Why boomers are divorcing

The phenomenon has caught the attention of social scientists and researchers who study divorce trends. Experts say there are a number of reasons for the rising divorce rate. Researchers point out that every married couple is different, and broad explanations may not apply to every situation, but several reasons have emerged to explain why the divorce rate among baby boomers continues to climb. First, experts say modern attitudes about divorce have changed significantly from the s and s, when many baby boomers got married.

Today, there is less of a stigma associated with divorce. Modern individuals are more inclined to pursue their personal happiness, which can sometimes mean leaving a difficult or unsuccessful marriage.

For women, financial insecurity can be a reason for staying in an unhappy marriage. In previous decades, women were less likely to work outside the home. As a result, they were often wholly dependent on their husbands for financial security. In , for example, just 33 percent of women participated in the U. In , that number had increased to 57 percent. Because more women are participating in the workforce, more women now have the financial autonomy they need to survive on their own.

Additionally, older women may be more likely to be well-established in their jobs. If they have been working for a few decades, they may have sufficient income to be able to decide to leave their marriages. Margaret, 56 years old and married for 25 years, worked in the same restaurant business as her husband.

He did not enjoy the responsibility of the daily grind and reacted by constantly screaming at her. That was a common verbiage of his, and I finally decided that I guess I [had] to give [him his] life back. Instead, this mid-life population takes splitting up very seriously and, more often than not, considers whether their promised binding responsibilities to each other have been violated when they file for divorce.

And as their numbers continue to climb upward, soon we will all be saying to those seeking a divorce after we know why you did it; welcome to the club. Computing and artificial intelligence. Algorithms associating appearance and criminality have a dark past.

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Those who do get hitched are likelier to stay together. Meanwhile, baby boomers — who caused the divorce rate to surge starting in the s — are continuing to divorce at higher rates as they age. Even if the rate of grey divorce stays the same, more than , Americans will be divorcing each year by , Brown and her colleague I-Fen Lin estimate.

The best way to recover from divorce, research suggests, is to find a new spouse or partner. After a grey divorce, it takes about four years for depression to return to earlier levels, the Bowling Green study shows. But remarrying or re-partnering will end depression almost immediately. Finding someone else can also restore your financial situation.

In a paper published in January in the journal Demography, Brown and other researchers estimate that about 22 per cent of women and 37 per cent of men re-partner in the decade after a grey divorce.

Women have a harder time for a couple of reasons. They live longer than men, who tend to look for female partners significantly younger than they are.

As heterosexual women age, therefore, the pool of possible partners shrinks. Then again, some women may prefer to stay single. Several studies have shown that older women often enjoy their independence and are less interested than men in re-partnering. Still, the economic effects of grey divorce on women can be brutal.

Grey-divorced women age 63 and older face a poverty rate of In the U. Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the Financial Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

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