Calling It Quits; Late-Life Divorce and Starting Over Part III

I asked all the respondents the usual questions about how long the marriage had lasted and what role each partner played within it. Then I let them tell me how and why they came to believe divorce was their only option. I also asked about life after divorce and whether or not it had turned out to be what they hoped for. In general, my findings supported the AARP survey in that the greater percentage of divorces among the long-married are initiated by women. Most of them stressed the positive and told me they were "pleased, "satisfied,' or "downright happy" with their lives. The men, many of whom called themselves "the dumped," "the duped," or "the abandoned,' are for the most part learning "to adjust, "to accommodate," "to get along.'

One man who coped better than most is the eighty-three-year-old whose wife of fifty-three years tossed him out. Calling her the "dumper and himself the "dumpee,' he decided that, having had a woman look after him all his life, he needed to find a new one. He remembered how the cruises he had taken as a married man were filled with single women, all seemingly on the lookout for a new man. It took three cruises, all of which "exhausted' him (he said euphemistically), until he found "a good-looking sixty-year-old who doesn't mind doing my laundry. His ex-wife says she is happy for him, as she fills her days with part-time volunteer work, plays bridge with friends, and dances in the evening with men her age whom she meets in church groups and at senior centers. What she likes best about her single life is that she has male companionship when she wants it but at the end of the evening she goes home to her own bed and they depart for theirs. "I'll never pickup a mans socks again,' she vows.

Divorce is different for the rich and famous. Here I found the largest categories of men who initiated divorce and women who are sad and sometimes angry because their husbands have left them for "trophy wives." A Jungian analyst told me she describes these men as afflicted with "CEO-itis. All their lives they have been taken care of by wives, secretaries, and various assistants who fulfill their every need and desire. They are imbued with a sense of entitlement, that they can have and should be given everything they want and as soon as they want it. An English man described himself as a "serial marryer,' who likes his wives in their twenties and wants to dump them as soon as they reach thirty because "they get broody and want babies.' That, he said, would interrupt their concentration on him. Another told me to think of a man like himself (chief financial officer of an international corporation* in a way that his several wives had never accepted, as a "prize stud bull." It was his "obligation to service as many cows" as he could.

Throughout the book, I have used two different forms to tell the stories. One is the composite, in which I create a fictional person to stand for the cluster of persons whose stories are so similar that one can almost stand for them all. The second is the case study, where one couple's experience either provides a blueprint for what causes a marriage to end or else is so unusual that it needs to be told separately. Because I promised everyone who talked to me confidentiality, I have disguised their identities by changing their names and sometimes their professions and places of residence. All the information contained in this book is the truth as they told it to me, but I have created fictional personae to protect their privacy.

I don t know how many answers I've provided to the question of why there is so much late divorce throughout the world, but I have certainly raised a lot of questions. There are the obvious reasons, such as the fact that people are living longer and healthier lives and many have more disposable income. It is only natural that they change and even more natural that they don t always change at the same time as their spouse: he may be ready for retirement and she may be deeply involved with a career or hobby, she may want to move to a retirement community and he might not want to leave the old neighborhood. One or the other becomes bored or disenchanted with the old, wrinkled person sitting across the dinner table and might want someone new and exciting.

Margaret Mead thought every woman needs three husbands: one for youthful sex, one for security as she raises her children, and one for the joyful companionship of old age. Perhaps this is what people want today and why so much divorce is happening. The feminist revolution that started in the 1970s got women out of the kitchen and into the workforce, where they learned to be self-sufficient and discovered that they liked it. There are still many women today who are financially dependent on the man they married a long time ago, but it is surprising how many of them are willing to risk the uncertainty of life on their own just to get away from the "control" (another big word often cited in divorces) their husbands exerted.

I use the phrase "social earthquake' to describe what is happening today It was coined by the revered American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton to describe a sensational adultery scandal of her time that led to a late-nineteenth-century divorce, and it remains resonant here in the twenty-first. Our contemporaries have tried to name the phenomenon; British writer Margaret Drabble deems life after divorce "the Third Age. Drabbles heroine thinks, in the novel The Seven Sisters, "Our dependents have died or matured. For good or ill, we are free."

A woman in New Zealand put it more bluntly when she told a newspaper interviewer that she looked at her husband one day after her children had left home and thought, "I don't want to be here. I don't need you, and I really don't like you.

Could that be the simplest and most direct answer to all the questions about late-life divorce? We need to find out, and I hope this book will be a good way to get the dialogue going.