This piece was originally published in the UK National Innovation Centre on Ageing’ Curious Life magazine.
There is a lot of talk of what our longer, 100-year lives will do to our careers. A lot less about what they will do to our couples. While the management literature and consulting worlds are alive with the idea of multiple careers, lifelong learning and repeated re-invention, the world of love is… silent. But how many of us, in our innocent 20s, knew we were signing up to marriages that would last 70 years or more? Would we even have understood, at that time, what that meant and who we would become? If we were more longevity literate would we be more relationally modest – or mobile?
The data is beginning to tell its own story. Divorce overall has been falling for decades, at least among the educated. But one exception is the increased rate of divorce among people over age 50. It’s doubled since 1990 and is predicted to triple by 2030. There are enough of these divorces now that they’ve been given a variety of more or less colourful names depending on your degree of optimism about the result: ‘grey divorce’ for some, ‘silver splicers’ for others.
I’m one of those who quit at 50, after a solid 22-year run. Contrary to the popular mythology of male midlife crises, it’s mostly women walking out the door. I wrote a book exploring the phenomenon and its aftermath, called Late Love: Mating in Maturity. It was, by far, the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Looking back a dozen years on, it was also the wisest.
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