Latter-Life Crisis!
By: Geo (July 8th, 2010)‘Grey Divorce’, as it is increasingly being called, is on the rise. Couples who remain married for decades together are seeking divorce! This trend has been around for a while now but it has once again come under focus with Al Gore announcing a separation from his wife of forty years, Mary “Tipper” Gore!
The Gore divorce annoucement came as a shock to the Americans especially because just about two weeks earlier they had celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary and 40 years is a really long time! As a couple they have survived emotional upheavals, the likes of which few could imagine. During their stint for the White House, and earlier even as ‘Monicagate’ loomed large over Al Gore’s political future too, they created the public image of a couple deeply in love.
Why do couples who together sail through a lot in their life suddenly decide to part ways, especially during the ‘Empty Nest’ stage? Couples are known to have their struggles during Mid-Life, between the mid-thirties to mid-forties. But the post-sixty phenomenon perhaps seems to be a new stage in human life cycle that needs to be addressed and accomodated in the syllabuses! I am almost tempted to call it “End-Life Crisis’ but I need to be more sensitive.
The reasons are many. Sometimes its an affair. But it could also be boredom, conflicting pursuits, new found financial independence or even the realisation to end-up the long put-up incompatibility.
In the busy-ness of life and raising kids, couples often choose to overlook several factors in each other. However, once life becomes more quiet and the children are gone, these factors become significant and are more on-the-face than before! Some of these couples even realise that after the children are gone, they have nothing to talk about!
Many of them find a newer purpose and taste in life and get more busier than before while the other partner maybe wanting to ‘take-it-easy’! For still others, it maybe an urgency to make their life more satisfying and fulfilling than it has been till then and that most often means moving on from their marriage - letting go to let loose! Has ’self-actualisation’ moved upward to the older people?
The impact it has on the adult kids is often the same as would happen to much younger ones but does anyone care!
Like in Mid-Life, perhaps couples should realise that there seems to be a stage in lengthy marriages when “you don’t know each other.” It’s a transitional time and those times are always risky in a relationship. Old issues could resurface and there could be times when one wonders if they still have an emotional connectedness, or if love has died! But its important to hang on to the relationship despite the feelings and the circumstances.
But why hang on? Would it not then be like giving up two kilometres before the finishing line of the marathon? Or like coming to the tie-breaker in the final set of lawn tennis and then quitting! Or still like getting knocked out after ten rounds of scoring winners over your opponent in a boxing match!
Why would anyone invest everything they have on something and then before it can be said ‘done’, ‘finished’, give up on it! Is it because - shown better options for ‘giving up’, the ‘post modern’ generation opts for these options over winning and conquering!?
Whtever be the reason for it, if this trend continues as is, we definitely have a social crisis brewing up! What message or values will the grand-children carry for “their” posterity!
Tags: Al Gore, divorce, grey divorce, latter-life crisis, separation, tipper gore