AZ – “2) Encourage repudiation and in fact there are many girls who go that route once they hit the high 20’s/30’s (not that this really help anything, because the women of those first marriages, divorces or widows end up even more stuck since the men who have previously been married have the opportunity to look for women who have never been married instead of women who have been married)”
Yes, I agree with this one. I actually alluded to it in the topic of “Who wants to be a Tzaddakes like Rus”.
Your misgivings are not the reality. There are two types of second marriages one is middle age and one is older age. The older age people tend to marry usually because they don’t want to be alone in their older years. These aren’t interested in more kids as usually both have from previous (even if biologically it’s possible). The second type are the people in the middle age. Unfortunately the women don’t always want to get remarried, some because they are busy raising their kids or some because they went OTD. So there are more men in this class looking for marriage than women.
“in fact there are many girls who go that route once they hit the high 20’s/30’s”
This I disagree with. Maybe there are a few, but definitely not many. If there were many -this class wouldn’t have problems with Shidduchim. The fact that there are so few is because I believe it’s a strong stigma not to marry older guys esp. those whom are divorced! So now we have two stigmas to contend with -this and marrying s/o your own age!