Adventures In Love

For 30 years he had always been a good father, husband, lover and friend and today he looked across the table into her eyes and instead of remarking on how wonderful their lives were and how happy he was, he said quietly but forcefully, “I am leaving you. I don’t love you anymore. I want a divorce.” She blinked in confusion and wondered if she had hallucinated. She leaned forward and attempted to force her lips to say, “Excuse me” but before she could get it out, he repeated himself this time louder: “I am leaving you. I don’t love you anymore. I want a divorce.” She looked into his eyes. They revealed nothing. His face was stone. Wait. He meant this. He was serious. She had heard him correctly. Like it had just appeared she saw his weekender at the door. He slowly rose from the table and without another word or a backwards glance, strode out of the door of the home they bought together 25 years ago. Her breath caught in her throat as she was smacked with the realization that her entire life just fell to pieces. She had planned on retirement with him. They had kids in college. Their oldest was trying for a baby. They were to be grandparents soon. She sat like a stone: numb and lifeless. Hours must have passed. The house they had raised a family in was empty. The life they had worked to build together was gone. Tears begin to stream down her face and her pain reverberated through the empty rooms. She didn’t know if she’d ever stop crying or if she could ever get out of that chair. The love of her life was…..gone.
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In researching this piece, I found numerous women who have posted messages on message boards who tell a similar story. Many have never worked outside of the home and are for all intensive purposes, helpless. These women sacrificed careers for family. They had never saved for retirement or even gave it a second thought. They built their lives around their families. Now, their kids are grown and just when they thought it was now time to rekindle the flame that smoldered for the last 30 years, their devoted husbands walk out on them. They want to know why. They thought everything with their husbands was in perfect working order. They thought their marriages were solid. They were the ones that younger women sought for advice on how to maintain marital bliss and they had given it freely. These women often remark, “Sure, there was no passion but we had each other.” They are surprised and devastated. They had no idea that he felt this way. They had no idea he wasn’t happy. He never seemed anything other than content. Yes, maybe the romance and excitement had waned but isn’t this what happens when you add kids, work and the stress of juggling finances to any marriage? Were they not just like millions of other couples entering their third stage? Weren’t they….happy?

Divorce after 30 years of marriage, also known as a grey divorce, has been on the uptick in the Western world and is such a rare event that few have bothered to study it. Some researchers state that these grey divorces of those aged 65 and over have increased to 10% in 2001. Overwhelmingly, the majority of divorces occur within the first 8 years of marriage. These are often the young struggling divorced mothers that we hear about and read about in national reports concerning the overworked and underpaid who are worried about their futures. No one thinks about the 55-65 year old woman with grown newly independent children and how a divorce after 30+ years can devastate her life: these women lose their life partners and their financial security and cannot count on their energetic youth to help them spring back.
Many therapists cite a meltdown or a midlife crisis as the cause of these events. What else can lead these otherwise sane men to abandon their wives without the slightest indication of his unhappiness? Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family studies at Evergreen State University and author of "Marriage, A History," has a very different answer; she says that couples breaking up after 20 to 30 years together are becoming increasingly common. "In the past, even if a marriage was unhappy, couples stayed together. What else could you do?" Coontz said. "The idea that you could meet another person at this stage was totally foreign. But now, people in their 50s and 60s are healthier, can look forward to another 25 to 35 years of life … and have more options, including a much higher chance of meeting a new partner." Although the chances of meeting another partner have increased overtime, there is a wide gap between the remarriage rates of men and women with women being much less likely to remarry than men.
Personally, I do not buy any of the simplistic assertions that we are living longer and that men are having a crisis of sorts that cause men to walk out on their families. Actually, according to a survey from the AARP, more often than not, the women are initiating the divorce, though this is not what is reflected in the current media reports of grey divorces. Time and time again, we are reading that these women are claiming that they had no idea anything was wrong. They were under the impression that their lives were the picture of domestic felicity. In many cases, the comfortable lives they were living were largely for the comfort and happiness of these women and the children. We are seeing that comfort and happiness for men and women tend to mean two completely different things. In her world, nothing was wrong and in his, everything was and her happiness blinded her to this fact as often happens in relationships. Many of these men are yearning to recapture the sense of adventure and exploration that they gave up for marriage and children. We see these men as walking out on their families when they are really waling into a life not marked by the discontents of civilization that say they must be complacent with a life that consists of little more than going to work and coming home to a Sam Adams and a Red Sox game and a “honey do” list.
What men seek when they leave their wives after 30 years is a new beginning and a sense of adventure. They are yearning to blossom out of the mundane lives they’ve lived for the last several decades in order to explore the world and rid themselves of tireless familial obligations more biologically suited for the feminine.
Wives should encourage their husband to go and explore before it’s too late. Instead of yet another weekend with her mother, she should send him off on his annual trip with his college buddies to go fishing or camping. Wives should encourage his golf outings and other hobbies that make him feel like he can escape the reality of ordinary family life. Wives, if you can get him away from the house without a wife and the kids a couple times a year and encourage his hobbies (even if they are slightly dangerous), you may be able to prevent one of those late evening conversations that mean the end of your 30-year marriage.
Many will point to Al and Tipper Gore’s recent announcement of divorce as being completely antithetical to my argument: here is a man who lived a life full of adventure. He has been a senator, vice president, presidential candidate and is currently the world spokesman on the all things environmental. What many pundits will admit is that Gore could have run again in 2004 and defeated his nemesis, George W. Bush. Gore could have also run in 2008 and been the anointed one and Barack Obama still would have been the senator from Illinois, but he didn’t. He stated that Tipper could not deal with another campaign and his family wanted him to spend more time at home.
Presidential candidates will admit that longing to be being president, once in your mind is an itch that does not stop until you are six feet under. Who knows if Gore would have been a great president? What he knows is that he was elected once to the presidency and there is a better than average chance he could have done it again, but for his wife. Now that Tipper is home alone, I wonder if she thinks she would have been better served letting the man fulfill his dream of trying to change the world rather than keeping him at home civilized and discontent.