RemarriageGuide

About

What this site is, and what it refuses to be

Page last updated

A practical guide to marrying again when you already have a history: the decision, the blended family, the stepparent role, and the paperwork nobody warns you about.

A man in his late forties in a plain dark top, turned three-quarters towards the camera, lit from one side by soft window light against a blurred pale grey-blue wall.
AI-generated imageIllustrative portrait, AI-generated; Owen Pardoe is the pen name this site's editorial team signs with.

Who writes here

Pages here are signed Owen Pardoe — Editor · remarried, stepparent.

I came at this subject as somebody filling in forms, not as somebody with a professional view of them. Marrying again turned out to be two different projects wearing one word: the part everybody congratulates you for, and the part that arrives as a stack of paperwork with a previous marriage still printed on it. Nobody warned me that the second part would take longer, or that it would be the part I lay awake about.

What I remember from the beginning is how ordinary and how unanswerable the questions were at the same time. Whether a form I had signed years ago still pointed somewhere I no longer meant it to. Whether I was allowed to say no to a rule in a house that was now also mine. A child being courteous to me in a corridor and owing me nothing more than that, and the small flinch of realising that courtesy was the correct amount. None of it was a crisis. All of it needed somewhere to be put, and what I found instead was either a confident stranger telling me the law, or a page telling me how to feel about my own household.

Those are the questions I arrived with, and they are the ones these pages take seriously: what a situation actually asks, which document or which person answers it, and where a page has to stop because the next step belongs to a lawyer, a school or the other parent. I am not qualified to tell you what applies where you live, and I would not trust a page that offered. I am qualified to notice when a page is pretending to be.

What I arrived with

A date, a partner, two histories and a drawer of documents written by people who assumed the first marriage would be the only one. The emotional questions were loud, but the ones that actually kept me up were administrative: what still points where it used to, who has to agree, and what happens if nobody gets round to it.

What was missing

Confidence, mostly, in places where confidence was not available. Pages that stated the rule without saying which country or which state it belonged to. Advice about somebody else’s child written as though the writer had met them. Percentages about second marriages passed hand to hand with no publisher attached. What I wanted was duller and did not exist in one place: the question, named plainly, and the person whose job it is to answer it.

What this site does

It names questions and it names who answers them, and it stops there. I decide which questions get a page, I read every page before it goes up, and I am the address for telling us one is wrong. My name on a page means somebody is answerable for it — never that I can tell you what your own documents mean. Nobody here can.

Owen Pardoe is a pen name, and it belongs to the editorial team of this site rather than to a biography you could look up. The name exists so that a page has somebody answerable for it, and neither the name nor the portrait at the top of this page is meant to lend a sentence weight the sentence has not earned. There are no credentials behind it: nobody here is your lawyer, your mediator, your accountant or your child's other parent, and no page is written as though it were. The portrait is not a photograph of a living person — it is an illustration generated with an AI tool and labelled as one wherever it appears, and it is there to give the byline a face rather than to tell you whose. Drafting is AI-assisted and human-edited, every figure is traced to a named publisher before it appears, and if a sentence here is wrong the fastest route to fixing it is hello@remarriageguide.com with the page address and the sentence you are disputing.

A byline is worth less than a citation on this subject, and the pages are built on that assumption. Remarriage advice is full of confident first-person authority — letters after a name, a “family law expert”, a coach with a method — and on a question whose answer changes at a state line, almost none of it is checkable. So these pages stand on things you can check without trusting us: a named publisher beside every figure, the population that figure describes, the regulation or publication quoted by name, and plain description of what people report doing.

Where a question needs a professional, the page names the professional and stops. We also do not put words in anybody's mouth: there are no interviews on this site, and no quotation here is attributed to a person who did not publish it. The working rules are written down in the editorial policy.

What this site claims, and what it does not

Both halves matter equally. A page that is vague about the second half is a page that will eventually be read as advice by somebody who needed a lawyer.

This site does say

  • Which question a situation actually raises
  • Which professional or institution answers it
  • What families and couples report doing
  • Who published a figure, and about whom

This site does not say

  • What the rule is where you live
  • What any document of yours means
  • How to parent someone else’s child
  • Whether your marriage will work

Why these pages are more cautious than most

The sources this site is allowed to cite were assembled specifically for remarriage, and almost every one of them carries a written limit on what it can be used to say. Those limits are the reason the pages read the way they do. The full list is on the sources page; the four that shape the writing most are here.

A federal rule is not your state’s rule
Where a regulation is quoted here — a survivor-benefit rule, a child-support framework — it is quoted as the shape of the thing, not as your answer. Federal text describes the frame within which states write their own rules, and it is the state rule that will decide your case.
One state’s statute is not the country
Two pages here link a single state’s law: one on stepparent visitation, one on what a surviving spouse may claim against a will. Both are there for one purpose — to show that such a provision can exist — and both say so on the page. Neither is evidence about anywhere else.
Tax publications are revised every year
The revenue-service publications behind the money pages are reissued annually, and the address serves whatever the current revision is. That is why the pages name the document rather than repeating a threshold from it: the number moves and the page would not.
A survey is not a forecast
The research on second marriages that does exist describes named groups of people over fixed periods. It carries no statement about a particular couple, and where a page quotes it, the population and the year of the survey are printed in the same sentence.

One consequence is worth stating outright: this site publishes very few numbers. Three figures are cleared for use across all 22 pages, and a dozen more have been rejected for having no traceable publisher — including the percentages about second marriages that everybody has read somewhere. Every figure that survives, and the exact wording it must be quoted in, is listed on the statistics page.

If you are starting here

Almost nobody arrives wanting to read about remarriage in general. People arrive in one of four states, and each one has a different section.

Or start with three pages people open first

Corrections, and how to reach us

If something here is wrong, say so and it gets fixed with the change noted — the procedure is in the corrections section of the editorial policy. That includes the small things: a regulation that has been amended since we linked it, a publication reissued for a new year, a sentence that reads as advice when it was meant as description. The last of those is the one we most want to hear about.

Email hello@remarriageguide.com, or use the contact page. What we cannot do, and will not do by email either, is tell you what applies to your marriage, your will or your benefit. That answer belongs to somebody who can see your documents and knows your jurisdiction.