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from MSNBC: Feeling the 50-Year Itch
Seniors aren’t waiting around for death to do them part
By Karen Springen
NEWSWEEK
Dec. 4 issue — Last year Kit Levedahl’s husband divorced her—after 48 years of marriage, three children and two grandchildren. He was 74; she was 72. She had expected to travel the world with the “dashing” World War II fighter pilot she fell in love with a half-century ago.
BUT, SHE SAYS, her husband met a younger woman. “I kept hoping that maybe he’d change his mind,” she says. “It breaks up a family—more so I think than when you’re younger, because you have less time to pick up the pieces. More people are involved.” The family no longer convenes for Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas jigsaw puzzles. Their daughter, Babs Levedahl, 44, says, “It’s devastating.”
” ‘Til death do us part” was easier to honor at the turn of the last century, when average life expectancy was only 47, than today, when it is 76. More years to live means more time for couples to grow tired of one another. “My grandparents’ generation, their whole perspective in life was, you get married young, you rear your children—and die. There wasn’t much more to it,” says Kate Vetrano, chair of the American Bar Association’s elder-law committee. ”[Today] they see many healthy years ahead of them. They decide, ‘I’m going to make those years happy’.” And—for men, at least—the invention of Viagra has created new opportunities for happiness. “Substantially more” senior citizens are divorcing today than in the past, says Donald C. Schiller, a partner at Schiller, DuCanto&Fleck, the nation’s largest matrimonial-law firm. Most states don’t keep track of divorces by age; in Maryland, one of the few that do, the divorce rate among men 65 and older increased 11 percent in the past two decades. The growth in late-age divorces even inspired an ABA panel last month called “Approaching the Golden Years With No Band of Gold After 50.” “People are more willing to say, ‘You know, it’s been 30 years, but I’ve had it’,” says geriatric psychiatrist Marc D. Graff.
Economic trends make divorce more palatable. Seniors are wealthier, and the spread of community-property laws—which generally provide for an even split of assets—enable women to live better than in the past. Still, it’s generally less expensive for two people to live together than apart. A sobering 22 percent of divorced female retirees live in poverty, defined as an income below $7,990 a year for someone 65 or older.
The dislocations of retirement shake apart some marriages. Couples who move to another state often leave behind family, friends and the social-support system that got them through difficult times, says James Greene, immediate past president of the American Psychiatric Association’s long-term-care committee. (His own parents moved back to their hometown after an unhappy stint in Florida.) Retirement also means an end to the activities that give structure to people’s lives—and give husbands and wives an escape from one another. “We see lots of women who say, ‘I didn’t really want him home all the time’,” says Sandra Morgan Little, past chair of the ABA’s family-law section. The overall divorce rates in Florida and Arizona are among the highest in the nation.
Men and women tend to split for different reasons. Elderly women are often tired of being caregivers who “give, give, give... without the proper acknowledgment or respect” and want to take their money and live life their own way, says the ABA’s Vetrano. The actress Carol Channing is an extreme example. In 1998, when she sued for divorce from her husband, producer and writer Charles Lowe, after 42 years of marriage, she accused him of abusing her, wasting her fortune and having sex with her only twice. (Lowe, who counter-sued for defamation, died last year.) By contrast, the men look at it as “their second wind, their second chance at a new woman, a new life,” says Vetrano. An elderly Pennsylvania woman whose adult children didn’t want her to give her name says her husband filed for divorce after he fell in love with a much younger woman. The relation- ship didn’t last, but her husband filed for divorce anyway.
Lawyers say that second marriages among the elderly are particularly susceptible to breakups. After their first wives die, many elderly men quickly wind up in divorce court after choosing poorly from among “the casserole ladies coming along,” says lawyer Connie Putzel, author of “Representing the Older Client in Divorce.” “He was happy for 40 or 50 years, and his ever-loving wife did everything for him, including cutting his corn off the cob.” Not so wife No. 2. The second wife can also cause friction with adult offspring from the original marriage. “They didn’t want Mom or Dad to marry this new, money-grubbing spouse who’s out to get the inheritance,” says Scottsdale, Ariz., attorney Paul Buser, head of the elder-law committee for the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers
There’s one thing to be said for divorcing when you’re past 65: the kids are grown and (usually) out of the house. On the other hand, it can be much harder to adjust to living alone, particularly after a long marriage. Seniors lose longtime acquaintances at a time when it’s harder to form new friendships. “When you’re divorced, a lot of your friends drop you. You don’t fit into dinner parties or dances,” says the Pennsylvania woman. And it’s harder to start a new profession—or resume an old one—in your 70s than in your 30s. “When you get divorced as old as I did, you can’t really have a career or pick it up too well,” says the woman, who stopped working to raise her children. She also had to learn about investing in her 70s.
Many elderly women lose their spouses through death, not divorce. Among Americans 65 and older, about 75 percent of men and 43 percent of women are married. The 7 percent—or more than 2 million seniors—who are divorced shouldn’t feel like failures. Even Nobel Peace Prize winners can’t necessarily figure out how to stay married—like Nelson Mandela, who divorced his firebrand wife, Winnie, in 1996. But like many seniors, Mandela got another chance. As part of his 80th-birthday celebration, he got hitched again.
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