As I pointed out in my last post, there doesn’t seem to be isn’t a rash of late life divorce in either the US or the UK. This however doesn’t discourage the media from its full court press to sell divorce to older women. Most of their sales pitches are typical hamster food, like the article in The Times by Helen Rumbelow: An inconvenient truth about late-life divorce. The subtitle pretty much says it all:
The separation after 40 years of Al Gore and his wife Tipper reflects an increasing trend for splitting up in old age — but is it such a bad thing?
In the article we get the usual doses of “everyone is doing it”, along with female martyrdom, linking divorce with empowerment, and the empirically inaccurate assumption that divorce makes people happy:
In talking to people who escaped a marriage when they were issued with their Freedom bus pass, I realise that I kind of admire them for not crumbling away into her kitchen and his garage and silently rancorous mealtimes.
If I had to grade the author on her skills at selling divorce, I would give her a solid B. This kind of consistent plodding is how the war on marriage is won. There isn’t anything imaginative or flashy about it, but she has her fundamentals squared away and turns out a solid article selling divorce. She also does a bang up job of confusing her readership on what the AARP actually found when studying late life divorce:
A study of post-40 divorce by the American support group for older people, AARP, found that 60 and 70-year-olds appreciate life after divorce the most of any of the ages, citing a fresh lease of life from forging a new identity.
A rookie might have noticed that the AARP study actually found that women often fared quite badly after late life divorce, and avoided the study altogether.
But not everyone at The Times is satisfied with good enough. Dr. Louann Brizendine clearly has what it takes to go the extra mile. She came up with the ingenious plan of telling women that they will make their best decisions while in the grips of menopause! Her masterpiece is titled: All Change (H/T Dan S). The piece opens with a typical female martyr, who of course is fit and attractive and sure to find a better man:
Sylvia woke up one day and decided, this is it. I’m done. I want a divorce. It had become clear to her that her husband, Robert, was unavailable and ungiving. She was tired of listening to his tirades and fed up with his demands. But what really pushed her over the edge was when she found herself in the hospital for a week for an intestinal blockage and he visited her only twice. Both times he came to ask questions about running the house.
At least this is how Sylvia, an attractive woman with brown hair, bright blue eyes and a spring in her step, explained it to me during a therapy session. Since her early twenties, she felt she had spent most of her time taking care of needy, self-absorbed people. She had fixed their problems, pulling them out of alcoholism or abusive situations, and in return they had sucked her emotionally dry.
At 54, she was still very attractive and felt full of energy.
I know this is all standard fare, but even when creating your masterpiece you can’t omit the fundamentals. Next we learn that Sylvia’s new found marital angst is not due to her being in the throws of a life altering hormonal change, but in fact the opposite:
What astounded her more than anything was that she felt as though a haze had lifted recently, and she could see in a way she hadn’t been able to before. For 28 years she had chauffeured, nurtured and loved her three children, made sure home-work was done, dinner was eaten and the house didn’t fall apart. Now, out of nowhere, she found herself asking, why?
If we took our MRI scanner into Sylvia’s brain, we’d see a landscape quite different from that of a few years before. A constancy in the flow of impulses through her brain circuits has replaced the surges and plunges of oestrogen and progesterone caused by the menstrual cycle. Her brain is now a more certain and steady machine.
Having explained that menopause causes women to make better decisions, the author masterfully ties this back to the themes of female martyrdom and women being trapped in marriage:
This can happen precipitously and the problem is that Sylvia’s family can’t see from the outside how her internal rules are being rewritten. One day she turned to Robert and said: “You’re a grown-up and I’m finished raising the kids. Now it’s my turn to have a life.” Robert couldn’t believe what he was hearing. For instance: “Make your own damn dinner or go out by yourself. For the last time, I’m not hungry. I’m happy painting right now and I don’t feel like stopping.”
Next the author takes on the common misconception that menopause can make women less rational. She explains that the real problem was in the past, when she was more likely to moderate her emotions:
But as Sylvia hit menopause, the filters came off, her irritability increased and her anger wasn’t headed for that extra “stomach” any more, to be chewed over before it came out. Her ratio of testosterone to oestrogen was shifting, and her anger pathways were becoming more like a man’s. The calming effects of progesterone and oxytocin weren’t there to cool off the anger either. The couple had never learnt to process and resolve their disagreements. Now Sylvia confronted Robert with regularity, venting decades of pent-up rage. The children were also affected. Sylvia had reported that her daughter had said: “Mom, you’re acting weird and dad is getting scared. He’s afraid you’ll do something crazy — like take all the money and run away.” Sylvia wasn’t crazy but she wasn’t the same woman. She told me that her husband had once screamed at her: “What have you done with my wife?” Sylvia had changed the rules of the relationship and no one had told Robert.
Now it is time to weave in the “everyone else is doing it” argument:
It is commonly believed that men leave their ageing, chubby, postmenopausal wives for fertile, younger, thin women. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Statistics indicate that more than 65 per cent of divorces after the age of 50 are initiated by women. My suspicion is that much of this female-initiated divorce is rooted in the drastically altered reality of postmenopausal women. (But as I have seen in my practice, it could also be because they are tired of putting up with difficult or cheating husbands and have just been waiting for the day when the children leave home.)
Note that the author doesn’t get caught up trying to explain why menopausal women initiate divorce at the same rate as non menopausal women. This would only confuse her audience.
After some more female martyrdom and uplifting tales of how divorce empowered our menopausal hero, the author adds one final sweetener while removing another obstacle in many women’s minds. We learn that Sylvia ultimately gets back together with her husband, now having benefited from the power she gained by showing him she would divorce:
There’s a lot of life left after menopause, and embracing work passionately allows a woman to feel regenerated. Two years after their separation, Sylvia realised that she missed Robert. He was the only one she could talk to about certain things, including their children. One day he invited her to dinner and she decided to accept. They met, talked calmly about what had gone wrong and ended up apologising for the unhappiness they had caused each other. They also had new experiences to share and over time they rediscovered their friendship and respect for each other and realised that they had already found their soul mates. They just needed to rewrite the contract.
Other authors should use this technique more. Many would-be divorcées are deterred by the bleak dating reality they witness other women experiencing. While they likely haven’t given up their dream of a secret multimillionaire hunky handyman, at some level they probably know better. You need to remove their fear that they could be making an irrevocable decision during a time of great life change. If you feel that it is too much of a stretch to suggest that they could remarry their ex husband after divorcing him, suggest instead that it will make them best friends. Under no circumstances should you share the findings of the AARP study in this regard (P 41):
Divorcees may not have any contact with their ex‐spouses at all, true among almost a third (31%). They may remarry the same person, but very rarely, as occurred among two percent. A total of about one in twenty (6%) either remarry the same person (2%) or had sex with their spouse either occasionally (3%), or often (1%).
In addition, 27 percent were friendly afterwards while 35 percent were not friendly but talked once in a while.
See Also:
This can happen precipitously and the problem is that Sylvia’s family can’t see from the outside how her internal rules are being rewritten. One day she turned to Robert and said: “You’re a grown-up and I’m finished raising the kids. Now it’s my turn to have a life.” Robert couldn’t believe what he was hearing. For instance: “Make your own damn dinner or go out by yourself. For the last time, I’m not hungry. I’m happy painting right now and I don’t feel like stopping.”
Perhaps Robert should say, “You’re a grown up and I’m finished supporting you. Now it’s my turn to have a life.”
Or:
“Make your own damn money and support yourself. For the last time, I’m tired of working and supporting you. I’m happy sleeping right now and I don’t feel like getting up and going to work to earn a paycheck to take care of you today.”
Good grief but you should write an article on that man being a saint. His wife put him through absolute hell (and no doubt the kids, too) and still he accepted her back. Initiated it, in fact. I’m not certain I would be able to do that.
She cut him off from not only the implied agreement of their marriage (he provides, she nutures), but cut him off from any emotional support. Then she frightened him (as testified by her children) and he got the idea she’d take the money and run, leaving him destitute. As pointed out, she changed the rules without consulting Robert, without even telling him. Then she left him, and he was left to stumble over the broken pieces of his life.
The good man waited patiently, though as we know he could have replaced her, probably with another lonely heart regretting her own mistakes, likely with a younger model. But he didn’t. We can only speculate as to why, the article doesn’t bother wondering or asking his perspective, just hers. That man deserves a medal.
I know this may sound like a silly question, but: didn’t women go through menopause before feminism took over our culture? And don’t women from non-feminist cultures have periods? It seems that neither of these groups got divorced as often…wonder what’s different about menopausal women today?
Must be those ‘boring loyal dudes’ fault.
@detinennui32
Heh good turn around. Is like women have all the rights and no responsibility if Robert had just try to play the “martyr husband” things would had been different. But in this time a day anything a woman do is a noble sacrifice and everything a man does is his duty.
Nice times we live in, indeed.
“Must be those ‘boring loyal dudes’ fault.”
I’m telling you is the water… 😉
Although I suspect it is emotional porn from The Times, when I read articles like this I praise the Lord for the fact that I am single. Although we learn that fifty-four year old Sylvia is attractive [would it have made a difference had she been unattractive – presumably only the attractive should risk divorce] with a spring in her step – and because no mention is made of anything else – it being implied that she is sweetness and light itself, I must tell you that in the highly unlikely event that she and I had met (and had she told me this story – or any version of it) she would not have appealed to me one bit, although there is of course always pump and dump which – reading between the lines – is presumably what she was up to in the two years before she returned to her dull, boring, loyal husband, and presumably because that billionaire handyman just did not show-up. I was chortling as I read it, and of course the sub-text to the story, the unspoken elephant in the room is that being post-menopausal, whether she likes it or not, she is aging.
what’s different about menopausal women today?
Health, affluence, longer lifespan… To a certain degree, I think that the silver divorce phenomena happens because people find themselves in 30 or 40 year marriages at approximately the same time their grandparents found themselves dead. Yet, they know they’ll be around for another 20 years or so and that they have one last chance at enjoying life before they get sick or senile. How they are going to spend those last years and with whom becomes an issue. Successful couples can renegoitate their deal.
the implied agreement of their marriage (he provides, she nutures)
So what happens when there are no kids to nurture or provide for? I personally am hoping that when my kids are gone and my husband retires we can have some playtime together before we take the dirt nap.
Stephanie:
American women definitely seem to be an anomaly among females worldwide. Here’s what a British MRA blogger said recently about their relationship preferences:
“There certainly seems to be something especially deranged about American women, more than other women in the Anglosphere, in their attraction to these retarded ass-hats. Maybe it’s some way of getting subconscious revenge against their parents.”
I agree with the first part, but when we see them divorcing reliable, stable men well into their 50s, and then turning into red-hot viragos again (or, ‘cougars’ in newspeak) and chasing after the same kinds of poltroons they pursued in their teens and twenties; I can’t think subconscious rebellion explains it adequately.
It think it has to do with a lethal combination of social factors: feminist indoctrination that teaches women that they must always be superior to men; and America’s inherently competitive culture. In other words, American women not only are psychologically driven to be superior to men, like feminist Amazons elsewhere; they also are driven to beat men into the ground like a business rival would take out a competitor.
By teaching women to ignore their natural tendencies—and do things like abandoning motherhood for abortion; and abandoning the protection and provision of a worthy male for some slobbering imbecile—women in our culture are constantly torn internally between their inherent feminine nature and their twisted social programming. That’s why they lead every other demographic worldwide in consumption of prescription psychiatric medications, no doubt.
J;
“health,affluence, longer lifespans…”
Not really. People in the past generations were generally healthier and lived as long as they do today. The reason that, statistically, they had lower lifespans was because medical technology in the past couldn’t fight the sudden onset of disease like it can now. One of my great-grandmothers married when she was 16 and was having kids well into her 50s.
If anything, I think menopause is hitting women at younger ages, due to poor diets, substance abuse, and emotional instability. The obesity rate among American women, for example, is around 35%—highest in the world—and their general physical and mental unfitness for child-bearing takes its toll.
@Eric
I’m still studying what is wrong about First World women and I say 1th world because my other Dominican friends had married guys from other first world countries (Italy, Sweden, Spain…) and there is similar behaviour on this.
Another thing that we had notices is that this women are incapable of understanding that the men they despised or divorced could actually find women that truly love them and find them desirable unless the women are inferior in some way. Most of my friends had to pass the tests of this women that try to make them look dumb or naive in front of their friends at best or gold-diggers or whores at worst, even women that initiated the divorce (many times to leave with a lover abandoning their children) start to get all possessive and catty when their ex-husbands bring a “3rd world girl” into their lives.
I must say though that maybe this is for the best, by not accepting them into their herds my friends started to create a herd for themselves where they won’t be able to influence them and convince them to follow them, which is what I think happened with the foreign ones that end up walking out of their hubbies, they learned from the women around them to be entitled and bitchy and leave as soon as things are not going their way.
Is madness I tell you. Is like they feel better by thinking everyone that disagrees with them is inferior somehow, but why is that?
My guess is that like that guy say a combo of being competitive in every aspect of their lives plus mysandry. Plus the idea that without constant female fight a man naturally will want to oppress the women in his life, so everything from forgetting to take out the trash, to calling her out in a mistake it seems as Patriarchy rearing its ugly head instead of understanding that men are also human and make mistakes with no ill intention of further oppression. And paranoia is a bad counselor.They spent a lot of energy into fighting oppression and reaffirming their “power” that could be better spent trying to find a middle ground or simply enjoying the company of this guy.
I will add that also the laws and society reward this behaviour.
So is a combo of factors indeed, hard to fix. The conservative women will never support a law to regulate alimony, to give the same chance to a father at child custody than to the mother or to make sure that no fault divorce means no money for the partner that wants out without a good reason like cheating or abuse, so the system will stay the way it is till the backlash reaches women in a way that they actually see it as a bad thing for themselves.
That won’t happen in a while, if it happens at all. Sad indeed.
“Sylvia woke up one day and decided, this is it.”
I have to ask: why people believe in this ridiculous made up stories.
“At 54, she was still very atractive and felt full of energy”.
No woman can still be very atractive at 54.
Dames…
Stephanie:
American women feel very threatened by foreign women, for obvious reasons. I live in a city with a lot of immigrants, and I’ve noticed that American women almost never have female friends from other countries, and they shame men who show interest in foreign-born women.
@Eric
To be fair this is common sexual competition. Dominican men love to tell women in my country that the only reason men of other countries are more faithful is because they are “cold” in bed. They are not as virile and don’t like sex that much. As to discourage outsourcing and I have many country women asking about my husband sexual skills so some of them actually believe it. I always praise him in case you were wondering about my answer. ;0
I’m mostly shocked me because most Dominican men that despises a woman or doesn’t find her attractive, doesn’t care much who she pairs herself up later is not like he was going to do anything with her anyway, while in there women actually feel threatened by women that are dating men they divorced already or never will date not even in a million years. Makes no sense to me to feel butt-hurt for men that you don’t want anyway. ??!! No sense at all.
Sylvia would have made her exit at the point of my toe if I was her husband. “ok you want it, you got it. Get the fuck out and support yourself. Do not contact me AGAIN EVER!” Back together after TWO years separation? No fucking way!
I bet this woman had lifetime alimony to look forward to.
@Eric
I think your great-grandmother was pretty unusual. My grandmothers, who would both be over 120 were they alive today, both had big families but neither gave birth after forty. One had her first pregnancy at 14. I have no stats on births to 40+plus women handy, but I’d bet it’s more common now than 80-90 years ago.
I am also under the impression, based on stats I’ve seen, that menarche has been occuring earlier and earlier over the last century and a half or so.
@Lolzlzlz:
“No woman can still be very atractive at 54.”
Well she “COULD” be. I happen to know a woman who is 52. She can easily pass for 35, and a very hot 35 at that. Thinking about my decades on this planet and the number of women I have met, I’d say she is one in five thousand, maybe more. When it comes to looking youthful, there is no substitute for good genes.
It really doesn’t matter because what the writer considers “very attractive” undoubtably falls far short of the criteria that a guy, of any age, would apply.
@J
“How they are going to spend those last years and with whom becomes an issue. Successful couples can renegoitate their deal.”
NO J. Simply NO. Successful couples have spent the time to keep the “deal” they made. Ideally they were self aware enough not to marry without share unconditional love. Ideally they waited to marry until the achieved adulthood, which is not an age it is a state of growth. A long married couple who has to “renegotiate their deal” isn’t really married and pretty much is kidding themselves if they think they can find happiness together in their remaining years.
J – Marriage vows are referred to as vows for a reason. They are not a “deal”. You are married, You have not shared the nature of your marriage ceremony. Did you and your husband take a vow, or did you “make a deal”? If the former your comment is rather disingenuous, if the latter I am forced to wonder what marriage means in your lexicon.
@uncleFred
By “deal” I don’t mean the marriage vows themselves, I mean how a couple lives their day to day life together. Marriages go through lots of phases and changes. I think needs and expectations can and do change. What my husband and I needed from each other as newlyweds was different from what we needed as a childless couple which was different from what we needed as parents. When our kids leave our home and we are empty-nesters, our needs will change again. Voicing those needs and responding to them is “renegotiating the deal.”
At menopause, a lot of women start turning into men anyway, so if it was not for the divorce court raping and lifestyle disruption, I don’t know it would be so much of a loss.
Slightly off topic perhaps; but I was intrigued in Eric’s excellent posts to note that he suggests that Menopause is occuring earlier. I always assume that Menopuase takes place at about the age of forty -six, yet, one of my own great Great Grandmothers, born 1797, gave birth to her son, Great Grandfather Opus in 1848!
Let me see if I have understood.
The author of this piece claims that women after menopause think better, their brain is better wired and they think more like men. Their brain patterns are more constant and they are not marinated by hormones so they can make better decisions.
So the obvious conclusion is that pre-menopausal women’s brains are wired to think worse than men, that pre-menopausal women can’t be trusted because their brain patterns are not constant and are marinated by hormones. This seems like a perfect argument for the patriarchy.
Jesus Christ these women don’t take husbands, but hostages.
Yet again, the most financially and legally sound decision a man can make is to stay single. All the milk you want, NO cow to tend to!
The average age of menopause is 51 in the first world, younger where nutrition is poorer. Most women have a period of lowered fertility and hormone levels before menopause. It possible to hav a child at 51, but extremely unlikely. OTOH, I’d bet that 51 is no the record-breaking age.
At menopause, a lot of women start turning into men anyway…
Of course, men’s hormone levels also decline and their secondary sex characteristics become feminized to a degree. I saw a 70ish couple in the supermarket the other day; the degree to which they resmbled each other gave me the willies.
“Make your own damn dinner or go out by yourself. For the last time, I’m not hungry. I’m happy painting right now and I don’t feel like stopping.”
You go, grrl!
But seriously, is it too much to ask that women act like a grown-up in expressing what it is they want? That they consider the fact that they are cohabiting with another human being, and that what each of you does affects the other? That they exhibit some basic human decency and consideration in negotiating their daily lives?
How have have these women managed to get to their sixth decade of life without learning some basic social skills at negotiating relationships with the people in their immediate orbit? Is the Painting vs. Dinner problem really so intractable that one needs to resort to pouting and acrimony and divorce? Really?
If you want to paint, then paint. Jesus H.
Pro tip: Try saying, at any point during the day before the usual dinner time actually arrives, that you would like to change a few things about your evening meal routine. “I enjoy painting so much. You know, the evening is a really enjoyable, relaxing time for me to do my best work, but there’s dinner to think about. What do you think about having some quick and easy meals a few days a week so I can do that? Now that I think about it, you always wanted to learn to cook — how about we take a cooking class together, and that way you can practice making your culinary masterpieces while I paint in the early evenings? What do you say, chef? I’ll blow you later …”
See? Win-win.
“…divorcing reliable, stable men well into their 50s, and then turning into red-hot viragos again (or, ‘cougars’ in newspeak) and chasing after the same kinds of poltroons they pursued in their teens and twenties…”
Anyone who uses “virago” and “poltroon” in the same sentence is clearly a person with a masterful vocabulary.
OK, back on track…
Feminist indoctrination, emotional pornography, no-fault divorce, changing hormones… the perfect storm.
“If we took our MRI scanner into Sylvia’s brain, we’d see a landscape quite different from that of a few years before. A constancy in the flow of impulses through her brain circuits has replaced the surges and plunges of oestrogen and progesterone caused by the menstrual cycle. Her brain is now a more certain and steady machine.”
Does this mean that marriage is the best possible thing for a pre-menopausal woman, because she needs something to stabilize the crazy and irrational parts of her brain? Or does it just mean that women need men to make rational decisions for them until they hit menopause. I’d be pretty offended about that part if I was a woman.
If the Brizendine assertions are true, then a man will wake up one day and find out that the woman he married NO LONGER EXISTS***she has disappeared and been replaced by another person, one he doesn’t know and may not like at all.
If all this if really true, then maybe all marriages should be dissolved automatically at this stage of life. If it’s not really true, then maybe an incorrect neurochemical hypothesis is being used as an excuse for bad behavior.
I added links at the bottom of this post to the one on divorcée retirement as well as an older post titled Her husband was her best friend. If you haven’t read the best friend one I recommend it. It ties in very well with this one.
Stephanie:
That’s true, but competativeness alone isn’t an issue. The problem comes when it’s combined with a malignant social philosophy like feminism. Women here treat men as rivals and enemies against whom they have to fight rather than cooperate.
I’ve been in Latin American countries a lot too, and heard Latin men telling the women there that American men are cold-blooded and passionless as well. Granted, repeated exposure to American women would kill most healthy male sex drives. Also, too, the US media doesn’t help matters; a lot of Latin women think American men are as they are portrayed in American TV (i.e., amiable, useless dunces who are utterly dependent on a strong, dominant female).
It’s just a fact that American men are at a competative disadvantage with foreign women with the local men. Still, the bad quality of US women make it worth the effort.
Opus:
Looking through some of the records in my family tree, I tend to think that, unless by coincidence our two families were unusually virile, that menopause hit our fore-mothers at a much later age than it does today. There were more than a few who were mothers and grandmothers at the same time.
People tend to believe that people then were less healthy and long-lived than today, but that isn’t true. People lived just as long as now; but the statistics are skewed because there were no such things as antibiotics, antesthetics, or vaccines and people succumbed to illnesses and epidemics. The mortality rate was higher then, but people who survived these things weren’t much different than we are in terms of longetivity.
@Eric
I entirely accept that people were just as fit in earlier centuries and that the earlier average age of death – for the reason you mention – gives the misleading idea that people were genetically programmed to die younger. I should also add – to correct myself that it was my Great Great Grandmother who was born in 1797. For what it is worth on the subject of longevity my Great Grandfather died in 1939 aged 90 or 91. Whether you and I are related, we do have – as do all of us – one thing in common: All of our direct ancestors had the genes to survive The Plague!
I am intrigued as to the idea that Menopause may be happening earlier, because one often hears that puberty is happening earlier, and I wonder whether there might be a connection between these two states.
My mother had a friend like this woman. HAD. Chances are very likely that when hubby wasn’t there to rescue her from herself or to be her scape goat, she tried that crap on her friends. Complete with vindictive b.s.
Of course, when she tried treating her friends like she treated hubby , she was in for a shock. Her parting words to my mother was to accuse her of being emotionally abusive. Mother sweetly replied that she didn’t have a penis and that crap wouldn’t work on her.
I am intrigued as to the idea that Menopause may be happening earlier, because one often hears that puberty is happening earlier, and I wonder whether there might be a connection between these two states.
“Start early and end late.” is the OB/GYN maxim regarding menstruation. The onset of puberty has gotten earlier over the years and menopause has gotten later.
“See? Win-win.”
You need to remember that the feminism dream is for woman win – men lose. If there is a win-win the woman will still be unhappy. I think that is a clear at this point.
“It’s just a fact that American men are at a competative disadvantage with foreign women with the local men. Still, the bad quality of US women make it worth the effort.”
I actually don’t think so. All my friends were very envious of me when I landed a gringo ( I wasn’t the prettiest woman in comparison to them) and two of them stopped talking to me altogether. American men are actually really desirable in our culture. That is why you have all this dating sites full of young educated Latin women seeking American or first world husbands. So I wouldn’t say you are in a disadvantage, only with Latin Alpha carouselers that they do exist but they are no considered “empowered” mostly stupid for their likings.
Stephanie:
I think you misunderstood…what I meant to say was that American men are at a disadvantage because they first have to overcome the stereotypes that you described. Fortuneately, Latinas aren’t taught to hate men reflexively, like American women are, so they’re more open-minded towards men. I’ve never had any problem dating Latinas.
Opus:
Checking through my family Bible records, my direct paternal line goes back (counting me) 10 generations. Starting with my great-grandmother, here are the ages the women had their last child: 38, 43, 44, 46, 40, 43, 40. Number of children for each: 6, 11, 3, 12, 5, 6, 4. The two lowest numbers were both step-mothers who married a widowed great-grandfather, with previous kids, at ages 32 and 33, respectively. There are couple in my maternal lines having kids late; one at 52.
I noticed that the numbers dropped radically in my grandparents’ generation, people who were having kids in the 1940s-1960s. Even more so with my parents generation, having kids during the 1960s-1980s. There the last children born were about a decade earlier, on average, about 32-33 was about tops.
I don’t think there’s much evidence that puberty is happening earlier, because there were also women in my line who were married and having kids in their early-to-mid teens. At least psychologically, I think puberty is happening later. Our culture also treats people like children well into their early 20s; at that age most of our ancestors were raising families and holding jobs.
Menopause + EPL = Trouble.
so what is our part as man, just to be supportive over all these years and than to just be dumped as we have been (ab) used for the years when we served a purpose. Are we allowed to have a word in this, or just need to throw away our dreams of a future together
@Ken
Welcome Ken.
This is certainly the message of the media and popular culture. Men who don’t want to marry have commitment issues and need to man up. Men who expect their wives to honor their commitment are being unreasonable, trapping women in unhaaaapy marriages. Fortunately the hype around late life divorce is mostly just hype. The data doesn’t fit with the breathless headlines and relentless media stories about women divorcing late in life. There is also strong data showing that late life divorce is much worse for women than for men. For more information, see:
Post-marital spinsterhood.
There is no baby boomer (or silent) generation divorce spike at retirement.
The truth vs the hype: UK divorce rate data by age per 1,000 married women
i don’t know what to say. Been married 25 years. I am no saint, but I love my wife. I have provided, i have endured a myriad of health issues ( hers – not mine) and while I did spend the first 15 years of the marriage trying to build a safe and sound financial foundation for us and our kids, since then I have tried to induce her into branching out and finding her own self for the past many, many years. Now it’s menopause, and while I am no different than I have been for the last 10 years, suddenly I am not worth S**t. I love her. I really do. I know this. There is no one else for me. At first I worried about my kids ( older and younger) with a split up, but now I’m worried that they will see Dad taking abuse and thinking that that’s just the way it goes – and it ain’t. She’s a good woman, but she’s not the same woman. It’s like everything bad happening in her life is my fault. This isn’t right.
Dante
It is not right. Do not take abuse ever and in your head don’t see her as a good woman but rather yourself as a good man father and husband. You got the job done and are continuing to get it done. Nothing in the world will say so not even the church but I will. Let you wife know she lucked out having a husband and cut her off and let her know if she is so unhappy and feels that she should abuse you as punishment then there are plenty of wonderful men out there that can see her for how wonderful and deserving of happiness she is. Encourage her to find her joy. On your part in your heart and soul make it about how you have honored your duty to god and your children and less on winning her love respect and appreciation. It was never there for you or any man (one of the hardest things I have learned in life)