He Wants Another Wife. She Wants Her Saturday Back

By: Maureen Steele

Something curious is happening after gray divorce.

Men and women are leaving marriages of twenty, thirty and forty years, walking out the same courthouse doors; and frequently appearing to want completely different things on the other side.

A lot of men want another relationship. A lot of women want peace.

Obviously, there are countless exceptions. Women fall madly in love at 70. Men build magnificent independent lives after divorce. Human beings stubbornly refuse to fit neatly into columns.

But the pattern is interesting enough to ask why.

Why do so many older divorced women seem perfectly content not to remarry? Maybe because they know exactly what the job entails.

For generations, marriage wasn’t simply a romantic relationship for women. It frequently came bundled with an enormous amount of invisible labor: Remember the birthdays. Schedule the appointments. Buy the Christmas presents. Know where the insurance cards are. Keep track of everyone’s medications. Plan dinner. Make dinner. Clean up dinner. Notice we’re almost out of toilet paper. Remember his mother’s birthday. Make the reservation. Pack for the trip. Keep the family connected.

And then comes the most exhausting assignment of all: Make sure everyone is okay.

For women who began motherhood in their early twenties, that responsibility can continue almost uninterrupted for forty years.

Children grow up, but motherhood doesn’t end. Parents get old. Grandchildren arrive. Husbands age. Careers continue.

And somewhere underneath that mountain of responsibility is a woman who can’t remember the last time she asked herself what she wanted to do Saturday.

Then comes divorce.

Suddenly Saturday belongs to her. All of it.

This may help explain something researchers have observed about later-life divorce: men appear more likely than women to repartner afterward, while many women remain single.

Perhaps that’s because men and women can experience the end of marriage differently.

A man may lose his primary source of companionship, emotional intimacy and domestic structure all at once.

A woman may lose those things, too. But depending upon the marriage, she may simultaneously lose a job she didn’t realize she’d been working. And nobody retires from a forty-year unpaid position and immediately starts scanning the classifieds for the same job.

That doesn’t mean women don’t want men.

There’s an enormous difference between wanting love and wanting another marriage.

A woman can want romance without wanting someone’s laundry. She can want companionship without surrendering autonomy. She can adore having dinner with you and still want you to go home afterward.And perhaps the most radical realization available to a woman in her 50s or 60s is this: Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing.

There are deeply lonely married people. Ask any woman who spent years trying to communicate with someone who wasn’t listening. There is a particular loneliness in lying six inches from another human being and feeling a thousand miles away.

By comparison, sitting peacefully alone with a dog, a book and a glass of wine may not feel lonely at all. It can feel luxurious, decadent even. 

This is why I think our culture misunderstands the older single woman.

We still carry an antiquated assumption that she must be waiting. Waiting for somebody to ask her out or for  another husband. Waiting to be chosen. Maybe she’s not waiting.

Maybe she already chose. Herself.

That doesn’t make marriage obsolete or men unnecessary. A magnificent relationship between two people who respect one another remains one of life’s greatest gifts.

But that’s precisely the problem. Once a woman has learned that solitude is preferable to a bad relationship, the price of admission goes up considerably. You’re no longer competing with another man. You’re competing with her peace.

That’s a formidable opponent.

Her home is exactly the temperature she likes. The television isn’t blaring. Nobody is sulking. Nobody is asking where something is while standing three feet from it.

She travels where she wants. She sees whom she wants. She spends Sunday however she wants. So if someone enters that life, he has to add something to it rather than merely occupy space inside it.

Perhaps that’s one reason some divorced men seem more eager to partner again while some divorced women hesitate.

He may remember what marriage gave him. he may remember what marriage required of her. Neither perspective is necessarily wrong. But they aren’t the same. And this might be one of the quiet social revolutions happening among women in midlife.

They aren’t rejecting love. They’re redefining the terms under which they’re willing to receive it. They’ve learned that companionship is wonderful, but peace is companionship too.

And after forty years of asking what everybody else wants for breakfast, where everybody else wants to go, whether everybody else is happy and what everybody else needs from her, an older woman may finally wake up alone on a Saturday morning, pour herself a cup of coffee and realize something astonishing: Nobody needs anything. Nobody is angry. Nobody is waiting.

The entire day belongs to her.

And she is not lonely.

She is free.