When Your Parents Call It Quits After Decades of Marriage

When your parents divorce when you’re already an adult, the experience can be a lot different than if they split when you were a kid. (Photo: Getty Images/Yahoo Health)

I’ll never forget the moment I knew my parents’ marriage was over. I was standing in the living room of my childhood home, watching them through the window. They were on the street corner where my brother and I caught the bus for more than a decade. And it was ending.

I was 25 years old — their marriage, 29.

When we think of divorce, we tend to think of young couples and young kids: weekdays with mom, weekends with dad, holidays split between the two. But as it turns out, I’m not alone in facing my parents’ divorce at an older age — far from it, in fact.

Millennials like me represent a new face in the wake of divorce: adult children. That’s because a phenomenon commonly referred to as “gray divorce” is on the rise: Some research suggests that Americans over 50 are twice as likely to divorce now than their peers 20 years ago were.

But despite its painful prevalence in our society, divorce is always something that happens to someone else — something that after a certain age, we think we’ve escaped. Even though we know the stats — about 40 to 50 percent of couples in this country that walk down the aisle end up walking into court — we tend to think our own family will somehow skate by unscathed.

I did.

After all, I’d like to think I had the best childhood ever: one home to come home to; one Christmas morning; one loving relationship to look up to; two parents around for dinner. Divorce wasn’t in my parents’ future — until it was, that is.

How do unions so seemingly good go up in flames after decades?

You May Face Unique Struggles — And Perks

When your parents get divorced after you’ve already left home, you escape some of the pains you’d otherwise experience if they had split when you were a young child. In fact, having the foundation of a happy childhood can sometimes make the divorce smart less.

“My childhood was awesome. My parents were fantastic,” Chris McMahon, a 20-something from Massachusetts whose parents recently divorced, tells Yahoo Health. “I appreciate that they didn’t do this while I was younger because I would have had to split time between houses like my friends who had divorced parents did.”

Related: Divorced — and Dating Again — Before Most of Your Friends Are Engaged

In fact, Gail Bleach, a Maryland-based psychologist who specializes in divorce, tells Yahoo Health that parents who stay together until their children are raised often do it for their kids. After all, a stable environment proves to be important for development — and young divorces (where family traditions are upended) can be more acrimonious, she says.

Michael Paradise, a 20-something who lives in Virginia and whose parents divorced when he was 26, agrees. When he graduated from the University of Kansas in 2010, he felt like his family life was the envy of everyone around him. “My parents’ love story was like that of a fairy tale,” he tells Yahoo Health. “I had come from a loving home where I could count on my fingers the number of times I had seen my parents fight.”

Adult children do have to deal with different challenges when it comes to divorce: “The hardest part is juggling my parents’ feelings. It was frustrating to have to hear their side of the story over and over again. I hate to sound selfish, but going into the formative period of my career, it was hard not to be annoyed by the constant neediness,” says McMahon.

Fortunately for some — like Paradise — parents keep the kids out of it. “I am grateful that … the worst part of the divorce [was] finding out about it,” he says.

Rachael Schultz, a 26-year-old who lives in Brooklyn and also recently experienced the divorce of her parents, tells Yahoo Health that handling the minute issues has been the hardest. “I still feel weird when I’m telling a story to my mom that involves my dad, or vice versa. When I go through a breakup, I don’t want to hear about my ex,” she says. “If part of growing up is realizing your parents are adults too, it makes me stop and think, ‘Does my mom really want to hear what my dad is up to?’”

And of course, double the turkey and double the celebrations do not for a stress-free holiday make. As McMahon puts it, “It sucks having to have two holidays every year and having to turn one down for the other.”

Related: 9 Really Weird Causes of Divorce

Age Can Help You Cope

According to Bleach, there’s no question that adult children are better able to handle the pain after a divorce. “The more years, the better,” she says.

McMahon says that being an adult allows him to better see the silver lining. “The positives are clear: There was so much tension between my parents before, it made it a pain to be around them. Now, I get to see them on their own, and it’s generally much better.”

A divorce sans abuse, substance abuse, or extreme circumstances is indeed usually less traumatic on adults than on young children, says Bleach. To gauge this, you have to think about how much the split disrupts your life. At 25, when you’re out of the house, it might be not at all. But at 12, you have no say in anything, she says.

McMahon agrees: “It seems much more traumatic to see your parents break up when you have this ideal vision of a family and relationships at a young age. Being an adult made it easier to look at it objectively and say, ‘Yeah, I guess that was bound to happen.’”

“I think being able to view their divorce through the eyes of a (semi)-mature adult instead of a rose-colored-glasses kid made me able to take the effects in stride,” Schultz says.

After all, while divorces that involve young children seem to be more disruptive on families, high-conflict splits can occur at any age. And Bleach estimates that about a third of adult children who experience their parents getting divorced later in life fail to move on properly. The divorce either burdens them individually or negatively impacts the parent-child bond.

Related: Is It Normal to Contemplate Divorce When You’re Married?

Think about it: If your dad is left in financial trouble and you have to pick up the slack, or if your mom treats you as a confidant instead of a daughter, that can disturb relationships going forward, Bleach says.

This was the case for Schultz, whose parents’ breakup involved an affair. “My dad was pretty childish in the way he went about changing his life, but I feel more valid being angry and more entitled to hold a grudge than I may have felt as a kid.”

She adds, too, that while she wasn’t forced to choose sides (she was out of the house), she still did: “If one of my good friends cheated, I would choose sides. If someone is going to be human and make a mistake, I’m going to be human and stand by what I think is and isn’t OK.”

A Changed View of Divorce Opens You Up

Being a little bit older can also give you a newfound outlook on divorce itself. I’ll admit it: Before my parents split, I kind of looked down on people who came from broken families. Guys with divorced parents might not be able to commit; friends who had been through it at a young age were worse off, I assumed.

But then it happened to my family — and I found the most solace in people who shared my experiences, whether at age 10 or 25.

“It sort of feels like I joined the same sh***y club kids of divorce were in for a long time — one I was pretty sure I’d never join,” McMahon says.

But the thing is, once you’re in the club, you find that the members understand your fresh wounds. “I immediately found close friends whose parents were going through the exact same thing or who had gone through divorce late in life,” says Paradise, who adds he bonded with those people, sharing stories and advice.

“I found that I also bonded with people whose parents had divorced early in their marriage,” he says. “We found ourselves comparing the pros and cons of each situation and the similarities in both. It was through those connections that I coped and my attitude on the divorce changed from avoidance to acceptance.”

That said, not everything between a later-in-life divorce and an early-on one are similar. “Since my parents divorced during my mid-20s, a lot of my relationship was already established. For someone whose parents divorced early in life, I imagine that that event defined much of their relationship personality,” says Schultz.

Related: Get Married in Your Late 20s If You’d Rather Not Get Divorced

You Can Learn From Your Parents’ Experiences

The other thing you realize about relationships: They change, whether you’re married, divorced, or single. And seeing your own parents’ love die can impact your own love life — for better or worse.

“Marriages once seemed like mythical, unbreakable bonds, but they’re just super-serious relationships — which don’t always last,” says McMahon.

In fact, with that realization, McMahon has learned to further consider longer-term implications of committing to someone. “It’s easy to fall quickly in love and, in the process, ignore the things you don’t necessarily like about that person,” he says. “But you can’t leave those issues unaddressed because they’ll grow over time and can result in serious schisms.” His parents’ divorce has also made him more honest with himself about what he’s looking for — and a bit dubious of people seeking to become very serious very quickly.

Schultz adds: “I think it also makes you take the ‘to have and to hold, for better, for worse’ even more seriously because you’ve seen people bail on those vows during the ‘worse’ periods.”

When Schultz’s parents split — a product of failed communication, she says — she realized that in her own relationships, she bickered a lot like her parents had. In the aftermath, she even ended a five-plus-year relationship, realizing it wouldn’t be able to navigate all of the different potential paths she wanted to take in life.

“Now, the most important thing to me is addressing problems head on. Open communication is so important because we’re all still trying to find our way, and I want my partner to feel like we can explore our own paths together, talking through potential changes and making decisions that are best for both of us,” Schultz says. “Otherwise, 35 years down the line, I’ll find myself in the same net of resentment and secrecy as my parents did.”

Paradise, a once self-proclaimed hopeless romantic, is now approaching 30 as a single man. “My views of marriage are polar opposite than they were five years ago,” he says, and in some ways, that might be a good thing: “I’m not just looking for love at first sight, but rather trying to get to know someone before taking a plunge. I grill girls about their values and goals.”

Of course, there is also the negative: “In some ways, I think [my parents’] divorce has made me a cynic about marriage,” Paradise adds.

And, unfortunately, he may be right. “Children of divorce are more likely to have relationship and commitment problems and are more likely to divorce themselves,” says Bleach. Some research suggests that if one partner comes from a divorced family, the couple may be up to twice as likely to divorce. Other studies suggest that people with divorced parents bring more negative communication to their own relationships than those with married parents.

But there are also other factors at play in determining how much you’re affected — like how much conflict there was in the divorce or how involved you were. Plus, think about all of this on a curve, says Bleach. If you’re 30 and already married, you already have different role models and beliefs in place. You’re going to be less affected by your parents’ split than if you are 9. But, as Bleach puts it: “There’s no ‘up until a certain age’ [in the way] it affects you.”

The good news: It can have the opposite effect too. “A lot of people vow that they’re going to use their parents’ example as a model of what not to do — and they do,” says Bleach.

Related: The One Universal Secret to a Lasting Marriage

As for me? I never thought my parents would get divorced — but I also never thought I’d be glad that they did.

Someone once told me that divorce can be like a car crash — leaving victims of all sorts in its wake. But it’s also a choice — one that takes a lot of courage and strength. From what I can tell, creating a new life in your 50s doesn’t look easy, and it’s something I don’t know if I’d be able to do. And for that strength, I give my parents credit and kudos because ultimately — and I think most kids of divorce would agree with me — I just want them both to be happy. And sometimes divorce is the first painful step toward that happiness.

What Can Drive Aging Couples Apart

Susan Brown, the chair of the department of sociology at Bowling Green State University, who studies gray divorce, tells Yahoo Health about the particular factors that uniquely plague older couples:

• An empty nest: “Many couples will stay together for kids, but once the kids leave, the couple no longer has the children as a buffer,” Brown says. That turning point can leave couples to face their issues head on and even call it quits.

• Retirement: “If you’re busy with kids and careers, maybe you don’t have to pay as much attention to your marriage, but when you’re sitting there staring at each other, some people may decide they don’t want to spend those years with this person anymore,” says Brown.

• It’s OK to divorce: Decades ago, a couple may have been looked down upon for divorcing, but things are different today. “It’s a much more individualized view: Today, people think about marriage in the sense of ‘Is it making me happy — do I feel fulfilled?’” Brown explains. “If the answer is no, divorce is an acceptable solution.”

• Women are more independent: Financial autonomy for women makes it easier for them to leave marriages, says Brown. In fact, women initiate most divorces in this country. Among many reasons, researchers speculate, this could be partly because marriage is still dated in some of its traditions (like a woman taking a man’s name), which women may feel trapped by.

• Remarriages are less successful: “The Baby Boomers [people between ages 50 and 69] were the first generation to experience the high divorce rates of the ’70s and ’80s, and many got remarried,” says Brown. But second marriages are 2.5 times as likely to end in divorce than first marriages, she says. Plus, with a new spouse come a slew of issues: stepchildren, new family dynamics, and changes in ties with kids’ biological parents. “Therapists would argue step-families don’t survive long enough to surmount these challenges,” Brown says. “It usually takes five to seven years to shake out the wrinkles.”

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