“It is a sad indictment of our society that people can get to the age of 70 and still not be free from the threat of divorce,” says divorce lawyer, Vanessa Lloyd Platt. "But, increasingly, it is true"

The only age group to show a rise in the divorce rate last year was the over-60s, bucking the downward trend for all other ages.

In 2005, 8,086 husbands and 4,671 wives over 60 petitioned for divorce, some 48% more people than, for example, 1991.

Why do they do it? What makes people abandon the comfort and security (both emotional and financial) of a long-term relationship, at the very point at which society expects them to sit back, relax and enjoy the fruits of a hard working life?

“People’s attitude to themselves is changing, seventy year olds see themselves as young,” says Lloyd Platt. That is the crux of it.

Retirement has always been a time of reckoning, but nowadays the future lasts very much longer. Pensioners might have another 30 active years ahead of them.

“The desire to go off with another partner is sometimes a factor, but not overwhelmingly so,” says James Copson, family law specialist with Withers LLP, who points to the fact that retirement often coincides with the children leaving home and a couple being brought face to face with one another for the first time in years.

Christine Northam, a counsellor with Relate, remarks on the dramatic change in status retirement brings: a man who might have seen himself as ‘the boss’ at home as well as at work, has to forge a new relationship with his wife as an equal.

“This is when a lot of people realise that they are not as close as they thought they were,” Northam says.

Interestingly, she has recently been observing the flip side of empty nest syndrome: couples whose relationship is put under strain when their adult children return home because they cannot afford to live independently.

“The fact that their children cannot fend for themselves is a worry, then they have to be fed, their clothes have to be washed, their heating and lighting paid for. The couple’s privacy is compromised and it can skew their vision of retirement.”

Equally problematic is the fact that a great many people reach retirement without ever having discussed what they hoped it might be like.

He might have planned to join a golf club while she has been dreaming of backpacking round the Himalayas.

This is what Heather Heber-Percy who runs the County Register, a dating agency for older people, sees among her clients.

“Having brought up the children and looked after their husband for years women suddenly think ‘there must be more to life than this, I want to learn Japanese or climb the mountains in Afghanistan’.

Women in their sixties look very good these days, they’re fit, they’re energetic, they don’t want to sit at home handing out the pipe and slippers.”

The scenario she sees is this: the woman takes off (and often goes travelling with her daughter), the abandoned husband takes up with a younger model and every one is happy. “I meet very few people who regret it,” says Heber-Percy.

Lloyd Platt, however, says that most of her older clients filing for divorce are male. “I have one 79 year old who refers to himself as Don Juan. He says he has so many girlfriends he feels as if he is in a candy store.”

The oldest client she has had was 82; on the day his decree absolute came through he sent her a case of wine and a note thanking her for making him happier than he had been for years.

“He said he had been miserable in his marriage for 54 years but had never before got round to divorcing.”

The pension is obviously a very significant issue when older people separate. Interestingly, many of those reliant on the state pension are considerably better off if they divorce: a non-working wife whose pension has been assessed on her husband’s contribution will get 60 per cent of his entitlement to the full pension of £77.45, bringing their joint income to £123.92, but if they subsequently divorce, her pension will be topped up to match his.

Many private pension schemes cannot be ‘sliced up’ if the marriage breaks down and anyway, as James Copson explains it was only recently that such equity came into existence in cases involving considerable assets.

“Very wealthy husbands used to get away with blue murder because courts based settlements on a woman’s ‘reasonable needs’ which, with older wives, weren’t very great. That all changed with the White White case of October 2000 at which a new touchstone of fairness was introduced.

"It was decided there should be no discrimination between the work involved in being a homemaker and the financial contribution of the breadwinner. As a result a 50/50 clean break division of assets is becoming increasingly common.”

Despite this, Heather Heber-Percy says that the women she sees – and she sees a great many, there being so many more single women than men at this age – are frequently planning to fend for themselves.

“They are happy to retrain and 85 percent of them, I would say, become counsellors which is a strange new phenomenon.” This self-sufficiency,she says, extends to their post divorce social lives.

“Women are very good at building supportive networks for themselves: they’ll have Janet to go shopping with, Mary to discuss sex with, Judith who is good for a game of golf and so on.”

Both Lloyd Platt and Copson say that on the whole older divorcing couples are less vicious in their attitudes to one another than their younger counterparts, probably because maturity brings them the sense to see that venting your spleen through the courts is extremely expensive.

“Holiday homes tend to be a major issue because of the emotional attachment built up over years,” says Lloyd Platt. “It’s hard to know how to deal with it, usually it has to be sold but sometimes the children buy it so it stays in the family.”

But the real issue for most people is their first home. “That’s the main asset in most marriages and by the time you’re past 60 it’s usually paid for,” says Paul Lewis of Saga’s Money Matters and Radio Four’s Money Box.

“The fact is you can’t really get two houses for the price of one. If the average house price is £154,000 you can’t get much for £75,000 and, at that age, borrowing is a real problem. The very longest a mortgage will run to is 70, if you can show you have the income to repay it. You’d have to have quite a significant company pension to think of doing that.”

Both Lloyd Platt and Copson find that some of their clients’ children want to have meetings with them.

“They want to understand what is going on,” says Copson. “Either for their own benefit, or to help their parents. Sometimes they don’t want their parents to know they’ve been in, but they provide background information about family dynamics or put forward strategies to offer their parents.” Heber-Percy finds her clients’ children are resigned to the situation.

“They’ll say ‘if that’s what makes you happy Mum, do it. Dad’s always been a bit of a boring old fart anyway.”

This may be true, but Agony Aunt, Katharine Whitehorn, cautions people not to give up too easily on marriage.

“When you are widowed you lose two separate things: the man and the life you led with him.
I think people should think carefully before deliberately passing up the life they have been living: even if the chap is not ideal they have their home, their children, their relationship with other people.

"There’s so much more to marriage than love and sex; I know several senior couples who live rather semi-detached lives but are still there for one another in quite an important way.”

Whitehorn sees folly in ending marriages impulsively. Her mail-bag often contains letters from people who have had an affair but given it up and stuck with the marriage for the sake of the children only to find that their love for their spouse rekindles. “Despite our romantic notions to the contrary, things can come good again,” she says.

Margaret Dryson, an interior decorator who is about to marry for the third time is convinced she did the right thing in leaving her second husband with whom she had a turbulent relationship.

“I got tired of the constant rows and reconciliations. You only have one life, why spend it being miserable?” she says, speaking from the hotel in Spain where she was holidaying with her new love.

She does not pretend that divorce at the age of 59 was easy: her business went into decline and for a time she lived on income support but, determinedly, she picked herself up again and is now having the time of her life.

There, surely, is the rub. Would your grandmother have gone to the gym after an illness? No, she would have put up and shut-up be it ill-health or unhappy marriage or any other of life’s vicissitudes.

But that was then. “People who are in their sixties now became adults in the 1960s,” says Katharine Whitehorn.

“They grew up thinking that the world was their oyster and if things weren’t perfect something ought to be done about it.”

And that something might lead to a decree absolute.

Written by Serena Allott

This article was created: 31 August 2006.
This article was last edited: 15 August 2007.

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