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Musings on divorce after a long marriage — 56 Comments

1. neo, my gut, as well as a lot of Lileks’ regular commenters guts, suggests his wife may have found a “perfect” stranger. She’s big into playing a lot of tennis and James does not play. More than one commenter has stated their spouse’s tennis habit led to finding a partner on more than the court.

   But I have no idea and I feel a little scummy even speculating about a woman I’ve never met that I only know through a blog.

2. neo,

   I have no doubt the second reason you give (perfect stranger) is as common, or more common than the first (empty nest). I’ve certainly seen it myself in more than one marriage. It always surprises me that someone would have an affair in their 50s or 60s, unless that had also been their motus operandi in their youth.

   First, it seems grossly unfair, especially when a man does it. My wife was gorgeous in her youth and she still looks amazing at her age, but neither one of us is as attractive as our younger selves. It seems very cruel of a man to avail himself of an attractive woman through her 20s, 30s and 40s and then abandon her when she is less attractive to new suitors. Especially if she has born children!

   Second, being involved with a younger woman sounds like torture to me. I loved my wife when she was in her 20s, but I was in my 20s also. I don’t think I could sit through listening to a 25 year old woman talk through an entire meal no matter what awaited after dessert. I often tease my single friends dating younger woman; “What do you talk about? Pop music? YouTube influencers?”

   Maybe some people panic as they age and think bonding with someone new, especially someone younger, will be like an elixir of youth? Don’t they know that new person will also need money, shelter, medical care? That new person has family members, siblings and friends you’ll have to listen to, and visit.

3. or at least thinks that he or she has found someone else

   Reminds me of lunch many years ago with several ex Green Berets. One of them, a cancer researcher, had divorced his wife and married a women he met at a hospital in Texas. Out of nowhere, he says “There should be a law against divorce.” Why, we asked. “I divorced a women who bored me on occasion and married a woman who drives me crazy every day.” Heh. And it was true, his new wife was pretty spiffy the first time I saw her, but quickly declined into a mess. I’m not assigning blame here, but things clearly didn’t work out.

4. We’ve been married 42 years. No kids, so no empty nest, but the post-retirement adjustment was a challenge. Whenever we were at loggerheads, what got us through was a very deep conviction we both have that the commitment was absolute. I can’t honestly say where it comes from, since he is not religious and I was not religious in the early years of our marriage.

5. Which is why I don’t speculate unless I know I know and why I don’t always understand why someone most of us will never know beyond the “click-n-read” of the internet would share without a wider context.

   I don’t read Lileks… unless he’s cross-referenced somewhere else like here. Not likely to race back.

6. I went back and read through Rufus’ comments on the earlier post and then here as well. These are illuminative. Thanks, Mr. Firefly, for taking up the subject! It’s a bit pause-giving to consider the element that you mentioned about the effect of the nest emptying out, since that has a certain inevitability to it that perhaps a couple would be almost forced to confront at some point.

7. An elderly relative of mine, not long after her husband passed, told me that the 47th year of their 54 together was the hardest. You just can never take your focus off your marriage, and I suppose it takes both to keep that focus.

8. Fifty-four years of marriage and counting, here. We believe in keeping the commitment unless if becomes impossible (there are some cases in which separation or divorce is necessary). Some years have been tough, but most have been happy, and the shared life is a source of joy for us.

9. I don’t know anyone who divorced after decades of marriage, and sort of like Neo would think it is worked out by then, but I am not one to judge being on marriage number three. First one was notarized dating, two years, no kids, just moved on. Second I had a kid with, wanted to work things out after ten years in, but she went insane at 40 and I had to boot scoot out of there.

   Number three is 15 years in and as we close in on 60 years old I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t last. I think we knew what we were looking for in our early 40s and had a decade with shared custody kids, so empty nest came quickly and was status quo when we were alone all the time. We are comfortable with each other at our age, and have the same energy and similar pastimes.

   As for men who do go out and get a younger woman, the old joke there is “it is not HER youth he is after”. And I sort of get that since as I near 60 I easily pass for 45, and if my wife also didn’t also look 45 I might not want to be like Bush 1, who people joked his wife looked like his mother.

10. We made it to Year 50 this summer, and don’t have any anticipation of untying the knot.

    As Wendy and Kate said, there is something important about keeping a commitment (religious or personal), even when it gets hard; the existence of something outside of “whether we like each other now as much as we did then” helps bridge the divides.

    However, I have more than one female friend who was tempted to boot her husband after his retirement, which left him hanging around underfoot all day: for us stay-at-home (aka unpaid-working) moms, it was nice to have 7-8 hours of “personal” (or at least quieter) time, even with church & civic duties, kids, shopping, etc.

    What was WORSE, “he” often took up advising “her” on how to do the housework!

    After 50 years, we pretty much have an idea what procedures are useful and effective, thankyouverymuch.

    Once past that little snag, which required some compromise by both parties, things have mostly cruised along (sometimes on actual cruises) for all of them.

11. We celebrated our 60th anniversary ten months ago. It has not been without its ups and downs, mostly because of bloody mindedness on my part. That said, I will admit we have never shared interests and pastimes. Fortunately, we have shared three very smart daughters. I sometimes wonder if life would have been easier if we had shared interests.

12. Wow, didn’t see that divorce coming! I used to read Lileks religiously, on his daily blog The Bleat. He was one of the first lifelines I found after 9-11 when I became a changer—or at least I found that the proverbial scales had fallen from my eyes to reveal the liberal’s leftward lurch. I also met him briefly on the one National Review cruise that I took right after Obama’s second electoral victory. What a downer that cruise was!
    Anyway, he always seemed crazy about his wife and daughter, and last I read, he and his wife seemed to be very much enjoying their time together, traveling after their daughter had left the nest.
    I wonder who gets the house.

13. Rigeldog, I read the Bleat entry after a link was posted in the comments at Ann Althouse’s blog (I hadn’t read the Bleat in years but recently found James posting on Substack) and it sounds like neither will get the house. It is to be sold next spring (so things may change)

14. Given that a very large fraction of what is discussed here is about politics, I wonder how many marriages are dissolving due to conflicts between TDS and MAGA.
    It seems discord at that level is greater now than the previous candidate vs. candidate options, maybe because the Republicans did exhibit too many instances of being the “stupid party” and that is “adjusting” somewhat during the Trump admins.

    I judge that my marriage is surviving because we have learned to give each other some space for our different interests. And perhaps because I am now a little better behaved about helping with cooking, yard work, or other chores [certainly not perfect!] It also helps that we now have enough money so that we can relax our prior frugal attitudes and readily overcome the minor vicissitudes of life; i.e., fewer disagreements about money.

15. My wife and I well bonded for the eight years it took to get one live child.

    She had never heard me sing a note when I revealed an excellent singing voice one night by singing to her the end of Rod Stewart’s “You’re in My Heart”. She cried.

    Nothing has changed after 42 orbits. We are lucky ones. Since we got together at a Halloween party, I sometimes accuse her of casting a spell on me.

    “You’re in my heart, you’re in my soul
    You’ll be my breath should I grow old
    You are my lover, you’re my best friend
    You’re in my soul”

16. The late 1960s featured a LOT of divorces of several decades among my parents’ peers. (Well, a lot from my POV..) The divorces nearly always involved middle-aged couples, where the “other woman” or the “other man” was also middle aged and married. As far as I can tell, each second marriage formed from two divorces lasted until death.

    One affair involved two teachers from my high school. A suicide attempt led to being hospitalized, where she confessed her afair. Her lover was one of my favorite teachers.
    Which wasn’t the only shocking news of that time about my teachers.

    Some affairs didn’t result in divorce. Mr. A and Mrs. B met on a trip to Europe. Unfortunately for them, Mrs. C, also vacationing in Europe, saw them together. The result being that in the subsequent year back in New England, both couples were ostracized. In response to being ostracized, Mr. B took a job on the other side of the country, a job that wasn’t as prestigious as the one he retired from. But when you gotta get out of Dodge, and you have a good pension, you get what you can. (Mr. B had some friendships if not necessarily affairs w 20-somethings at work—enough for him to be reprimanded at work.) Mr. A later left his wife, but didn’t marry again for some years. Mr. and Mrs. B, on the other side of the country, stayed married until death—lived until late 80s and 90s. Of the four, only Mrs. A had clean hands.

    When my parents died in the 1980s, I found out that in the late 1960s my father had an affair with a neighbor. After a town meeting—a social affair in a small New England town—the neighbor asked my father for advice about what to do about her husband. After years on the wagon, he had resumed drinking. She divorced her husband—who fortunately got pensioned off instead of being fired—and one thing led to another with her and my father. The affair lasted several years.

    Reminded me of Donovan’s Season of the Witch.

17. It is like death, but much much more crueler!

18. Gringo,

    I had a theory that a lot of those divorces, especially in the ’70s, were accelerated by feminism. The culture was full of a lot of messaging to women to examine their lives and demand more. “Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson,” the feminine mystic, those ubiquitous Virginia Slims ads!

    But I’ll be darned if the same thing didn’t happen with my generation, and feminism had mostly shaken out by the time my peers and I married. Many of our wives, including my own, stayed home with the kids (at least during their formative years), despite being college educated and having careers, prior to being moms. And they were consciously glad to make the choice and didn’t feel “trapped.”

    And I do think it was true that some, non-significant percentage of women did not divorce prior to the ’60s due to strong, cultural messaging, despite being married to philanderers or alcoholics.

19. I have heard more than one person who divorced late in life comment to the effect that they looked ahead at the next 20 or 30 years and didn’t want to be trapped into whatever scenario they felt trapped in with their spouse.

    In other words, sort-of a facing one’s mortality awakening to a window being shut.

    “I want to see the world.” “I want to learn to paint, sculpt, act.” “I don’t want to be tied to a house…”

    Maybe that’s what Window Manager alludes to in his comment about chasing youth. Mortality is a sobering thing. I always knew I was mortal, but as the years roll on and I get closer to what is inevitable, my feelings about time and aging have changed. Does that push some people to impulsive behaviors?

20. F:

    Congratulations!!!

21. God’s plan: One man, one woman, for life.
    Man’s plan: One man, one woman, until we get tired of one another.

22. We celebrated 45 years of marriage in August of this year. Our empty nest phase began around 2005 when our youngest left for college. We did not have a difficult time adjusting, just sort of eased into it and welcomed the additional free time. The biggest challenge came in the spring of 2020 and the arrival of the Covid lockdowns. I traveled regularly for work for years, often being away at least two or three nights per week. My wife developed a routine during that time that included quiet time to herself and activities with friends. Suddenly I was in the house 24/7. Our marriage was never seriously threatened but we did have to make some adjustments to how much we interacted and what we did together. It didn’t take too long to adjust – I was still working 5 full days a week and so on the phone, computer, and zoom most of those days. Then in 2022 I retired, this caused another period of adjustment because I no longer had something to occupy my days. We both have time to ourselves during the week, mainly through volunteering but also walks with friends (or alone), golf with friends (for me), and crafting activities (sewing for her, woodworking for me). It helps that we do enjoy doing lots of things together, and are confident enough in our marriage to say, and hear, that we would like some time to ourselves.

23. I recently heard of a book by Kate Rose, “You Only Fall in Love Three Times.”
    AI’s summary of her theory:

    The First Love (Idealistic Love): This love often occurs at a young age and resembles a fairy tale, driven by passion and the desire for an “ideal” partner. It teaches us about the excitement of love but often ends due to immaturity or a lack of real-world compatibility.

    The Second Love (Hard Love): This love is often intense and painful, but it is the one that brings significant lessons about personal limits, needs, and self-worth. It involves repeated cycles of breaking up and getting back together and teaches us what we are willing or unwilling to tolerate in a relationship.

    The Third Love (Unconditional Love): This is the love that often comes unexpectedly, when a person is comfortable with themselves and not actively searching for love. It’s a mature, grounded love built on acceptance, respect, and deep connection, where everything, “easy or hard, is absolutely worth it”.

    I’ve read of some divorced and divorcing people taking this as guidance. “I married my first love, when I was naive…”

    I sort-of understand her theory, at least from American, western culture perspective, but I think it’s hooey. Yeah, I was naive about girls and love when I first started dating. But I was also naive about cars when I first started driving and naive about music when I first started playing. Experience and knowledge grow with everything you put time into.

    And I know some people who have married their first love, whom they met at a very young age, and they have great, well developed, mature relationships. I even know a few immigrants whose marriages were arranged by their parents, and those seemed to work.

24. My Wife and I were married for 57 years, no kids. Things change gradually, and adjustments are also gradual. After many years we both were different people than when we married at age 21. But it worked. My Darling Sandy was so much the better person than I was , and am.

    One is the Loneliest Number

25. Neo:

    Thank you!

26. There was a scrum of divorces in my parents’ circle of friends ca. 1972. You might find one or two with a feminist component in the wife’s thinking. Or you might not. The smart money says the salient vector was what it commonly is among women – the effect of their acts on their status in their social circle. Some small cultural shifts made serving papers on your husband acceptable when it hadn’t been before. (Serving papers on your wife was always considered skeevy unless you’d been abandoned). The modal source of dissatisfaction was the husband’s drinking habits. The next was serial adultery. Among women who did not have minor children at home, the husband’s volcanic temper was commonly the issue; they marked time until the last child was out of high school and bye bye. A man who was a satisfactory earner, wasn’t hitting the bottle hard, wasn’t hitting on floozies, and had a properly calibrated temper, got to stay married.

27. I’ve know so many couples who got divorced and the husband then marries the first woman he comes across. One friend, she and her husband agreed to meet fur drinks RIGHT after the divorce was finalized. (Their divorce was mostly amicable.) He arrived at the bar a few minutes before she did, and started talking to another woman there. Someone who he just met. He married her less than a year later.

    I’m surprised more couples in my age range don’t get divorced when the empty nest years hit, but i think some of that gets deflected by how much of herself the woman can inflict on her adult children especially if they have kids and she can be a pain in the a** grandmother.

    What I mean by this is: When I was in my twenties and thirties, I saw so many couples in which the woman was so bossy, and sometimes downright mean to the man. But they’d get married anyhow… and for the next twenty-five or they years, her petty energy would be focused on her kids and their world, giving the guy a break. The kids leave home… if she can meddle in their lives and her grandkids’ lives, the marriage survives. If not, they break up.

    I married late in life. I love him, but there are things about him that drive me nuts. But the great stuff about him far outweighs the things that drive me nuts. (I have to admit that when my husband is driving me nuts, I do have to remind myself what is great about him!)

28. “It’s my observation that most long marriages that end do so for one of two reasons, and often for both of them. The first is what “Rufus” mentions: the empty nest changing the marital equation. The other is that one of the spouses has found someone else, or at least thinks that he or she has found someone else who’s much better than the spouse of whom he or she has grown weary.”

    The woman I am in a relationship with divorced after a long marriage. Her reasons were his drinking and drug use became intolerable and he had blown a giant sum of money on drugs, booze and horse racing. Horse racing!

    From my script and the book “Frankenstein, Part II” there is a line like this, “You’ll find out that women don’t just stroll out of their marriages.”

    In both the script and book, the woman had suffered physical abuse for many years. And they both take place right after the American War for Independence.

29. Cornhead:

    The sort of motive for divorce that you mention is much more common earlier than after 30-plus years into the marriage. Usually those things surface and become intolerable earlier.

    When such behavior only starts much later in life, it sometimes is the result of some sort of disease process such as this, often undiagnosed.

30. I think the “empty nest” syndrome comprises two separate scenarios: couples in unhappy marriages who delay getting divorced until the kids have left, and couples where the empty nest, as neo puts it, “changes the equation,” meaning that the marriage was fine (or seemed fine) with the focus on children, but then the empty nest exposes problems. My parents’ divorce after nearly 25 years was more in the first category–from what I understand it was pretty unhappy for at least the last 10 years of the marriage. They actually didn’t make it to the empty nest stage, as three of the four of us were still at home (ages 10-15). But I think it only lasted as long as it did because of us kids.

    And to Rufus’s point, feminism had nothing to do with it. Part of it may have been the mental health profession deciding (probably for all the wrong reasons), that staying married “for the sake of the kids” was a bad idea, that somehow the kids are better off if parents in unhappy marriages get divorced. That may be true sometimes, but it wasn’t in our case.

31. Cornhead….”From my script and the book “Frankenstein, Part II”…something you wrote?

32. Here are snapshots of the four long-term marriages I personally know of which ended in divorce.

    A) Wife divorced eccentric husband after child grew up.

    B) Mentally ill wife divorced rich husband after child grew up. She got a generous settlement, lost the affection of her daughter and committed suicide some years later.

    C) Wife divorced good guy husband after the children grew up. She got involved with another guy almost immediately, so I suspect that was already happening. She was gracious in the divorce.

    D) Wife divorced husband after he had gotten involved with an old girlfriend. They had also been fighting for decades whether to live in the city (he) or the country (she).

    Make of it what you will.

33. It has been noted that:

    * Women are the gatekeepers of sex.
    * Men are the gatekeepers of marriage.

    Women file for divorce much more often than men. Ergo:

    * Women are the gatekeepers of staying married.

34. Caretaking issues always were fraught for us. A couple of years ago my husband suffered some mildly alarming and unpleasant health problems that called on me to act as his medical advocate and, for a while, to wait on him hand and foot. It seems that something melted in him and perhaps in me as well. Bonding and mutual trust flowered that I see now had been missing.

    Even when things were sometimes bad, I think we both always knew we were the only ones for each other.

35. Wendy K Laubach:

    That’s great! You melted my stony little heart a bit.

    Best to you both.

36. @ Neo > “When such behavior only starts much later in life, it sometimes is the result of some sort of disease process such as this, often undiagnosed.”

    The symptoms in that report, “Behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia: an update,” track very closely with those of the husband of my sister-in-law, which precipitated a very acrimonious divorce (2 kids were in late HS), exacerbated by his extremely aggressive and greedy lawyers, who persisted in filing multiple appeals of the court’s financial decisions until the judge pretty much kicked them out.

    He poisoned what had been good relationships with the kids and all of our family.
    I found out later that he had always had some mental problems, and had been making things bad for my sil for some years before she filed the papers.

37. @ Rufus > “I recently heard of a book by Kate Rose, “You Only Fall in Love Three Times.” —
    I think it ought to be “three way,” as her title suggest a sequence that might not hold at all, and may not result in marriages. (Some comments above suggest the same).

    Lots of people have had naïve and hard love experiences multiple times
    I suspect the mature love experiences make for the most stable marriages.

    Sounds like a lot of those “remarried on the rebound” are of the “first love” type – naïve at age 50 is not a good thing to be.
    Hard love can come any time, mature love can be your first or last experience, or develop in the middle of a naïve or hard-love relationship.

    My two cents, I’m cheaper than Lucy.

    Shameless huckstering here, but it has the images I wanted.
    https://tempestbentley.com/peanuts-lucy-psychiatric-help-5-cents/

38. By definition long-term marriages today are mostly from the Boomer/Gen X generations.

    Male-female relationships have changed a great deal since then. Currently the marriage rate is at an all-time low. There is much more divergence between what the sexes want.

    In the 2000s I was in a memoir writing class. Most of the class was in their early thirties. The anger members described when writing of their love relationships astonished me, especially women towards men.

    I suspect that much of what applied to marriages in the past won’t apply in the future.

39. huxley, dare I ask: what business do people in their thirties have thinking they’re in any position to write a memoir?

    Philip Sells:

    You may dare. I wondered the same.

    I was in my early 60s and the oldest in the class. However, I wasn’t the second coming of Alexander or anyone else either.

    Still, the writing maxim goes, “Write what you know,” and to be a writer one must write, so why not.

40. huxley, dare I ask: what business do people in their thirties have thinking they’re in any position to write a memoir? I’m sure none of them was the second coming of Alexander.

41. It appears huxley and Phillip’s comments may have gotten caught in some WordPress wormhole as the reversion to standard time occurred early this morning.

42. Jimmy, sorry to read that your parents’ divorce caused you and your siblings pain. Author Andrew Klavan states, “divorce for kids is like blowing up the planet they live on.”

43. Something that hadn’t occurred to me until now;

    There may be a biological component. All animal species have some sort-of “rut” season when biological signals conduce them to mate. Maybe that’s very strong in most humans around the mid-teens to twenties, and we are focusing more on temporary, or external factors in our partners.

    Then, when the elixir of procreation wanes from our bodies our personalities and those of our mates change, and not always in ways that are conducive to more practical bonding?

44. huxley…”in the 2000s I was in a memoir writing class. Most of the class was in their early thirties. The anger members described when writing of their love relationships astonished me, especially women towards men”

    Part, but not all of this is that there are entire industries devoted to stirring up anger across all possible dimensions of people.

45. David Foster, on anger at partner:
    “Part, but not all of this is that there are entire industries devoted to stirring up anger across all possible dimensions of people.”
    Oh how true! Anger-fueling is sadly a very profitable industry in politics. Usually using envy.
    And thus encouraging people to blame others instead of encouraging self-improvement & hard work.
    That many public educators shifted to this scheme is appalling.
    Hopefully, growing parental awareness may be reversing it, somewhat.

46. Looking back however many decades to early years when the field was young, hot, and simple–so it looks now–might not help with today’s situation.

47. Marlene….see my post Will America Drown in Anger? and the ensuing discussion:

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/73847.html

48. I do put a fair amount of blame on second-wave feminism which adopted the Marxist oppressed / oppressors binary, thus men became oppressors of women, and deserved to be objects of anger and attack.

    Feminism went from being about equality to domination. Colleges are now 60:40 women:men. There has been no compassionate outcry, “What is happening to our young men?”, as there had been for young women. No, the problem is that our young men are lazy toxic males, especially the white ones.

    In 1971 at my experimental college Robin Morgan, one of the leaders of second-wave feminism, came to teach a course in feminism (as well as to organize a group of women students to take over the college president’s office with a typical list of “non-negotiable demands.”)

    My roommate was curious so he took the class. He discovered that men were not allowed to speak and Morgan’s message was largely about trashing men and explaining how men were the huge problem for women.

49. Thanks, Rufus. I got through it ok, but some of my siblings were much more traumatized. But my main beef is with the counseling profession that started telling couples that the kids would be happier after divorce. They helped to enable the whole wave of divorces in the 70s.

50. Just reposted my ‘Will America Drown in Anger?’ essay at Substack:

    https://substack.com/home/post/p-177829102

51. I still remember myself as a seven year-old boy after the divorce, watching my father drive away and being told he wasn’t coming back.

    I only saw him once more in my life.

    I loved my father. Much of what is best in me — my strength, curiosity and honesty — came straight from my father.

52. Huxley, that is heartbreaking.

53. @ RTF: “… when the elixir of procreation wanes …”
    THAT is a marvelous phrasing!! Polite, respectful, but not really inuendo.
    Somewhere I read that we have 6 to 8 “love chemicals” in our neurochemistry. Evolution providing for redundancy, perhaps, to improve the odds of success?

54. What was called ‘the women’s movement’ ca. 1971 was never about ‘equality’. See Joan Didion’s critique in that era. The motor was more than anything else a complaint about adult life and its disappointments and constraints. There were other vectors: a desire to invade (and eliminate) male spaces, a desire to replace the status regulators in the lives of women with others, and a resentment of male authority in a variety of venues. The leaders of the ‘women’s movement’ were not women of accomplishment like Clare Boothe Luce or Mildred McAfee Horton. They were professional complainers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Bella Abzug. Every significant policy measure they wanted was bad. Their understanding of the role of men in the lives of women – as a pet, as an employee, an an ATM machine – doesn’t make for sustainable domestic relations.
    ==

55. i can’t help but think his wife is a POS who no longer wants to be married to a man who was fired from his job, who doesn’t give a shit about the Daughter and the Dog…also, she very probbly has a Handsome Stranger in her bed…..i love james, and i HATE the EBTH, whatever that stands for…..

56. I guess I’ve always felt no one really knows what goes on between two people in private. Whatever James wants, I hope he gets. He sounds like a combination of curious, funny, yet grounded and ethical. I knew him a long time ago, and was lucky to. I wish him (and his wife) the best.

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