STEP UP

With enough patience, a good dose of realism, strictness where necessary and heaps of love you can make your blended stepfamily work!

- ILSE SALZWEDEL

Around 25 000 South African marriages end in the divorce court every year, according to official statistics. And this figure probably only tells a part of the bigger story, because customary marriages are often not included in censuses (so neither is their ending in the divorce court).

So experts estimate that at least one in every three, but perhaps even one in every two modern marriages will end in divorce.

The average age at which people divorce is between 30 and 44 – roughly the same age people are when they have children. Plus, most couples who divorce do so before their tenth wedding anniversary. Recent figures from Stats SA reveal that more than half of divorces happen in families where there are children younger than 18 years of age.

What we’re getting at is that very few children – perhaps only about one-third of South Africa’s youth – has the good fortune to grow up in a core family with their biological mom and dad.

But many of them end up in reconfigured families, where the parent with whom they live remarries. We don’t have these figures for South Africa, but the estimation is that in the US about half of marriages are second takes.

Unfortunately a second marriage does not always mean the happy ending you’ve always dreamt of. “About 80 percent of second marriages also end in divorce, and research shows that a third marriage has about a 100 percent chance of failure,” says Kobus van der Merwe, marriage counsellor and relationship therapist with Imago in Pretoria.

With a second or subsequent marriage, usually also comes another phenomenon: a reconfigured family.