42 million adults have been married more than once

(Image credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty)

last updated 8 January 2015

If at first you don't succeed... get a good lawyer and try again.

Increasingly, that's exactly what Americans are doing with marriage, Pew Research explains in a comprehensive look at how the institution has changed over the decades. Forty-two million adults who were married in 2013 had been married before, almost double the number from 1980 and triple 1960's count. As Pew's graphic below illustrates, 40 percent of all new marriages involve at least one previously married spouse:

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This increase has been fueled by several demographic trends, beginning with the rise in divorce, which has made more Americans available for remarriage. It has also been fueled by the overall aging of the population, which not only increases the number of widows and widowers available to remarry, but means people quite simply have more years in which to make, dissolve and remake unions. Combined, these two trends have created a larger pool of people who can potentially remarry.

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Mike Barry is the senior editor of audience development and outreach at TheWeek.com. He was previously a contributing editor at The Huffington Post. Prior to that, he was best known for interrupting a college chemistry class.

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