Remarriages have become almost as common as first marriages in contemporary America. In fact, in recent years, almost half of all marriages involved at least one spouse who had been married previously (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1998). Remarriage rates in the United States (the number of people remarrying each year per 1,000 persons divorced or widowed) increased during the 1960s, declined precipitously across the 1970s, and have continued to decline throughout the 1980s and 1990s, although at a much slower rate (Sweet and Bumpass 1988; U.S. Bureau of the Census 1998).

Contemporary remarriages are more likely to follow divorce, in contrast to earlier centuries, in which remarriage typically followed the death of a spouse. For example, Demos (1970) reported that in the Plymouth Colony, approximately 40 percent of men and 26 percent of women over the age of 50 had been married more than once, due primarily to the death of the first...