@KylieKoKo
I do think too many people go into it with their eyes clamped shut, ignoring all the red flags waving in their faces, thinking ‘love conquers all’ / ‘it’ll be different for us’.
@RussiasGreatestLoveMachine Do you not think this also applies to parents who have children who go onto to split up with them? Let's not forget, in most cases step parents exist because the first relationship failed and I don't think many people have children with someone planning to split up with them.
This is a good point.
The stats for first marriage are bad. Even worse for cohabiting relationships with children. Relationships is full of threads about all the awful things that happen in relationships. Pretty much everyone knows someone whose spouse had an affair and people who have absolutely shit relationships.
Yet people have relationships and have children. They do so in the hope that their experience will be one of the good ones. But, often, it doesn’t work out that way. For all kinds of reasons.
Given that, why should we expect people to be any more guided by the stats and second hand bad experiences in subsequent relationships?
They are dealing with an individual and, often, the pre-marriage/child offer turns out to have been falsely advertised. In stepfamilies, changes like marriage/new baby often seem to cause a hitherto dormant volcano of shit to decide to become extremely active once more. Not just the ex either. It can cause weird changes in your new husband as he starts operating out of guilt for the first time. Or in his extended family.
Stepchildren who were cute and small - and whose behaviour could be explained as normal preschool stuff of adjusting to a new situation - get bigger and much less cute. Sometimes the behaviour just gets worse and worse, rather than improving. And it’s long since been explicable as age appropriate.
With hindsight, I’d have run very fast in the other direction from being a stepparent.