‘I was like a tornado going through men’s lives’: meet the people who can’t stop getting married

 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.

The dream of the perfect wedding, and the perfect marriage, can be particularly hard to resist if you are a woman. At first I was surprised to find so many serial brides on internet message boards. I had a stereotype in my head of the man who cycles through women, trading in each new wife for a younger model. But when I actually connected with interviewees, it began to make sense to me. Anita, who has been married six times, told me that she walked down the aisle for the first time at 18 because she was frightened people would think there was something wrong with her if she wasn’t chosen by a man. When her first marriage broke down, Anita kept getting remarried, because to be a divorced woman in the European town in which she grew up was to be a kind of social outcast. A 2019 book by the behavioural scientist Paul Dolan drew on data suggesting that women who don’t marry or have children are happier and healthier than those who do, but there is still a perception that single women are broken or unfulfilled. For men, a solid relationship is one of a number of ingredients that make for a good life, but many of the women I interviewed for this piece were raised – like me – to view marriage as their crowning achievement.

Marriage is seductive for irrational, emotional reasons – but it is also incentivised by the state. In the UK, married couples are eligible for tax breaks and, in the US, married couples are allowed to use their spouse’s medical insurance, so a marriage certificate can mean access to life-saving medical care. Carys, a 73-year-old American divorce attorney who has herself been divorced seven times, was transparent with me about the fact that marriage, for her, is partly a financial proposition. When she first got married, in 1972, marriage put women at a disadvantage: marital rape was still legal in most US states, and women generally lost any claim to shared property in the event of a divorce. Speaking to me via video link from her home office, Carys explained that she kept remarrying because she wanted to prove to herself that she had value, and that she could find love but she was also insistent that a marriage should be about something more tangible than romance. “If you’re a divorce lawyer you’re not really so into the ‘until death do us part’ bit of marriage,” she explained. “It’s more something you do to make yourself financially and emotionally safe in the event that things go south.” Carys has filed six out of seven of her own divorces, and used to keep the paperwork sitting in a file on her desk until needed, like a kind of security blanket. “As an attorney who’d handled divorces for hundreds of other people, I always felt able to quickly and painlessly escape.”

Carys is happily married to husband number eight. She spoke to me anonymously, and doesn’t always disclose her marital history to clients. Similarly, Anita, who lives in Scotland, keeps her multiple divorces a secret – Anita is not her real name. Other than her sixth husband, the only person who knows the full story of her past is her priest. Even the people who did agree to be photographed in these pages expressed anxiety about being judged. Serial brides and grooms are cast as unstable and morally weak, which is strange – because the people I spoke to struck me as being unusually courageous. Many of us grit our teeth and struggle on through a bad relationship, or numb ourselves to our own unhappiness, because we are afraid of being alone. People who marry multiple times aren’t willing to remain in a bad relationship for the sake of propriety. They seem less afraid to change and to admit defeat than the rest of us are.

The serial spouses I interviewed also seemed unusually hopeful. Recovering from any breakup requires a certain amount of resilience. You put yourself back together and try to believe in love all over again. But buying a wedding dress, sending out invitations and saying “I do” in front of everyone you know – for the fifth or sixth time – requires an extraordinary amount of hope. Many of the people who share their experiences below are currently happily married – so what follows is really a series of offbeat, non‑traditional love stories. They are a testament to the value of the pursuit of love, rather than its attainment – and a reminder that a wedding is never really a happy ending. It’s only a beginning.