The Wolf – I agree with your post. I wasn’t coming to contradict what you wrote and I didn’t say that both can’t be successful. In fact, I was maskim to that. I was simply raising an additional point, and I was wondering if both marriages can be equally successful. It was meant purely as an academic question.
But now that you mention it, it does have practical ramifications. I am at an age where marrying a widower is a very real possibility and quite possibly the best possibility, and that MAY be something to keep in mind when marrying a widower. I have often thought about the fact that the tafkid of a wife married to a widower may be a slightly different tafkid than someone who is married to someone who was never married before or someone divorced. Likewise, the tafkid of someone married to someone divorced with kids is different. For that matter, a marriage between two older singles is probably somewhat different than the marriage of two young people.