Gray Divorce: Higher standards, more opportunities, longer lives, women at work help explain the trend

Finally, the rise in female labor force participation over the past several decades offers women in particular a way out of marriage that was not as widely available in the past. This is another reason why gray divorce is increasing. At all ages, women are more likely than men to express dissatisfaction with their marriages and to initiate divorce. It is unlikely that women over 50 are more unhappy than in the past, but these women are less likely to be financially dependent on their husbands and more likely to have the resources to call it quits.

Gray divorce is a recent phenomenon and scholars are just beginning to investigate its antecedents and consequences. For the most part, factors traditionally associated with divorce also appear to be predictive of gray divorce. But there is one notable exception: education. As noted above, on average, education tends to be protective against divorce. As a proxy for socioeconomic status, it is indicative of financial security. Education facilitates economic security, which helps to stabilize marriages. Not surprisingly, many couples who get divorced point to disputes over money as the reason why they broke up. Having plenty of money means one less thing for couples to fight about.

But this linkage only holds for younger and middle aged adults. For older adults, the risk of divorce does not differ much by education level. A college degree does not provide protection against later life divorce. The older college graduate, even one in a first marriage, faces essentially the same divorce rate as the older high school graduate.

Perhaps the economic advantages that stabilized college graduates' marriages in the child-raising years now work in the opposite direction, making it financially possible for dissatisfied couples to split up, whereas those with fewer resources (i.e., the high school educated) feel compelled to stay together for financial reasons. Their careers are winding down, and they would not have time to recoup the economic losses often associated with divorce. Nor may they be as likely to have the savings cushion to minimize the financial shock.

Alternatively, this pattern simply may reflect the fact that for older adults, the level of financial resources one has is less tied to education level. It is younger cohorts for whom education level is closely linked to earnings (which is why so many young people are pursuing a college degree). The role of education for economic security differs across cohorts, and this has ramifications for how education is linked to the risk of divorce across the life course.

The consequences of a gray divorce are also likely to be different than those of early divorce. For individuals in their prime, people who are healthy and financially secure, divorce can bring a new lease on life. Spouses who felt tied down and constrained are now able to pursue their own goals, reinventing themselves in their third age.

At the other end of the spectrum, those without adequate economic resources or who are in poor health face a tremendous struggle following divorce. Now they must go it alone without the buffer of social and economic support that spouses provide. Older adults are unlikely to recoup financial losses associated with divorce, and this is particularly true for women who were out of the labor force for decades. A woman who divorces in her 20s and 30s may experience a financial loss, but she has time to improve her earnings power, often through increased education or longer work hours, and she also has a better chance of remarrying someone with higher income than her first husband. For older women, the time horizon is simply too short — they can’t spend 20 years in the labor force building up their savings.

Our research shows that, on average, gray divorceds have only 20 percent as much wealth as older married couples. Older divorceds are also disadvantaged relative to widoweds. The net wealth of those who were widowed after age 50 is more than twice as high as the net wealth of gray divorceds. In short, individuals who divorce later in life and remain single typically do not enjoy the economic cushion that marrieds and even widoweds experience. And Social Security payments do not close the gap — on average, gray divorceds can count on less than $14,000 per year from Social Security.

Today, one out of every four people experiencing divorce is over age 50. Nearly one in ten is 65 or older. This raises critical questions about how gray divorce is reshaping the aging experience in the US. Although for some older adults a gray divorce may be liberating, for others who are less advantaged it is a devastating experience with long-term negative consequences for their own lives and for society as a whole. It is essential that we investigate in more detail the distinctive dynamics of late life divorce, along with the factors that allow some adults, but not others, to successfully steer their marriages through the new terrain of aging in contemporary America.

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Gray Divorce: Higher standards, more opportunities, longer lives, women at work help explain the trend

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