She asked me the other day what I was going to write about this week. (You know who ‘she’ is!) I said ‘the increasing rate of senior citizens divorces.’
“Oh,” she said, “what are you going to write about that? I hope you are going to make it clear that you are not encouraging it, and that you are not experiencing it!”
Now I’m not always real quick and witty with answers to questions, but these two from this girl, I know how to handle! I was real quick with “Yes, dear! And yes, dear!”
Having spent most of my years with one mother, one sister, one wife and five daughters, you know that I am very well behaved and have a head start on most domestic issues. So my answer passed with flying colours.
But yes, while the general divorce rate in Canada is going down, for seniors, it’s going up.
In other words, the divorce rate in Canada would be going down even faster if the older, and supposedly wiser, Canadians would stop doing what they so often criticize the young people for doing.
You’ve heard the lines.
“Why can’t they just get along?” “Back in my day, people would have tried harder to work things out.” “They’re just looking for the easy way out!”
And that’s just a few.
But now, it isn’t only the young people who are divorcing, for reasons good or bad. The old gang are now part of the rising stats.
Actually, what I’ve seen in my little life is that the numbers may be going up, but the problem has always been there, even in my own family.
In the 1950’s my Dad had a lady cousin in Alberta who was a farm wife and whose husband was a bit older than she, but who had been a model spouse for over forty years.
They had taken their mixed farming operation of milking cows twice a day, growing oats and barley and re-invented their operation into an agricultural market niche, raising registered Hereford bulls. They became quite successful, and after many years in the business, Edith’s husband wanted to retire and spend some of his last years doing other things. Like travelling.
But not Edith.
She was having too much fun raising bulls, talking bulls, going to bull sales, and anything else you could think of that had to do with raising Hereford bulls.
So they split. Got a divorce. He married another lady, did some travelling, and probably went to his grave with a smile on his face.
She never married again, yet never lost her zest for life and carried on raising bulls.
I can hear someone say, “Maybe it was for the best!”
Maybe it was, since it seemed to work out for both of them.
Perhaps a late-in-life divorce works out for many folks now and, if so, I am glad for them, not because of a desire to encourage divorce, but to at least recognize that if a marriage isn’t a good one, it can at least be ended, even if a person is over 50.
It wasn’t always that way, and it was usually always the woman who suffered.
It’s probably hard for our 21st century minds to get our heads around how marriage used to work, but it was often like this: women of marriageable age in Europe would often marry men in North America, very much including Canada, hoping that it would lead them to a loving spouse, a wonderful family and a prosperous and fulfilling life, just as the pages and pages of matrimonial ads in weekly Canadian newspapers suggested.
It was an exciting ideal compared to what many thought their home country could offer.
While many dreams hopefully came true, many others did not. And in those years, women did not have the economic opportunities that they do today, and they found themselves trapped in marriages from which there was no escape, because they had no money to escape with.
And so they stayed, loved their families because they were now mothers and grandmothers, and kept celebrating their wedding anniversaries because it was the thing to do. But many of those homes and marriages were cold and empty shadows of what might have been and of what many women might have dreamed.
Women today have economic abilities and opportunities, and because they do, there is an option to make a change in their lives which would benefit from a course correction, even later in life. Of course, divorce is not only an option for wives and women, but for men as well.
But why is it just now that Canadians over 50 are climbing the divorce statistics charts in divorces? The answer is simple: times change. And when times change, people change. What was acceptable yesterday may not be acceptable today.
Think of smoking. Smokers used to smoke inside, they even used to smoke in crowded cars. Non-smokers wouldn’t tolerate that today, and smokers wouldn’t ask them to.
In addition to only recognizing that times change, though, the Baby Boomers who came along between ’46 and ’64 have likely carried with them, as individuals, some of the empowerment mentality that came with their formative beginnings.
It used to be called ‘respect for authority.’ I think it’s fair to say that the ’60s watered down any respect for authority that may have existed, and that may have brought a willingness to do things that generations before the present crop of those over fifty would not do.
Getting divorced later in life may be one of those things.
