Famous couples who marry, divorce and then remarry their former spouses are often fodder for tabloid headlines. Think of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who were married to each other twice — first for a decade beginning in 1964, and then again in 1975 before they divorced the next year. Elon Musk and Talulah Riley were wed from 2010 to 2012 and again from 2013 to 2016.
But not all remarriages fail. The celebrity TV justice Judith Sheindlin, better known as Judge Judy, married Jerry Sheindlin in 1977. They divorced in 1990 and then remarried in 1991.
The singer and actress Marie Osmond and the motivational speaker Steve Craig were first married in 1982 and divorced in 1985. They remarried in 2011.
Osmond told People Magazine in 2019, “The thing about a second marriage is that you realise things you thought were so important aren’t.”
Precise figures on how often divorces result in marrying ex-spouses are hard to come by, but research suggests it’s relatively rare. A small study published in 2001 in the Journal of Divorce and Remarriage estimated the number at about 10 per cent.
Nancy Kalish, a former professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, conducted a study of more than 1000 participants in the mid-1990s and early 2000s as part of her research on reignited romantic relationships. While the study may not be representative, she stated in an interview that 6 per cent of the couples she met with divorced and remarried the same person.
“The obvious disadvantage is baggage,” said Kathryn Ford, a psychiatrist specialising in couples therapy based in Menlo Park, California. “The baggage they have is probably considerable if it was enough to break them up.”
But sometimes couples break up for reasons that, in retrospect, weren’t that daunting.
“A few years later, they realised, ‘Gosh, that wasn’t the only option we had,’” Ford said. “We could have done something other than just break up.”
The New York Times asked five couples to share how and why they tied, cut and retied the knot with each other. Here are their accounts.
Learning to navigate religious differences
Leslie Lisbona and Val Nassiri, New Rochelle, New York
Leslie Lisbona described the initial phase of her first marriage to Val Nassiri as “an extension of our honeymoon”.
The couple met in 1991 at a party given by a mutual friend in Queens.
“He was so handsome,” Lisbona, 59, recalled. “He had dark, silky hair and an olive complexion.” Nassiri, 57, remembers being struck by her dark hair and pale skin. But she was cool to his advances. Among the reasons was that she had a long-distance boyfriend. Another issue: Nassiri is Muslim. She is Jewish. But she liked his sartorial style and that he liked to dance, so she suggested they be friends.
They had a platonic relationship for four years hanging out with groups of their mutual friends. One day, they found themselves alone together, and he kissed her.
“It was electric and warm and soft,” recalled Lisbona, whose long-distance relationship had ended. Six months later, he proposed. They were married on April 28, 1996, at the Puck Building in Manhattan.
“We moved to the city, and that was really exciting,” Nassiri said. “We did a lot of things that we hadn’t done separately, and now we did it together.”
But as their family grew, beginning with the birth of the first of their two sons in February 1998, their relationship started to come apart. She wanted a ceremonial bris performed by a mohel at home. He wanted it performed by a doctor in a hospital. He got his way.
“We thought that we were so in sync culturally, but really we weren’t,” Lisbona said. “We started to see that there were vast differences in how we were brought up and our expectations in life.”
Eventually, their relationship had no conflict-free zones. From their separation in November 2000 until March 2004, when their divorce was finalised, they spoke only through their lawyers, Lisbona said. But upon signing the divorce papers, they hugged.
“We no longer had anything to fight about,” she said.
One evening, about a month after they were officially divorced, Nassiri showed up at Lisbona’s apartment to pick up their sons for his usual Wednesday dinner with them. He asked Lisbona if she would like to come along. She agreed and continued to join the Wednesday night dinners.
We no longer had anything to fight about.
“We laughed a lot,” she said, adding that she felt disconcerted. “We’d just gone through a nightmarish divorce, and now we couldn’t take our eyes off each other.”
Two months later, he moved back in to their apartment. Five years later, on February 8, 2009, they were married in the living room of the house they had purchased together.
“I was raised very secularly,” Nassiri said, and to him, the various Jewish rituals and holidays his wife wanted to celebrate as a family smacked of religious indoctrination. That wasn’t her intention.
“I am also secular,” Lisbona said. “I do not believe in God. However, I do believe in tradition and rituals that bring us together.”
Misdelivered mail brought them back together
Lauren Sterling and Larry Sussman, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Lauren Sterling and Larry Sussman credit their getting back together after their divorce to a supernatural force, or possibly a mischievous US Postal Service worker.
After their divorce in 2012, Sterling, 63, and Sussman, 68, met occasionally to exchange mail. Sterling would sometimes get some of Sussman’s sons’ mail at her new address in Brookline, Massachusetts. Sussman would bring some of her daughters’ mail from his home in Waltham, Massachusetts.
“In retrospect, we thought maybe there’s a higher power holding the puppet strings,” Sterling said.
The couple met in 2004 on Match.com. Both were in the process of getting divorced from their former spouses. Their first online chat went on for two hours.
“I would write something, and she would write something back, and I’d crack up,” said Sussman, who retired in 2021 as the vice president of quality systems at New England Donor Services, an organ procurement organisation in Waltham.
In retrospect, we thought maybe there’s a higher power holding the puppet strings.
“I could sense that he was intelligent from how he was writing,” said Sterling, an associate director of alumni and volunteer engagement at Simmons University in Boston.
A couple of days after their online exchange, they met for drinks.
“Usually, I have difficulty finding things to say,” Sussman said. “But I recall that we couldn’t stop talking.”
Sussman’s two boys, then aged 12 and 14, and Sterling’s two girls, then aged 13 and 17, blended so effortlessly that the couple decided to merge their families under one roof, and married on November 20, 2005.
Seven years later, they began divorce proceedings.
During their marriage, they devoted most of their attention to their full-time jobs and a house full of teenagers.
“It was a marriage centred on family,” Sterling said. “Once we moved them all out to colleges, there’s just us and a dog or two.”
She said they were missing “the original reason we got married — our emotional connection”. Sussman said he thought everything was fine.
They had been divorced about two years when Sterling called Sussman to say a large package for one of his sons had arrived at her home.
He said he would be near her work, so he could swing by and pick it up, and they could have a drink. She agreed.
“It turned into this reconnection — happy, warm, sharing each other’s interests,” Sterling said. “There was chemistry again.”
In the years after their divorce, Sussman had become more socially engaged, joining meet-up groups and a singles golf association. “I had a lot of fun,” he said. He also had a girlfriend.
Sussman broke up with his girlfriend that weekend, and he and Sterling began dating again.
“I have always felt from the day of the divorce that the divorce was a mistake, that Lauren and I were supposed to be together,” Sussman said.
In November 2018, they bought a condo together but remained divorced.
“We’re together because we love each other, not because of a piece of paper,” she said. But with Sussman’s retirement imminent, they married on November 20, 2020, so he could be included in her health insurance.
“I think we both had to grow up in our own ways to be willing to accept the other person,” Sterling said.
“We don’t overdo the intense emotional conversations, but we share and connect,” she said. “I’ve learned that I can’t shove that down his throat. I learned how to balance out the emotional partnership I give a person.”
A drive that led to reconciliation
Jean and Ronnie Barnett, Sherwood, Arkansas
For this couple, their third marriage to each other was a charm.
They met at a birthday party in North Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1977. She was 17, he was 19.
“My girlfriend asked me, ‘Who do you think is cute here?’” Jean Barnett recalled. “I said, ‘That guy right there.’” She pointed out a young man with shoulder-length red hair.
Later that evening, a friend introduced them.
“She’s a very beautiful woman,” Ronnie Barnett recalled thinking. “I thought I didn’t have a chance.”
He had underestimated his charm. They married two years later on September 7, 1979.
They moved to a new town where they bought 5 acres on which they planned to build a house. In the meantime, a rickety trailer served as their home.
“I didn’t know anybody,” Jean Barnett said. “I was away from my mother for the very first time. We were 40 minutes away, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but back then, you didn’t just pick up and drive 40 minutes at the drop of a hat.”
“I was working all the time for my job as a railroad engineer and leaving her home alone,” Ronnie Barnett, 65, said.
They divorced in 1980.
I’ve learned that outside influences do not matter one little bit.
The judge gave them joint custody of their dog, a 6-month-old Great Dane named Duchess, Jean Barnett, 64, said. They regularly passed the dog back and forth and “couldn’t keep ourselves away from each other”, Jean Barnett said.
They remarried on August 1, 1981, and moved back to North Little Rock, where they started their family — a daughter born in 1982 and a son born in 1984. In 1994, they moved to Sheridan, Arkansas.
“We stayed there 10 years until it just all fell apart,” Ronnie Barnett said.
“I started working for the school district there and made lots of wonderful friends and wanted to do things with them, but they weren’t his type of people,” Jean Barnett said. “And I didn’t like his friends.”
When their children went to college, they split up and divorced in June 2006.
They didn’t communicate with each other except for tight-lipped exchanges of “hello” when they both showed up for a grandchild’s baseball game.
In 2013, their daughter, living in Houston, invited her parents to visit for the birth of her first child.
“He asked me if I would want to ride with him, and I said yes because it was cheaper that way,” said Jean Barnett, who had remarried in 2010. Ronnie Barnett had a girlfriend.
“We drove down and we talked the whole trip down there,” Jean Barnett said. “We had our daughter’s house to ourselves and continued talking.”
“Ever since then, we started talking again and being cordial to each other,” Ronnie Barnett said. “During all that time, we realised we still had feelings for each other.”
In the spring of 2020, Jean Barnett divorced her husband and, later that year, remarried Ronnie Barnett.
“I’ve learned that outside influences do not matter one little bit,” Jean Barnett said. “He does go and has a beer or two with some old work buddies, and I see a girlfriend or two for lunch. But otherwise, it’s he and I against the world.”
Overcoming career and health setbacks
Elena Sirignano and John Hayes, Napa, California
Elena Sirignano and John Hayes had encountered each other, off and on, for years. He was a scruffy teenager who, it turned out, was seven years her junior.
One day in February 1998, they were at a 12-step meeting in Napa, and she noticed he looked different — the 24-year-old man across from her had cut his hair and shaved his moustache and beard.
“He was cute,” said Sirignano, an executive chef and a department chair and programme coordinator at Napa Valley College.
The pair started chatting that evening, unobtrusively probing for likes and dislikes and for shared and dissimilar interests.
“We spoke on the phone every night for like the next two weeks,” said Hayes, the manager at Van Winden’s Garden Center in Napa. When they finally met for coffee, they were smitten with each other. Three months later, they moved in together.
“She was able to meet me emotionally about any topic that we talked about,” he said. “And something that was really important, too, is we had already had relationships prior that made us stand back and think about what are our values. How can we live up to them while being in a relationship?”
But throughout their 12-year marriage, which began on June 30, 1999, tension from various sources — family issues, career and employment issues, and health issues — converged on them.
“Everything became like a family business,” Sirignano, 56, said. “We had the house to maintain. We had the kids to take care of.”
They moved to Smyrna, Delaware, which ultimately didn’t work out.
“His career was taking off, and mine was bottoming out,” Sirignano said. “I left the world of high-end Napa Valley culinary; back east, the best I could get was waiting tables in a hotel.”
In February 2008, Hayes, 49, was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, and Sirignano added caretaker for her husband to her previous responsibilities. By the end of 2010, she said, she and Hayes were “psychologically and emotionally estranged from each other”.
Their divorce was finalised in February 2012.
They underwent couples therapy so they could more effectively work together to raise their daughter, Taluja, who was 9 years old. (Garret, 20, Sirignano’s child from a previous marriage, was mostly on his own by then.)
We forgot how to play together and be at ease. And it felt all that had returned.
Through therapy, Hayes said, he needed to “learn how to listen and to come up with strategies between us. And also that I didn’t have to be reactionary with my feelings.”
Sirignano said therapy brought the root of some of her behaviour to light.
“I was always constantly fearful around money,” she said. “And also constantly fearful around my benchmark of what I thought was successful. Somehow or another, I was moving up a ladder, and then I stopped. Even though I never left the workforce.”
By late 2013, they felt they had repaired their relationship to the point where they moved in together again. Five years later, on June 29, 2018, they remarried.
“I definitely was fearful,” Hayes said. “I made the decision after going through a process of opening back up again and learning how to communicate; a lot of it, too, is that we forgot how to play together and be at ease. And it felt all that had returned.”
“I am a left-wing kind of person,” Sirignano said. “I do not feel compelled by religion or pressure by other people that people should get married. But it changes something within me. When he and I made this formal commitment a second time, like, I was fully in the first time, but the second time, even after getting divorced, it was like, ‘OK, I am all in.’”
A second chance to ‘right an old wrong’
Dawn and Barry Skochelak, Masontown, Pennsylvania
The couple, both 58, have known each other since elementary school.
“In about fifth grade, when girls decide that boys are not stinky anymore, I passed a note to Barry one day that says, ‘Do you like me? Circle yes or no,’” Dawn Skochelak said. “He wrote back, ‘Maybe.’”
“I think that’s what attracts me to him now, and what attracted me when we were children, is that he can make me laugh no matter the circumstance,” said Dawn Skochelak, an executive assistant with the WVU Foundation at West Virginia University.
Even with that promising start to their relationship and their remaining good friends throughout school, Barry Skochelak made no romantic overtures to her until their senior year of high school.
“She was the captain of the cheerleaders,” Barry Skochelak, a retired coal miner, said. “I wasn’t one of the jocks, one of the motorheads. I was just a farm boy.”
At the beginning of senior year, he mustered up the courage to ask her out. She accepted, and they dated through the year. He enlisted in the Air Force shortly after graduation, and they married on January 19, 1985.
In short order, he was catapulted from sheltered farm life to hanging out with a bunch of single guys who wanted to “lift weights, play football and go to bars,” Dawn Skochelak said.
“There was no extreme alcoholism, no abuse, no arguments about money,” he said. “If there is such a thing as a good breakup, that’s what we had.” They divorced on July 1, 1986.
Over the next three decades, they both suffered — Dawn Skochelak’s second marriage ended in divorce, and a third ended with the death of her husband from lymphoma after 2½ years of marriage.
Frustrated after the failure of his third marriage, Barry Skochelak, then 50, vowed to give up dating.
One day, the elder of his two sisters challenged him to send a Facebook friend request to Dawn Skochelak. He bridled at the suggestion to reach out to someone he hadn’t seen in more than 30 years. His sister bet him $10 that she would respond. He accepted the challenge.
A day, a week, a month, two months went by without a response.
“My first reaction was, ‘Why does he want to be my friend?’” Dawn Skochelak said. “I left him in San Antonio. Does he want revenge?”
Then, one Sunday, “I felt more lonely than I have ever felt in my entire life,” she said. “My mother didn’t call me. My daughters didn’t call me. I felt like there was not another person on the planet except for me. And then I happened to think about that friend request, and I thought, ‘Hmm, you want to be my friend? Well, I need a friend today.’”
Over the next few days, their messages were emotionally neutral. But eventually their texts became emotional.
To have a chance to have a redo is just nothing short of a miracle.
“I made a joke and said, ‘We have to quit talking like this. I can barely type through the tears,’” Barry Skochelak said.
She typed back: “Well, I have Kleenex and margaritas. By Google Maps, you live 34 minutes from here.”
“When she opened the door, I said, ‘How about a hug for an old friend,’” Barry Skochelak recalled. “And she hugged me. And I gotta tell you, that hug alone was kind of like putting an electric blanket on high around me.”
That was June 26, 2016. They remarried on January 19, 2017. Why?
“To right an old wrong,” Dawn Skochelak said. “I say this to him over and over again, how incredibly rare it is to have a chance to right a wrong. To have a chance to have a redo is just nothing short of a miracle.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Eric V. Copage
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
