“Each had two
children, and they each had a daughter with the same name,” Eileen remembers.
When they married, they sold both of their primary homes and bought a new
residence. “They were adamant about wanting a five- or six-bedroom house with
four bedrooms that were as close in size as possible,” she says. “They felt, ‘We
have the money; we can buy whatever we want. We want a new start, we want a new
beginning.’”
Another option is to renovate an existing home. “If you don’t
want to sell, rearrange the house or change it a bit so that it looks
different,” Pearl advises. However, if a couple decides to sell or renovate one
of the homes, the children raised there may be upset. “Sometimes the children
from the first marriage will be violently resistant to changes,” Pearl notes.
“In those cases, we’ve tried to help people look at ways to gift the home to the
kids, if possible, and let them keep it as a kind of memorial to the way things
used to be. That way the parents don’t have to stay frozen in time.” Yours, Mine, Ours
Many individuals in second marriages find themselves
fighting to hold on to their own possessions. “One of the big challenges that
arises almost immediately after deciding to blend two wealthy families is that
things begin to fall into two camps: yours versus mine,” notes Lee Hausner, a
psychologist and vice chairman of IFF Advisors in Irvine, Calif. “There’s going
to be a tendency to be protective of your own turf, and you cannot help that.
You will try, but you can’t.”
Darlene Orlov recognized this problem herself,
and found the best solution was to be as forthright as possible with her spouse.
“We do not strategize silently and then speak to each other,” she says. “It’s
checkers; it’s not chess.” Neither Darlene nor Geoffrey fear confrontation, she
says, adding, “So we try to be as clear and reasonable with each other as we
possibly can, because it matters.” Geoffrey concurs and adds that strategies to
blend complex lifestyles will emerge naturally from a desire for the partnership
to work. “As people spend more time together over the years, you tend to go
where the points of mutual interest are. And you start to do things that you
want to do together. Each person wants to please the other one.”
For those of
us who prefer a game of chess, experts suggest proactive and preemptive
counseling designed to move cantankerous issues out in the open right away so
that resentments do not fester. “The key is to take these subjective issues and
make them objective,” points out Constance Ahrons, a sociologist at the
University of Southern California and the author of We’re Still Family and The
Good Divorce. “Start by talking about them. If it heats up too quickly, then you
should seek outside counseling, someone who can help you tease apart the
emotional from the rational.” Meeting in a neutral place, with one or two
similarly neutral counselors who are well-versed in the psychology of both
wealth and family dynamics, will help make these often-intense discussions
fruitful, rather than damaging.
After the most important lifestyle decisions
have been made, such as what to sell and where to live, it is often best to
allow the dust to settle for a while in order to better identify what each
spouse still needs to do to make the new family’s house a real home. Larina
Kase, a psychologist and family counselor at the University of Pennsylvania,
argues that we should slim our belongings down to the essentials, and then go on
a shopping spree with our new spouse to reoutfit our new home. “You take a few
of the things that are the most important to you and that have the most
significance, and you make those things the building blocks for the new life,”
she says. “Then you fill everything else in with new things.”
In the case of
Darlene and Geoffrey, their lives and their lifestyles are now a product of
their work as a couple. Their Sutton Place apartment is a virtual gallery space
(despite the absence of musical monks). Art remains an integral part of their
lives. In one room, an 18-by-18-foot painting they purchased as a couple
dominates the space. “Darlene saw it at auction and was going to bid on it,”
Geoffrey recalls. “But first she called me, told me about it and then faxed me a
picture. I said, ‘Go for it!’ She was nice enough to say, ‘If you hate it, I
won’t get it.’”
Photo Illustration by Paul Collin. Section
Photography by Claudia
Kunin.
Additional Information:
 Accounting for Differences
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