Why second marriages bring a third more agony

IT SEEMS love isn’t lovelier the second time around – getting married again may actually make men more depressed.

Divorced men who remarry are nearly a third more likely to be prescribed antidepressants than those who remained single, research has revealed.

The study, reported in the journal Social Science and Medicine, looked at more than 200,000 Swedish men born between 1952 and 1956.

The men were then tracked up to the ages of 54 and 58, and their marital status and medical records compared.

By 1985, when the men were all aged around 30, 72,246 had been divorced. The researchers then compared depression rates in those who stayed divorced and those who remarried.

They found that the men who had remarried were 27 per cent more likely to have been prescribed antidepressants than those who had not. Men who were still married and had never divorced had the lowest risk of depression.

The researchers from Orebro University in Sweden, University College London, and the University of East London, said the findings could be down to difficult relationships with their new inlaws or stepchildren, as well as financial problems.

Professor Scott Montgomery, who led the study, said: ‘Maybe people rush into a second marriage thinking it will be the same as the early, happy years of their first, and run into challenges. Perhaps the grass is not always greener. A more positive possibility, but one for which we have no evidence, is that wives of the remarried men who have depression encourage them to seek medical help.’