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Free and Alone — or Lonely — After a Gray Divorce? Don’t Ask the Kids
Most parents see positives, adult children only see the negatives
We’re fast approaching January, aka “divorce month.” And while fewer Millennials and Gen Xers are divorcing, more people aged 50 and older are calling in quits after long marriages — so-called gray divorces.
More than one in three couples divorcing in the United States are gray divorces, according to a 2022 study.
And while there is a lot of research on how gray divorce impacts someone’s finances, especially women, and studies on how it impacts contact with adult children — especially if one parent re-partners — there hasn’t been much research on the costs and benefits of later-life divorce seen through an intergenerational familial lens.
So a 2024 study led by Chaya Koren, of the University of Haifa in Israel, caught my eye. Granted, it’s a small study of just seven families in Israel, considered a family-oriented society, so it’s hard to know how universal the results are. Still, it’s illuminating how the concepts of being alone, loneliness, and freedom have different meanings as one ages.
While Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has declared a loneliness epidemic for the general U.S. population, there is a particular…