The Well-Being of Persons Remarried after Divorce

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

DATA from seven recent American national surveys were used t o provide further evidence on the marital and global happiness of persons remarried after divorce. The findings are generally consistent with those from earlier studies. Persons remarried after divorce were found t o have had rather high levels of reported well-being, but ever-divorced women reported lower aggregate marital happiness than never-divorced married women (or than ever-divorced married men), and the difference was not explained by race, age, or socioeconomic variables. A history of marital failure was unrelated t o the reported global happiness of married persons except among white women, and the slightly lower reported global happiness of ever-divorced than of never-divorced married white women was fully explained by the lower marital happiness of the former. These findings indicate remarkably small long-term negative effects of marital failure on the well-being of persons who remarry after divorce.