FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

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Are You Ready to Remarry?

Guest:                         Ron Deal

From the series:         The Smart Stepdad (day 1 of 3) 

Bob:  Ron Deal says he has talked with a lot of people who have been through a difficult first marriage that came to an end, and have been in too big a hurry to find someone else and marry again.

Ron:  “You know, we met on eHarmony, and we‟ve met face-to-face once.  We live on opposite sides of the universe, but that‟s not going to be a problem for us.  We‟re in love!  eHarmony says we‟re a match.”

Wait a minute, wait a minute.  Slow down.  That hurried, desperate need to be together with somebody is telling you something about yourself.  You need to come to terms with that, and get objective about it so that it‟s not driving you into a decision that wouldn‟t be a wise one.

Bob:  This is FamilyLife Today for W ednesday, June 1st.  Our host is the President of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I‟m Bob Lepine.  Marrying a second time, becoming a stepdad, is a huge challenge.  Today, Ron Deal helps you think through whether you‟re up to the challenge, or whether you need to press pause for a little bit.

And welcome to FamilyLife Today.  Thanks for joining us.

I‟m wondering why Ron Deal put Doc Martins on the front of his book?  A pair of loafers, but I think they‟re Doc Martins.  Isn‟t that yellow stitching around the top characteristic of the Doc Martins?

Dennis:  Ron?

Ron:  I don‟t have a clue!

(laughter)

Dennis:  You‟ve got to be careful around Bob.  I‟m telling you, he‟s tough on you.

Bob:  Did you pick the shoes for the cover of the book?

Ron:  I did not pick the shoes.  I influenced.  I know which ones I did not p ick.

Dennis:  Every author knows about that!  All the covers you reject.

Bob:  Is the idea here that if you‟re going to be a smart stepdad, you‟ve got some big

shoes to step into?  Is that the idea here?

Ron:  That, yes.  And, in a way, you‟re also stepping into someone else‟s shoes, but that person‟s already in their shoes.  It gets a little confusing.

Dennis:  You challenge a step-dad with “Steps to Help You Succeed.”  You really have

a heart for stepdads.

By the way, welcome to the broadcast.

Ron:  Thank you.  It‟s great to be back.

Dennis:  Sorry we critiqued your cover right off the start.

Ron:  That‟s alright.

Bob:  It wasn‟t a critique.  I was just curious.

Dennis:  You were critiquing it, Bob.

Bob:  The shoes do look a little scuffed up, too, I think.

Dennis:  Ron Deal is the founder of Successful Stepparents.  He is an author and a speaker.  He and his wife Nan and their sons live in Amarillo, Texas.  He has written the book The Smart Stepdad.  I didn‟t realize this, Bob, but 16.5 million men are stepdads today.

Bob:  That‟s a big chunk of the population.

Dennis:  Sixteen percent of all men will bear this title.

So you‟re talking to millions of men who step into these shoes.  They‟re going to find this much more difficult to do this thing of being a stepfather than they ever imagined.

Ron:  Many of them have the biggest hearts in the world.  They come in and they want to be the hero, you know?  They want to do a good job.  God bless them for having the heart for that.

Sometimes what they experience when they get there is like the first day on a new job, and people didn‟t know you were showing up.  They really would rather have the other guy there instead of you.  His name is still on the door, and you‟re moving into his office. You‟re really unclear what performing well on the job would look like.

How do I hit the bull‟s-eye in my new job?  It‟s really unclear.  Some people are telling you it looks like this, and other people are telling you it looks like this, and you‟re thinking, “W ho‟s on my team and who‟s not on my team?”  All of that confusion hits stepdads pretty quickly.

Bob:  And you add to that, maybe in your last job things didn‟t go so well and there were challenges, and there‟s still some anger and bitterness from the previous place you used to work, that left you feeling a little insecure about your role in the first place.

Now, here you are stepping into the new assignment.  You‟ve got to acknowledge when you step into a role as either a stepmom or a stepdad that ther e‟s some stuff in this pot of stew that you‟ve been cooking up here that is going to have be dealt with.

Ron:  Yes, and an application of what you just said about the former job:  many stepdads are biological dads.  They have their own children and they m ay live with them or they may not.  They may be with them on a part-time basis.

So, really, you kind of have two jobs.  One of those jobs is very clear.  It‟s very clear what it is to be the dad.  But it‟s just not so clear what it is to be the stepdad.  That‟s what we want to do with this book is offer them direction.

Dennis:  As human beings, we tend to be idealistic.  W e enter into this new relationship

– there‟s a honeymoon.  Maybe we did go through something where we experienced divorce in the past and we‟ve got that set of bags that we bring into the marriage relationship like we‟re talking about here, but don‟t you find that as couples form

blended families, that they have some unreal expectations about how it‟s going to work?

Ron:  Absolutely!  Absolutely.  The expectations are built on the fantasy.  Really, we need the fantasy.  W e need the dream.  There are a lot of risks in life that we wouldn‟t take if we didn‟t have a dream wrapped around it.  I think that‟s often true about remarriage, about becoming a stepparent.

The dream isn‟t necessarily bad or wrong.  I want stepdads and stepparents to hold

onto that dream.  But, at the same time, it needs to be tempered with reality; it needs to be tempered with truth about ...