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Seniors not waiting 'til death do them part
More and more women in golden years seek divorces
 
Anne Marie Owens
National Post

This is the new face of divorce: She is a woman in her eighties, married for a half-century, a devoted, seemingly contented wife who one day decides she has had enough.

There is no secret affair, no mystery lover, no harbouring of a lifetime of abuse or ill-treatment that precipitates the divorce. Rather, the octogenarian divorcee abandons the marriage because she "could not go on living the same old life, in the same old rut, with the same old boring person."

For all the fuss that is made about the decline in marriage rates among the young and the postponement of marriage until ever-older ages, there is an equally significant trend on the demographic flip side: Late-life divorce.

"One woman had been married for 53 years, had never worked outside her marriage, had no idea of how she would survive financially and had just survived an organ transplant," says Deirdre Bair, the author of a new book on the topic.

"She told me, 'I don't know how many years I have left; I just know I don't want to live them with him.' "

Her book, Calling It Quits: Late-Life Divorce and Starting Over, is drawn from interviews with nearly 400 ex-wives, ex-husbands and their adult children.

They reveal some surprising realities of the recent phenomenon, including how more and more women are initiating these divorces, often leaving their husbands completely blindsided.

The interviews also reveal how for both sexes, these splits are motivated less frequently by a desire to trade in the older for younger models, as they are by such intangibles as "freedom," or "more control" over their lives.

"I thought infidelity was the big one, but I think it's really lack of communication," says Ms. Bair. "There's a quote from Lillian Hellman: 'People change and forget to tell each other.' That's what's happening -- people just grow apart."

This may seem like odd terrain for the literary journalist, whose biographies of Anais Nin, Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung have garnered awards and much critical praise -- until she reveals that she had a late-life divorce.

When her marriage of 43 years ended several years ago, she found that everyone wanted to share their own stories of late life divorce. Her American agent said these late divorces were an epidemic among New York's chattering classes; her European agent said the epidemic was rampant in France and Germany.

She decided to write the book after spotting an article in what seemed a most unlikely source for reportage on a groundbreaking societal shift, the magazine of the American Association for Retired Persons, which had a story about "The New Divorce," based on a survey of about 1,200 people aged 40 to 79, all of whom divorced between the ages of 40 and 60.

The cliche of wealthy older men getting divorced for younger trophy wives was of little interest to Ms. Bair, who instead was intrigued by the older men and women who leave marriages that seem contented, financially secure and happy, and who leave not knowing what the future holds.

"What this says is that it's possible for men and women to live in ways other than in relationships where they are dependent," she said in an interview. "This is such a serious cultural shift. I'm

telling stories in this book, which I hope are going to be the fodder for serious exploration."

It is a trend driven by the fact that older people are healthier, wealthier and more secure overall than previous generations, but it also reflects a major attitudinal shift about the necessity of marriage.

More women in America are now living without a husband than with one, in what experts say is likely the first time, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times this week.

In 2005, 51% of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35% in 1950 and 49% in 2000.

The analysis suggests that marrying later, opting for cohabitation over marriage, and delaying remarriage after divorce or avoiding it entirely all contribute to this societal shift.

Ms. Bair, who says her book is neither "a sociological survey nor scientific treatise," says the way people are conducting their lives in terms of relationships belies all the fuss that typically focuses on how to fix the marriage crisis.

"The experiences say that we, as a society, are going down one pathway, while religion, government, scholars are going down another pathway, which is focused on 'What can we do to prop up marriage?' " she said.

"This is heading for a confrontation. One says, 'Till death do us part,' but all of this says, 'No, we don't have to stay in it till the end.' "

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