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Living in sin at 60
To my parents' generation sexual cohabitation was something that men might have fantasised about, or imagined happening somewhere ‘foreign’, but never seriously contemplated for themselves
The social revolution that characterised the 1960s, and which by the 80s had turned ‘living in sin’ into a quaint euphemism, left the middle-aged and those older wedded to wedlock.
But by the 1990s there were signs that even for the faithful fifties marriage might be going the way of lamplighters and horse-ploughs.
“Older couples would get a lot of pressure from their children if they weren't married,” says Paula Hill, a senior counsellor with Relate. “It was perhaps more of a stigma for the children that mother was living in sin than it was for the parents. Gradually though, as more and more people came across couples who had chosen not to marry, attitudes changed.”
The statistics support Mrs Hill's analysis: the General Household Survey for 1991 revealed that slightly fewer than 80,000 over-55s were cohabiting; a decade later the survey found a fourfold increase to 337,000 cohabitees.
Professor Emily Grundy of the Centre for Population Studies thinks this huge increase could be partly explained by ‘cohort factors’, that is by the addition of people who had begun cohabiting earlier in their lives and who have simply become older.
But she suspects that there may be more deep-seated reasons too: “There has been a decline in the proportion of people who are actively religious, and a trend towards individual fulfilment with less emphasis on traditional values.”
Andrea Kon, agony aunt and author of How to Find Love Mid-Life says: “Young people allow physical love to dominate, but there is a different kind of love at 60 than at 30. And if you really care about someone, does it really matter if you're married?” Written by David Lovibond
Andrea Kon's book How to Find Love Mid-Life is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £7.99
This article was created: 13 July 2006.
This article was last edited: 11 December 2006.
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