Forty-two per cent of the married couples you know are destined to divorce, according to the latest UK statistics, but we still buy into the idea that a wedding is a happy ending. The story we like to tell, culturally, about romantic love is straightforward: that there is just one person out there for everyone, and that, once you have found that person, you will be happy every day until one of you is dead. So what about people who rack up multiple marriages? The famous stories tend to have a whiff of madness and glamour about them. There is Elizabeth Taylor, who was married eight times (twice to Richard Burton). The other, bloodier, example that springs to mind is Henry VIII.
To be married and divorced multiple times requires a strange mixture of romanticism and practicality about love. Saying “until death do us part” again, with four ex-husbands still living, suggests that you believe the right marriage might save you. But also that deep down you know it won’t. I started looking for stories of serial spouses in the aftermath of a breakup with a man I had wanted to marry, and there was a part of me that hoped that speaking to these people might loosen the hold that marriage has over my own imagination. Why do so many of us aspire to an institution with a 58% success rate, at best? And why do I feel like a failure because I haven’t achieved it? Serial brides and grooms might find the idea of marriage especially seductive – but I suspected that they might also be clear-eyed about love, and its limits, in a way that most of us are not.
