After four decades of marriage, they started to fight about politics and wanted different things. They decided to join the growing gray divorce trend.
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When my now ex-husband and I decided to divorce, it was just past our 25th anniversary. We had been together for 11 years before getting married, so we had been a couple for 36 years.
It's strange to feel you're part of a trend. There have been many recent articles about "gray divorces," which involve couples over the age of 50 parting ways.
After nearly four decades, it seemed impossible that the only answer for my husband and me could be divorce. But it was, and we did it —and we're happy we did.
I would say we sailed through most of our relationship with ease. When we announced our pending divorce, some friends declared that if we split up, nobody in the world had any hope of staying together. For the most part, it was a very good life together.
However, toward the end, we faced challenges that made it impossible for us to be happy if we stayed married. Some of the pressures were external, and some were internal.
At the time, I figured we were going through what many people call a political divorce. Toward the end, we fought more about politics than anything else. Throughout most of our marriage, we both considered ourselves pretty centrists. He was a little right of center, and I was a little left, but we agreed about most political things discussed in the news. We were privileged enough not to have to worry about most of it.
But we have two queer children, and they both came out within the last 10 years. They also are both intelligent, well-informed, and very vocal about their beliefs. Their arguments most definitely influenced me. My husband stayed on the other side ideologically. To be fair, it must have felt we'd ganged up on him. Through it all, though, he has shown full, unwavering support and love for our children. This is one of the reasons that, despite the divorce, I will always love him.
A strange result of our split was that, as soon as we decided to divorce, we weren't angry with each other anymore. Everything became easier to talk about, and we were nicer to each other. We went out for a drink the night before we turned in the paperwork and walked hand in hand to the office to file it. It was surreal. That's not to say we don't still disagree about many things, but he will always be family to me.
With some distance, I can say that the political differences were most likely a stand-in for the frustration of the real issues that we didn't want to or couldn't find the words to fight about.
I spent the first part of our lives working alongside him in his field while also raising kids at home. But recently, I wanted to start a new career, and he wasn't interested in being a part of it. Separate health issues also contribute to how we view the second halves of our lives and how we want to spend them.
We are both sad that we couldn't get past the differences, but to continue the marriage, one of us would have had to be unsatisfied with how life would go. We felt it was better to fully support each other on our individual journeys than live a life that compromises what we want. Even the kids agree we work better divorced than married, and there is much less tension when we're all together.
When we married, I promised to love him for the rest of my life, and I now feel confident that I'll do that. It's not how we originally pictured it, but it's just right for us.
