We boomers are the ones who feel it’s our God given right to find fulfillment. Those of us who make it through our childrens’ childhoods often pack it in when those kids are out of the house, or even when they’re still in high school. According to the Christian Science Monitor, “Divorce is rising. In 1960, just 1.6 percent of older men and 1.5 percent of older women were divorced. By 2003, those figures had risen to 7 percent of men and 8.6 percent of women.”
According to the February 2006 issue of Newsweek, “The 77,702,865 Americans born between 1946 and 1964 came of age in the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And while the last two may have lost some appeal over the years, sex and relationships remain front and center as the oldest boomers turn 60 this year. That’s largely because more boomers are single than any previous cohort of forty to sixtysomethings.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 28.6 percent of adults age forty-five to fifty-nine were unattached in 2003, compared with only 18.8 percent in 1980. (Of those, 16.6 percent were divorced, 2.9 percent were widowed and 9.1 percent had never been married.)
According to a 2001 U.S. Census Bureau report, even though there’s been a slight decline in the overall divorce rate, the highest rate of divorce was for older people, an average of 40 percent for men and women between fifty and fifty-nine. “Gray divorce,” (ages fifty-five to eighty plus) has increased as well. From 1970 to 1990, the divorce rate for women between forty and fifty increased 62 percent according to an article in More magazine. As more and more and more of us older women enter our later years divorced we will need a lot of help. From a financial perspective, alone, late-life divorce is much worse than late-life widowhood. Among women sixty-five and older, widows have a 50 percent higher average income than divorcees.
There are a lot of books about divorce for women out there, mostly for younger women who are dealing with young children and child support and custody issues. However, there’s nothing out there about the effect of divorce on grownups whose kids are grownups—and certainly nothing targeted specifically to older women. Women who wait until the kids are grown to split aren’t even on the radar.
Being the bookish sort, I read a lot of books about divorce after my husband left, searching for answers. None were targeted to women my age who had been in long-term marriages. None actually told me how to get through the experience alive. They all mention the rage, pain, grief, damaged self-esteem, and other varieties of misery you will experience, but weren’t a lot of help when it came to dealing with those feelings—especially at my age. I found a lot of wisdom about why marriages end, but nothing about what to do when you must bear the most unbearable feelings of your lifetime, AND be in your late forties or older. The divorce books out there are all by experts, many of which are helpful, but I was hungry for immediacy, for an expert who’d been there, done that. It seemed to me that midlife and older women who get divorced need a book of their own, by a girlfriend who really understands what they’re going through.
He’s History will tell you how to deal with issues specific to you as a midlife or older woman, including dealing with teen and grown children, finances, dating, dealing with loneliness, and more.
To gather material for the book I interviewed experts in all the subject areas, including divorce lawyers, mediators, therapists, career counselors, and divorce workshop leaders. I also interviewed a large variety of older divorced women, including both women who were left and women who did the leaving, exploring their experiences as well. The divorcees I interviewed were all forty-five and older, divorced within the last ten years, and married at least ten or more years. Most were married for twenty or more. There is useful advice categorized by age in most chapters.