ANOTHER CHANCE AT LOVE

BY JACOB A. DAVIS

WHILE CIVIL WEDDING CEREMONIES are not likely the “second chances” that come to mind when one considers our North Carolina court system, for many individuals these simple magistrate-led ceremonies are just that a second chance.

From 2013 to 2019, I had the privilege of serving as a North Carolina magistrate in Wake County, a role in which I performed nearly 6,000 civil wedding ceremonies. While touching memories from those ceremonies are innumerable, there was always something special about performing a wedding where one or both members of the wedding couple had been married before. That information was rarely discussed openly, but was present on the wedding licenses I was handed prior to each ceremony.

There seemed to be an added weight to those ceremonies, borne I believe from the fact that each person understood, from first-hand, lived experience, the commitment they were about to make.

They understood the incredible highs and lows that marriage can dish out in sometimes sparing and sometimes generous portions - the support and encouragement, the spats and critical comments, the frustration and elation - yet, with that complete and sobered picture, they were each ready to commit themselves, one to the other, for the rest of their lives. They were ready for their second chance. I loved that sentiment then and still love it now.

On many such occasions, I learned from a couple (or, more often, from their children) that not only had the couple been married before, but they had been married to one another. Those ceremonies were incredible to witness. Before me were two people who knew each other as much as two people could, who remembered the joys and challenges of their past marriage, and who understood intimately the strengths, weaknesses, talents, and foibles of the other, yet they were still willing to enter into a new relationship together, one built upon the hard-earned lessons of the first. A second chance not only at marriage, but at marriage with the person they had first committed their life to many years before.

When either spouse of a second or subsequent wedding ceremony had children from a previous relationship, or children shared by spouses being reunited, the ceremony also provided a second chance at a unified family. Children of step-parents could now live in a home where the weight of parenting and the day-to-day managing of a household could be shared between two people pulling in tandem, each bolstered and supported by the other’s efforts. Children of reunited parents would have another chance at inhabiting the encouraging and loving support system that they and their parents had once sought to cultivate.

Regardless of the context, second chances in life can often seem few and far between, but rest assured they can be found every day in county courthouses across North Carolina, punctuated by a magistrate’s pronouncement and a couple’s first kiss as newlyweds. WBF

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