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By Robin L. Flanigan, AARP, January 2025
Hugh Jackman is all over the news for splitting from his wife after decades together. But it's not just celebrities.
There's a long list of older celebrity couples who have split after decades together: Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness, married 27 years; Meryl Streep and Don Gummer, married 39 years; Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, married 25 years; Bill and Melinda Gates, married 27 years.
But it's not just celebrities. Gray divorce across the U.S. is significantly more common than it was a generation ago. More than one in three people who divorce in the U.S. are older than 50, according to research published in 2022 in the Journals of Gerontology: Series B. And many of those are, just like in Hollywood, people who have been together a long, long time.
So why go your separate ways after building a life together? Here are 10 big reasons, according to experts.
1. Infidelity
Suzy Brown, 78, says she tried for "three long, agonizing years" to persuade her husband to break off an affair with somebody he’d met at work. But ultimately, after 33 years of marriage, she filed for divorce.
Brown, of Kansas City, Missouri, says she was devastated, hurt, sad and furious. She found herself doing things she never would have expected, such as hiding behind bushes in the parking lot across from her former spouse’s new apartment at 2 a.m. to see if the woman was there.
Why cheat in a long-term marriage? It's often because life seems easier with someone other than your spouse. "The affair partner doesn't make the same demands on their partner that a spouse does," says Rachel Mirsky, a Certified Divorce Coach in Rochester, New York, adding that the person they are having an affair with usually doesn’t ask them to do chores, isn't financially dependent on them and doesn't rely on them for all of the regular responsibilities that go with day-to-day life.
The good news: Many people handle the experience by reinventing themselves, Mirsky says.
Brown used her experience to start a website with information to help others going through divorce called Midlife Divorce Recovery and wrote a book, Radical Recovery: Transforming the Despair of Your Divorce Into an Unexpected Good.
2. Money issues
For many older adults, worrying over money is warranted. The National Council on Aging found that 80 percent of Americans 60 and up don't have sufficient funds for financial emergencies.
But conflict in a marriage over money is not always about how much money a couple has, says Karen Covy, a divorce coach and divorce attorney in Chicago. People "want what money means to them. There’s a whole emotional component to it."
A classic example is the spender versus the saver, says Mirsky. For the spender, money equals freedom; for the saver, it represents security. Spenders may view savers as frugal or miserly, and savers may view spenders as frivolous or wasteful.
"Many times, only one of the spouses handles the family finances, and they often feel that the other spouse doesn't appreciate the amount of expenses they have, or how much they truly need to save to be prepared for retirement."
Another common source of money conflict, says Covy, is when one partner agrees to stay home with the kids while the other supports the family financially. After the children are grown, though, the financial supporter often wants the stay-at-home spouse to enter or return to the workforce, but that spouse may be unable or unwilling to find outside work.
"Both spouses have different perspectives about the deal and who broke it," Covy says. "This is why you have to deal with issues as they come up, because the longer you let them go, the more resentment builds. There comes a tipping point, and if one spouse lets the other go over their tipping point, game over."
3. Bad communication
There's poor communication, and then there’s harmful communication. The Gottman Institute, which has studied couples’ behavior since the mid-1990s, uses the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as a metaphor for the communication styles that, according to the institute’s research, can predict the end of a relationship: criticism, contempt (the No. 1 predictor of divorce), defensiveness and stonewalling.
Mirsky breaks down how each one can harm a long-term relationship:
Criticism: "Especially for people that need positive affirmation from their spouse to feel loved, criticism can destroy a critical need for a successful relationship."
Contempt: "When spouses continually speak with contempt to one another, they destroy the feelings of closeness and safety that are paramount to successful relationships."
Defensiveness: "When partners get defensive with one another, it is often about something deeper than the argument itself."
Stonewalling: "One partner stonewalls the other, they are refusing to engage in the conversation and thus preventing any real chance at true understanding of their spouse and their needs."
4. Empty nest
Empty nesters often split up if they haven't taken care to nurture their relationship while managing a family and "the busy life that creates," says Mirsky.
In the summer of 2019, once his two daughters were grown, Dan Tricarico realized that he and his wife had been living separate lives long enough, focusing more on raising their children than on connecting with each other. He decided to end their 24-year marriage.
"I said, 'I've been reflecting, and what we’re doing here is not how I want to spend the last third of my life,'" says Tricarico, 61, of San Diego. "When you're staring down the barrel at 60, you start to think about those things."
The coronavirus pandemic hit before they were able to divide the household, so the newly split husband and wife wound up quarantining with their children, a situation that Tricarico hoped would bring them closer — a sort of last-ditch effort. But he moved out in January 2021.
Although he’d always considered himself "a mate-for-life kind of guy," Tricarico says he doesn't think the decision — or his marriage — was a mistake. "Sometimes you just move in different directions and have different priorities and don't have that shared path anymore," he says.
5. Unresolved issues
For Bernadette Murphy, 61, the unraveling of her 25-year marriage revealed what she had suspected for a long time: That she and her partner "had always been a poor fit for each other."
Murphy believed that her husband had an unresolved issue with his mother, who had passed away. Murphy sought therapy and felt herself growing as a person. Her husband, however, not only eschewed individual therapy but, she says, liked the way she was — "a quiet person who stuffed everything down" — and wanted her to stay the same.
And though everyone in their inner circle was shocked the pair were splitting, the decision had been brewing in Murphy's mind for nearly 15 years. Couples counseling didn’t help.
"I would've gone to the mat if there was a way to salvage [the relationship]," she says, "but it had become clear it was either me or the marriage."
Says Mirsky: "If people don’t feel understood, they often don't feel loved." And it's tough to stay in a marriage without feeling loved.
6. No sex life
This is about a lack of connection, whether conversation has become nothing but surface-level chats or there's no passion in the bedroom, says Covy. "If you're not having sex, that doesn't mean you have no intimacy, but if you have no intimacy, that generally it means you're not having sex, either," she says.
In her practice, Covy sees that longtime partners often don't take time to keep the flame burning. Over time, that flame becomes harder and harder to rekindle — physical, emotional, or both — and in its place often sits "a mild level of malaise," she says.
"Those kinds of relationships are ripe for some other person coming along and tempting one or the other…and that's when affairs happen," Covy continues.
Mirsky says that most couples she works with say a lack of intimacy is part of the reason they're calling it quits.
She says she can't count the number of times clients describe their partner as not interested in sex or intimacy anymore — at times even concluding the partner must be asexual — only to learn as the divorce goes through that the partner either had an affair or, after separating, started a relationship with somebody else.
"It's not that they weren't interested in sex," says Mirsky. "It was that they weren't interested in sex with their spouse."
7. Too much conflict
That malaise Covy was talking about in the bedroom also comes about when couples have been dealing with conflict for too long.
"At some point, you just get tired of it," she says, "So the conflict doesn't look like conflict anymore…Many couples aren't out-and-out fighting and screaming at each other anymore, but it’s like they don’t care enough to fight, they’re so over it. When you get to that part of 'I don’t care,' now you’ve got a real problem."
8. Growing apart
"Older adults today are much less likely to be willing to remain in what we call 'empty shell marriages,'" says Susan L. Brown, codirector of the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Couples together for a long time can drift apart as they go through life experiences that shape what they believe and how they want to live, says Mirsky.
Covy explains it this way: "One person stays the same they always have been, and the other person changes, grows, does personal development work, does spiritual work, starts getting interested in different things."
Over time this causes strife, and if partners aren't willing to compromise, they grow apart. The distance can be exacerbated if one of them travels regularly for work.
Once retirement is in the picture and they have to share space all the time, "they don’t even know each other anymore," Covy says. "Now they like their separate life and they don't want that person back. It can cause a lot of friction, like 'Who are you, and why are you in my house?'"
The fact that the world has changed in those years of marriage seems to make it easier to switch up a situation that feels stagnant, according to Mirsky. Dating apps, for instance, can help with finding another, more compatible partner. There are meetup groups for making new friends while sharing passions and learning new skills.
"Even traveling solo now is a thing," Mirsky says. "There are lots of ways to fill your time [alone] in life that were just not there 30 years ago."
"Marriage now is more about self-fulfillment and personal happiness than it was decades ago," Brown says, "and we have very high expectations as to what constitutes marital success."
9. Trust issues
Broken trust leads to divorce because "once trust is lost, it's very difficult to ever get it back," Mirsky says.
Nicole Rochester, the 54-year-old host of the Your nEXt Chapter podcast, says she knows this well. Rochester says she wasn't a perfect wife, but that she assumed she still shared the same core values as her spouse after being married for 28 years and together for 36.
In April 2023, Rochester, who lives in Bowie, Maryland, discovered that her husband wasn't who she thought he was. She questioned her ability to be discerning and make wise decisions, and to be a good judge of character. She began to re-evaluate friendships and other relationships. She asked herself, "Have I missed something big in someone else close to me?" and "What else is a lie in my life?"
"It was a very disorienting experience for the trust to be broken so deeply," she says. "For it to happen with literally the one person who I thought loved and adored me and would never harm me intentionally…that was what really cut to the core."
10. Major health scares
When exchanging marital vows, couples often pledge to love each other in sickness and in health.
But particularly with a life-threatening illness such as cancer, Covy says, sometimes one spouse doesn't step up to the plate the way the person with the illness needs.
"It's in the hard times that people show their true colors," she says.
For example, the healthy partner may not show up at for medical appointments, help out more around the house, or show enough care and support. Maybe fear creates an aversion to facing a potentially terminal illness, so it's easier to pretend everything is the way it always has been.
When you have to spread the news …
If you and your spouse find yourselves going your separate ways after decades of marriage, do what celebrities do, says Covy: Come up with a prepared statement that succinctly explains that the split was a tough decision and that you are moving on to the next phase of your lives.
It also doesn’t hurt to memorize the statement, in case you find yourself cornered in the grocery store by an inquisitive acquaintance.
Covy suggests, “Just say, ‘Thank you for respecting my privacy’ or ‘Thank you for understanding’ — something that makes the other person feel like a jerk if they keep going on.”
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