Ah, the Second Time Around : Couples Who Split Up and Then Find Each Other for a New Beginning Are Rare, but They Do Exist

The moment was right. There was no doubt left in John Thurman’s mind. He got down on one knee, reached for the hand of the woman he loved and gazed deeply into her expectant eyes.

(“It was so romantic,” she recalled months later. “I felt like I was at Disneyland.”)

Then he spoke the words they both knew he would say.

“Cheryl, will you marry me?” he asked. “Again?”

The question was the answer to Cheryl Thurman’s prayers. So she said yes, again, and now the Anaheim couple are busy making preparations for their second wedding next month.

So much for the “irreconcilable differences” over which they separated in 1983 and divorced in 1986. Never mind the bitter arguments they had--the time she threw his clothes out on the sidewalk and changed the locks on the doors, the court battles over the child support he wouldn’t pay and the visits she wouldn’t allow. Forget that John Thurman was practically engaged to another woman less than a year before.

Lightning, it is said, never strikes in the same place twice. The same cannot be said about love. What can be said is that happy endings--and new beginnings--like the Thurmans’ don’t happen often. Couples who split up and marry each other again are a rarity, Orange County marriage counselors and divorce lawyers said.

And those who are successful in staying married the second time around are rarer still, the lawyers said.

The Thurmans, however, are eager to point out that, in many ways, they are hardly the same two people who exchanged vows in a quick Lake Tahoe ceremony 8 years ago. They’ve both recently become “born-again” Christians, and they said that change has made all the difference.

“John and I don’t understand what happened,” Cheryl said. “We only believe it.”

The same goes for their newfound religion. “Jesus doesn’t ask us to understand,” she said. “He only asks us to believe.”

The Thurmans, both 36, can’t talk about how they found love with each other again without talking about how they found salvation. It’s all part of the same story, they said. “What has happened to us is a testimony to the power of God,” Cheryl said.

The first time, it was August, 1980, when Cheryl, “out nightclubbing” with a couple of friends, spotted John across the room.

“I’m on the dance floor leaning over a counter and talking to the deejay, and all of a sudden these arms reach around me from behind,” John recalls. “I turned around and thought I really did go to heaven. It more or less went from there.”

“It was a whirlwind relationship,” Cheryl said. “One night, John told me, ‘I think I love you, and one day I’ll ask you to marry me.’

“ ‘Why don’t you ask me now?’ I said. We got married in Tahoe that Thanksgiving, and our daughter was born the following year.”

By then, John’s small business was growing rapidly. He was making--and they were spending--more and more money. “As he got more involved with his job, I got more involved with shopping,” Cheryl said.

“Instead of communicating, we were just getting further apart. There were times when we’d hardly ever talk at all. But as long as we were able to go where we wanted and buy what we wanted, we didn’t worry about it.

Then John’s business failed and “the bottom fell out,” Cheryl said. “And when the money stopped, we stopped.”

For the next two years, they seesawed back and forth. John moved out, then moved back in. They argued. They tried to work things out. John tried a couple of jobs, but he couldn’t find anything to match his previous income.

“We were really terrible to each other,” Cheryl said, turning to exchange an affectionate smile with her former and soon-to-be-again husband. “I nagged at him all the time. But all the criticizing, all the terrible things I did, did not make him different. And underlying all of it was still an emptiness for both of us. We weren’t really getting anywhere.”

“I had so many other things on my mind,” John said. “I didn’t take care of my family properly.”

In 1983, when their son was 7 months old, John moved out for the last time. By then, Cheryl said, “we were bitter enemies.”

“Getting back together was the furthest thing from my mind,” John said.

In 1986, about the time their divorce was final, John met and fell in love with another woman, also divorced and the mother of two children.

A year later, he had begun to think seriously of marriage again--but not to Cheryl. About the same time, Cheryl called him out of the blue.

“I told him I was ‘born again’ and asked him to forgive me,” Cheryl said. “Jesus says if you can’t forgive your enemies their trespasses, how do you expect the Lord God to forgive you yours?”

The next time he came over to pick up the children, Cheryl greeted him with an enthusiastic hug and kiss. Shocked, he froze, arms stiff at his sides, fists clenched.

“I knew in my heart that we hadn’t done everything that we should have to work things out,” Cheryl said. “I wanted him to come back; I wanted the children to have their own father.”

John wasn’t sure how to react at first. “Then I became more friendly to her,” he said.

“He couldn’t resist,” Cheryl said. “I was praying for him day and night.”

John said: “Finally I began to see that her transformation had literally become a part of her. It was not a game, not an act. And I knew if I chose to go my own way, she would eventually find someone to settle down with.

“In November, I was ‘born again’ too, and I had to make a decision. My heart was beginning to talk to me. The Holy Spirit was beginning to talk to me. And I knew, after several weeks, what direction I had to take. It was the most painful, most heartbreaking thing that I had to go through. Here I was, in love with another person. I had to decide if I could become a stepfather, or if I could see my children with a stepfather.

“I have always loved Cheryl. No matter how intense the hate became, there was always the love that I had for her in the back of my mind. So I made the decision to come back to my family. I love my kids so much that I would do anything to make them happy.

“But I didn’t come back because of the children. I came back because it was God’s will.”

The Thurmans are quick to say that remarriage is something they want too. “John and I didn’t say, ‘OK, God, we’re going to bite the bullet,’ ” Cheryl said. “We’re not suffering. This is a greater joy than we’ve ever felt. It goes beyond happiness.”

Patty Gum of Newport Beach went to see a divorce attorney after she moved out on her husband, Chuck, in 1985. “But I didn’t see any reason to rush into it,” she said.

By the time they married each other again in September, she still hadn’t bothered to file for divorce. But they just wouldn’t have felt married if they hadn’t had a second ceremony, they both said. “I thought it would be a good idea to recommit ourselves,” said Patty, 58.

The Gums married each other 17 years ago “on the quiet” at a perfunctory city hall ceremony in Las Vegas. “My best friend’s mother stood up with us in Vegas,” Patty said.

“We had a bottle of champagne, stopped at a casino and made one bet, and then we drove to the Apple Valley Inn and spent the night,” said Chuck, 67. “That was it. We didn’t have a honeymoon.”

The following Monday, they both returned to work at Buffums department store, which had a strict policy not only against employees marrying each other but against dating as well, according to Patty, who was the personnel manager at the Newport Beach store.

(They met when he applied for a transfer and she had to approve it. “I did,” she said with a mischievous smile. “I remember he came in and asked me how I felt about fraternizing with other employees. I said, ‘I don’t believe in it. Why do you ask?’ ” Their first date was a week later.)

A month after the wedding, Chuck changed jobs and Patty posted a note on the bulletin board announcing their marriage with a fictitious date.

Both Chuck and Patty had been married before. They had three daughters and a son between them, all in their early 20s. They both had been single for 11 years when they met.

“We just fell in love,” Patty said. “We found out that we had a great deal in common. We loved the beach, we liked golf.”

“She was a very classy lady,” Chuck said. “I remember telling her that the first time I saw her I wanted to leap across that desk and kiss her.”

They lived in Newport Beach then too. “We had a boat, and when we’d come home from work, we’d take the boat out with some chicken and a bottle of wine and spend the evening out in the bay,” Patty said. “I think we hit every buoy.”

Several years later they moved inland, something they both now say was a mistake. They were busy with work and family and whatever else came along, and there was no time or energy anymore for the romantic evenings of their early marriage.

“We just let too many things interfere with our lives, with what we really wanted to do,” Patty said.

“There was a lot of tension. Our arguments kept getting worse,” she said. “One day I got angry over something, and I just left.”

She stayed with a friend, then got a room by herself. All the while, “we were in constant touch by phone,” Chuck said. They still saw each other on holidays and at family get-togethers.

“During the time we were apart, we created our own lives,” Patty said. “It was like a vacation. A lot of people might not agree with me, but you have to have time to yourself.

“We’d gone through a great deal together,” she said. “We were burned out and blaming each other for everything. But we didn’t ever dislike each other. We just couldn’t live together. Then we found out we couldn’t live apart.”

While they were separated, both Chuck and Patty say they weren’t interested in anyone else.

“I wasn’t going to go to bars and chase women,” Chuck said. “When you get used to somebody, you know? I don’t think I wanted to break another woman in.”

Last year, Chuck moved to Anaheim from Lake Arrowhead, and “that was close enough that we couldn’t stay apart,” Patty said, and they both laugh.

After their second wedding, held on the beachfront lanai of the house Patty had rented back in Newport Beach, the Gums had six weeks together before Patty became ill. She had had cancer twice before she met Chuck. This time the doctors found lesions on her brain and lungs, and she has been undergoing chemotherapy and radiation since then.

“At our wedding we exchanged roses, our first gift to each other (in the new marriage),” Patty said. They had agreed to put a vase in a special place in the house, “and whenever we had a fight, one of us was supposed to put a red rose in it as a sign of peace,” Patty said.

They did have one minor argument, and when it was over “we just put a vase full of red (silk) roses up there and left them,” Chuck said. “Since then we’ve been fighting the cancer instead of each other.”

Chuck and Patty could look at their two years apart as lost time, but they don’t. “It was necessary,” Patty said. “I don’t think we’d have stayed together if we hadn’t separated.”