When you marry someone with children with children from a previous marriage, you take on a relationship not mentioned in your wedding vows. You have a person to be considered in your marriage that, most likely, wasn’t part of your wedding and marriage plans. That person is the ex.

The new stepmother or stepfather will often claim, “Oh, I didn’t marry the ex; I don’t plan on having a relationship with him or her.” I’ve got news. You do have a relationship. It may be an avoidant relationship, an unacknowledged relationship or a poor relationship—but you have a relationship. Your relationship affects your stepchild or children and affects your spouse. Your relationship with the ex, affects your marriage.

Now that’s depressing, you may be thinking. Worry not. You have a choice in how you deal with the ex. The question is, can you resist the natural “defensive” mode that second wives and husbands are sucked before they realize what’s happened. Yes, it’s natural to feel competitive. We’re not designed biologically to share our mates. Thus, the temptation is to spend time and energy in our second marriage convincing our new spouse—and sometimes others—that he or she is better off married to us than to the ex. We don’t need to do this. Also, this approach as a way to get comfortable in marriage will eventually backfire.

Strategy for Stepparenting with Style: Resist the urge to criticize the ex. Your spouse knows the ex has faults. Your spouse knows the ex wasn’t and isn’t perfect. They are not married anymore and they are not ever going to be married again. Not ever. Make your marriage great. Learn to say, “Well, I don’t know what I’d do in her (his) situation,” and let your spouse respond.

Strategy for Stepparenting with Style: Let your spouse deal with the ex the way he or she wants to deal with him or her. Every new wife or husband is tempted to criticize how the spouse deals with the ex. The tendency to believe the ex is “manipulative” seems so common as to be a reflex. Resist this position. If you take the role of telling your spouse how to deal with his ex, guess who’s now at odds? Yes, you and your spouse. When you call the “ex” awful names, what your spouse hears is that he or she must really be stupid to have been married to the horrible person you are describing. Your spouse is no longer spending energy figuring out how to make things comfortable with the ex; your spouse is now spending energy arguing with you.

There are reasons why stepparenting is hard. One of those reasons is that as a stepparent, to be effective, we must work hard and practice actions that are opposite of what our anxiety is telling us to do. Stepparenting with Style isn’t for sissies. It’s strategies that work.