New research finds an almost threefold increase in the percentage of divorced older adults compared with three decades ago. And an increasing number of older adults never have married.
The findings suggest opportunities for changes in the design and programming of senior living communities to accommodate evolving lifestyles.
“Traditionally, when we’ve studied older adults, we tend to confine our focus to thinking about marriage and widowhood,” Bowling Green State University sociology professor Susan L. Brown, PhD, said in a statement. She authored the study with graduate student Jaden Loo. “These figures show that we really need to widen the lens and think more broadly about the shifting composition of older adults, who are increasingly divorced or never married,” Brown added.
The investigators at the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at the Bowling Green, OH, educational institution found that the divorce rate among people aged 65 or more years increased from 5.2% in 1990 to 15.2% in 2022. Or, put another way, one in every 10 people divorcing in the United States today is aged 65 or more years.
Although reasons for the increase in divorce were beyond the scope of the study, Brown theorized that contributing factors could include increased life expectancy and the fragility of remarriages.
“This cohort of individuals experienced the divorce revolution in the 1970s as young adults, and many eventually remarried,” she said. “We know that remarriages are more likely to end in divorce than first marriages, which could be one cause for the increase.”
In addition to increased levels of divorce, the researchers found that the percentage of never-married older adults had increased steadily from 5.2% in 1990 to 6.6% in 2022. At the same time, according to the study, gains in life expectancy have reduced widowhood by more than 14% during the past three decades.
