The astonishing rise of gray divorce

From the outside, Rhonda Gipson-Willis and her husband were what some would refer to as relationship goals. They had the house. They had the kids. They had domestic equity: Gipson-Willis and her husband shared child-rearing and household responsibilities, she says. But beneath the surface, Gipson-Willis, 54, suspected she was never her husband’s priority. They got along perfectly, she says, but “I didn’t really feel like he was loving me at the capacity that I wanted to be loved and I was not loving him at the capacity in which I wanted to love someone else.”

They’d tried therapy a couple of times over the course of their marriage, and, at one point, Gipson-Willis asked her husband outright if he thought they’d be better off as friends. “And he responded ‘Absolutely,’” she says. Still, they stuck it out for a few more months.

It wasn’t until a three-week road trip in November 2020 when Gipson-Willis couldn’t ignore that nagging sensation any longer: This wasn’t how a once-in-a-lifetime vacation with your spouse should feel. “I’d even thought that we probably both would have enjoyed going on that trip more with a friend more than we did each other,” she says. Two days before their 25th anniversary, then-50-year-old Gipson-Willis suggested they separate. Her husband agreed.

To spend more than half of your life romantically involved with one person requires deep commitment and a healthy dose of patience. To walk away from a decades-long partnership in midlife (and beyond) is another gauntlet altogether. Is it possible to redesign your life in your 50s? 60s? 70s? Will you ever find love again? What about the financial hit? Who keeps the house? Who gets custody of the mutual friends? Still, these emotional and practical quandaries aren’t stopping Americans from leaving their marriages.

In fact, these separations are more common than ever before. Gray divorce — dissolutions of marriages occurring among adults older than 50 — doubled between 1990 and 2010, according to a 2022 study. These days, 36 percent of adults who get divorced in the US are 50 and older. Close to two-thirds of those separating in midlife had already been divorced at least once, according to the study’s lead author, Susan Brown, a sociology professor at Bowling Green State University. While divorce rates among younger groups remain higher, that gap is shrinking as older adults continue to split, Brown says. (There is limited data on same-sex marriages in the United States, so many studies focus solely on heterosexual pairings.)

Divorcing later in life has its unique challenges that younger couples don’t necessarily face, according to experts and the divorced people I spoke with who navigated this monumental later-in-life transition. When you’ve had decades to acquire wealth as a couple, splitting assets and retirement funds can be contentious. Living on your own for the first time in your adult life may be a difficult transition. Still, for some, freeing yourself of the pain of a dysfunctional marriage can outweigh any of the short-term struggles.

The story of gray divorce is just one piece of broader social trends in the US.

Prior to the 1970s, couples needed to justify their divorces and show proof of infidelity, abuse, or abandonment. In 1969, California became the first state to adopt no-fault divorces, where spouses didn’t need a reason or evidence of wrongdoing to split. Over the ensuing decades, every state passed a version of no-fault divorce laws.

Once divorces were easier to get, the divorce rate spiked: For every 1,000 marriages, nearly 23 ended in divorce in the early 1980s (despite headlines that nearly half of marriages end in divorce, that statistic was a miscalculation. While the divorce rate did indeed double between 1966 and 1976, 50 percent of couples who married during a given year did not divorce).

“In the 1980s after no-fault divorce was legalized, there were all these unhappy marriages that all started getting divorced all at once,” says Arielle Kuperberg, associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

At the same time, women were increasingly entering the workforce and able to earn their own living, no longer dependent on their husbands’ income. “The generation of women who are reaching their 60s and 70s now,” Kuperberg says, “is the generation that grew up as, really, the first generation able to enter high-paying professional jobs that put them on equal footing, in some cases, with their husbands. So that makes it easier to get divorced.” It’s worth noting that after the initial boom, the overall divorce rate has since settled back down to levels last seen in the 1970s — about 15 per 1,000 marriages.

Nevertheless, the stigma of divorce has softened over time, empowering more people to end their marriages without fear of social ostracization. For American adults, particularly women, who came of age during these social shifts (and may have even separated once before) divorce can seem like a no-brainer — a logical, emotional, and socially accepted means of charting your own happiness. “Marriage is now viewed as less compulsory,” Brown says. “People don’t feel like they have to stay married anymore.”

Older adults leave their marriages for the same reasons younger ones do — with some exceptions. That’s what Jocelyn Elise Crowley, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University, found in interviews with dozens of gray divorcees.

Men reported ending their marriages either because they grew apart from their spouse, their spouse cheated, the two differed in financial views, their spouse’s mental health issues, or they had disagreements about their children, Crowley found. Women respondents’ top motivators for divorce included cheating, their spouse’s pornography or alcohol addiction, emotional abuse, growing apart, and their spouse’s mental health issues.

Contrary to her original hunch, older adults weren’t divorcing for personal fulfillment — the notion that their spouse was holding them back from living their best life — says Crowley, who published her findings in the 2018 book Gray Divorce: What We Lose and Gain From Mid-Life Splits. “The big surprise were these classic reasons for getting divorced that have been documented in the literature for years for people in their 20s, 30s and 40s,” she says.

After 33 years of marriage, Suzy Brown, 77, discovered her husband’s affair with a coworker. The suspicious behaviors — he’d go into work early or leave in the middle of the day to run errands — accumulated until Brown got ahold of her husband’s phone records and saw just how often he was calling the woman. Despite the betrayal, Brown wanted to work things out, so the couple went to therapy for three years. Still, Brown’s husband was unable to end the affair. Devastated, Brown filed for divorce at 53. “My heart just hurt,” Brown says. “Songs on the radio would make me cry.”

“You thought things were going to be completely different,” Brown says, “and now you’re having to recreate yourself and figure out who you are now and what you want to do with your time left on planet earth.” She reinvented herself completely: She ditched her career in marketing and advertising and founded a support group, Midlife Divorce Recovery, as a way to help herself get through the transition. Through the group, Brown eventually developed a program for coping with gray divorce.

Even if the reasons for splitting aren’t altogether novel, the milestones of midlife may push couples to the brink. Once they no longer have to deal with the daily pressures of child-rearing, empty nesters naturally have more time to focus on their spouses. “These couples,” Crowley says, “are basically staring at each other and saying, ‘What is the value of this marriage? What am I getting out of it? What are the problems in this marriage?’” This discontent may have been growing for years, but the distraction of parenting — or the pressure to stay together because of the kids — may have led couples to power through.

Similarly, come retirement, people may question their identities and how they spend their time, says Lisa Neff, a professor in the department of human development and family sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Without a clearly defined professional role or office to escape to, retirees may feel unsure of how they relate to their spouse, or if they even want to.

Divvying up finances in a gray divorce can be particularly complex, after so many years of combining assets. Just because women are financially independent doesn’t mean that they don’t take a hit.

In her research, Brown found older women who divorce see their household income drop by 45 percent, compared to just 21 percen for men. Women only rebound from this loss of income if they repartner, Brown says. This is because older divorcees who are nearing or in retirement have limited economic opportunities compared to younger divorcees who are earlier in their careers and have more time to make up earnings and seek out higher-paying roles.

Additionally, women are more likely to put their careers on the backburner to raise children, and earn less than men over the course of their lives. As a result, they also may not have been able to contribute as much to retirement savings compared to their husbands, Crowley says. When women take time off to care for their families, it has implications for their Social Security retirement benefits.

“Every year you’re out of the workforce, that gets entered into the complex Social Security formula for benefits as a zero — that you basically did nothing that year, even though you were raising your children,” Crowley says. “As you might imagine, when women emerge from a gray divorce, they are hammered in comparison to men.”

Splitting up wealth and assets acquired over decades can also come at a higher cost to both partners, compared to younger couples who perhaps don’t own homes and aren’t retired. Couples who worked their whole lives to build a nest egg tend to split it 50/50, Brown, the researcher, says. As a result, both men and women experience a 50 percent loss in wealth and do not recover those losses, Brown’s research found.

The first 25 years of Randy’s marriage to his wife were happy, the former firefighter says. But a four-year sexual dry spell drove a wedge between the couple. By the end, he and his wife never spent more than a few minutes at a time in the same room. Their divorce was finalized when he was 59. Randy’s wife didn’t work during their 31-year marriage, and she received 45 percent of his pension and retirement savings, he says. (Divorcees can expect, by law, to receive half of their ex’s pension.)

Aside from divvying up Randy’s pension and retirement, property that had been in Randy’s family for generations was also included in the divorce settlement — although he was eventually able to sell the previous home they shared and move into his other property. He had to adjust his financial expectations for retirement and budget more than he originally anticipated, he says, but no amount of money can outweigh his independence. “Would it be worth getting back together just to have a good bit of my pension money back?” Randy, now 67, says. “Hell no.”

If women bear the brunt of the economic challenges of gray divorce, men shoulder the social consequences. Mutual friends of the couple and adult children tend to side with the women, Crowley says. During their marriages, men often defer to their wives for social planning, so they may be out of practice when it comes to coordinating plans with friends and family on their own.

Such was the case for Michael, whose wife took the reins of planning their social life when the two were married. Since getting divorced at 58, Michael, who asked to use a pseudonym to speak freely, has struggled for connection since he works remotely. The condo Michael rents by himself is so quiet — his three adult kids live on their own — he jokes how he’d like to hire someone to putter around and make some noise.

A salve for his isolation are the multiple support groups for divorced men he’s since joined. “I got plugged in with three different [groups] that I was doing every week with guys that were going through, or had been through, what I was going through, which was super important,” Michael, now 59, says. “If I hadn’t done that, it could have been bad, right? Imagine you take everything other than a person’s job away from them.”

A desire to be taken care of, socially and otherwise, drives more men to remarry at higher rates than women. Women, on the other hand, are more focused on their independence following a gray divorce, Brown says. “They have a ‘been there, done that’ attitude,” she says, “They’ve already reared their children, [taken] care of one husband, and now it’s their turn.” Gipson-Willis, for instance, has little interest in remarrying and instead lives with one of her best friends. “I was dating a guy recently,” she says, “and he was talking about wanting to be married in a year, and I was like, ‘Sir, you cannot disrupt this.’”

The cliche that time heals all wounds holds especially true for gray divorce — even if time feels in short supply.

While younger divorcees may adjust to their new life circumstances within one to two years, Brown found people over the age of 50 take up to four years. “Gray divorce is associated with an increase in depressive symptoms,” she says, “and that tends to persist for about four years after a divorce.” Understanding the emotional and practical ramifications of the split could make the transition less disruptive, she says.

In the early days of divorce, Suzy Brown, the founder of Midlife Divorce Recovery, suggests focusing on concrete actions, like getting out of bed, eating, and moving your body. It’s normal to grieve the loss of an established life, routine, and relationship, Crowley says. Simply making it through the day is an achievement in itself.

Avoid involving your adult children or other family members in the split, says family therapist Kathryn Smerling, author of the upcoming book, Learning to Play Again: Rediscovering Our Early Selves to Become Better Adults. Parents sometimes vent to their children about their ex, putting them in a tough position. Try to be amicable to prevent any awkward or contentious moments at family holidays and grandchildren’s birthday parties, Smerling says. If you’re not at that point yet, you may want to divide special occasions with your ex: Maybe you see the kids and grandchildren on Thanksgiving and your ex hosts them for Christmas.

Maintaining social connections is crucial across a lifespan, but for older divorcees who may be spending more time in solitude, it’s especially important. Neff, the University of Texas professor, suggests getting involved in volunteer organizations or activities where you can interact with others. Prioritize friendships and relationships with family, too.

Not all consequences of gray divorce are inherently bleak. Many of Crowley’s interviewees were happy they split, saying independence and freedom they gained, as well as having a chance to start over, were the best aspects of their divorces. And because so many gray divorcees had been previously married before, the experience isn’t altogether novel, Brown says: They know they’ll survive and eventually find love again.

John, a retired utility worker who asked to use a pseudonym to discuss his divorce, is open to dating again, but he’s not sure he knows how. The last time the 68-year-old asked a woman, his ex-wife, out was in high school, where they met when he was 16. After years of mental health struggles and the death of her parents, John says his ex-wife cheated. Infidelity was a betrayal he couldn’t overlook, so John asked for a divorce after nearly 42 years of marriage.

It pains him to think about what his ex did, John says, but for his own peace of mind, he forgave her, even as he decided they could no longer be married. It’s the only way he can start to move on. “The last thing I want to do is hold a grudge and just take more years off my life,” he says, “because this is just eating me up inside. So I gotta let it go. I gotta forgive.”