced Catholic must receive an annulment to remarry in the church or to receive Holy Communion.)
Ironically, the medallion is most popular among Catholics, Coleman said. “Once you start focusing on children, you don’t have room to really condemn the past as much.”
Remarriage also prompted Beth Reed Ramirez to forge a new path. Engaged a second time, Ramirez, now 40, grabbed an armful of bridal magazines at the grocery store. They didn’t help. She was not 24. She was not a size 6. The magazines “were 500 pages long. I would tear out about 10 pages that I could use.”
Ramirez’s special needs — stepparenting, prenuptial agreements, merging two households — weren’t addressed. Frustrated, she created her own site on the World Wide Web. Last month, she launched Bride Again: The Only Magazine Designed for Encore Brides, a quarterly that sells for $4.99 in grocery and bookstores. The only national magazine dedicated to encore brides, Bride Again is designed for female readers ages 30-45, with a median household income of $47,474 and a college degree.
It’s a sizable market. Nearly half of the 2.4 million people who marry each year in America are remarrying. Encore brides and grooms are no longer second-class citizens, Ramirez said. These days, divorcees do don white. A quiet City Hall ceremony is no longer de rigueur.
“People feel like `This is a celebration! I’ve been through so much with my first marriage or as a single mom. And now, by golly, I’m gonna have it right!’ ” said Ramirez, who remarried three years ago.
Bride Again offers tips on etiquette, dress, prenuptial agreements, stepfamilies and “his, hers or our house?”
Ramirez may have some male readers. Grooms get more involved the second time around, she said. Her husband, Kelly Ramirez, chose the location (the 18th hole at Mission Hills Country Club in Palm Springs), the menu and the band. She picked the honeymoon spot (the Fiji Islands).
Theme weddings are more popular for repeaters. A word on rings: Most couples pick the opposite of what they had the first time, said Kelly Lindbom, manager of Glennpeter Jewelers in Latham, N.Y.
“You’ve been through it all and you’re not going to say, `Oh, whatever you want, honey,’ ” Lindbom said. “(Second-timers) get equal to or better than what first-timers get.”
But never smaller.