Gray Divorce
There are a lot of interesting age-related trends happening around the world right now (Gen Z work expectations, low fertility rates in typically baby-having demographics, the clash between Boomer and Millennial and Gen Z and Gen Alpha online content, etc), but one that I’ve been thinking about a lot, of late, is called “gray divorce.”
This term refers to a trend of folks getting divorced at far older ages than was previously common, and this has become so typical in older Americans in particular that the previous peak living-alone age demographic in the US—35-64 year-olds—was surpassed in 2022 by the 65-years-plus demo.
That includes a smaller but still defined uptick in solo-living amongst the 75+ age demographic, and a substantial increase in people ages 65-74.
Much of this divorce trend (imperfectly captured by those living-along numbers, but also seen in divorce filings and other such data) can probably be attributed to steadily changing age- and separation-related norms across the US.
Researchers have found that the divorce rate in the country doubled from 1990 to 2010 (a remarkable figure) and it's been posited that in addition to a general shift in perception of what it means to get divorced—it's no longer broadly perceived as an indication of failure, nor is it generally considered to be a mark of loose morals or ungodliness—many people are seeing the later decades of their lives as periods in which they can still grow, change, do things, and basically just live, and not necessarily with anyone else (or not with the someone else’s they’ve been living with up till that point).
Newer data suggests some of the recent uptick in divorces is the consequence of what many of us learned about ourselves the COVID-19 pandemic: people were forced to spend more, different, and unpredictable periods with their spouses, illuminating misalignments and amplifying issues, and this simultaneously raised questions about how they want to spend the rest of their lives—lives that in previous generations may have been defined by rest homes, but which today might mean days filled with hobbies, friends, travel, and other sorts of explorations.
To some, these dusk-years of our lives are today more perceptually valuable than they would have seemed to previous generations, before the advent of modern medicine, technologies, and systems that allow folks of elevated age to still do stuff, to be active components of their communities, and to make choices that are not informed primarily or completely by history, tradition, or existing ways of doing things.
(Not everyone in previous generations were shaped by those things, either, of course, but those who were not tended to be the exceptions for a variety of reasons, and we’re talking about broad, general trendlines here, not individual experiences.)
There are important questions to be asked about how this might influence the way people live and what they prioritize, but also how it could impact systems and infrastructure like social safety nets, many of which were built with older couples in mind, not individuals (and funded based on that assumed norm, too).
I personally tend to think that divorces (and other sorts of relationship endings or recalibrations) can be tragic and liberating in equal measure; oftentimes they're a bit of both.
What this trend suggests to me is that people in older age demographics are feeling more empowered to make decisions based on who they are today and who they want to become in the future, rather than being held back by laws, traditions, ideologies, or norms that would have previously incentivized them to stay the course, even if the paths they were following were imperfect, misaligned, or even harmful or abusive in some way.
This trend won't be ideal or even welcome to everyone, especially those who are being left by a spouse that wants to pursue other, different, more them-shaped things.
That said, even forced change can be beneficial, even if it doesn't immediately seem that way.
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