Women dating in their 50s and 60s is now normal and celebrated. Let's take a moment to appreciate how far we've come
“Why late love is so much better than young love”; “The midlifers who found love on a dating show”; “The truth about dating in your 50s”. These are a sample of recent headlines from just one British newspaper, The Times, which seems to be mining endless clickbait on the topic of midlife dating. Some readers might sneer, but I marvel at the victory they represent.
Amid all the horror of the US Supreme Court overturning abortion rights, and the broader backlash globally against women’s rights, it’s easy to forget that one of the world’s biggest and most undervalued progressive victories – especially for women – has been divorce.
Divorced women of my parents’ pre-war generation, and the baby boomers that followed them, felt the burden of shame and isolation, whatever their cultural or faith background. Their children did too. And it was always a gendered shame. Divorce was only legalised in Ireland in 1996. State control of women’s bodies and behaviour was so entrenched that the Irish state made it possible for men to marry each other three years before it allowed women any right to abortion in 2018.
In a way, the subject of divorce has been on my mind for decades. Partly because, aged 21, I wrote my degree thesis on Anne Brontë’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the politics of Victorian marriage law – a few months, as it turned out, before my own parents separated.
The novel was a sensation on its publication in 1848, because it dared to challenge the long-established legal principle that on marriage, a woman’s possessions and her children became the sole property of the husband. Brontë’s account of a woman defying the law to flee a violent husband with their young son and seek independence was an important landmark on the road to the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act – a law that gave English women the earliest limited rights to their own earnings.
I thought about Anne Brontë again when my own divorce was finalised in 2023, after 27 years of marriage. I felt so grateful to the many women who’d fought for the rights we now enjoy, and who enabled me to be unafraid. I saw how often women born before me had been
pressured to give up paid work to raise children, often making it difficult to strike out alone. And, until 2000, there was the double unfairness of having no right to a share of their husband’s pension.
Having witnessed my parents’ divorce at close hand, I now see I planned from a young age never to be dependent on a man. A privileged choice, I know. Too many women must battle either poverty as single mothers, or in some cases the patriarchal biases of foreign court systems for access to their own children abducted by ex-husbands.
Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust famously chronicled the cruel farce of an innocent husband staging an adulterous weekend away to give grounds for divorce from his unfaithful wife. Despite some legal reform in 1969, no-fault divorce was only definitively introduced in England in 2021, ending the humiliating requirement to produce a morally tinged “reason”, such as adultery or unreasonable behaviour, and removing the possibility of one party disputing the decision to divorce.
The Office for National Statistics reported a huge leap in divorces that year – over 113,000 in England and Wales, mostly petitioned by women, and suggesting a dam-burst of couples waiting for the legal change. The divorce rate dropped by nearly 30 per cent the following year, unsurprisingly, but has since begun to settle down again.
Other evidence on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that women with their own wealth, once free from unhappy marriages, are in no rush to marry again. The Washington Post earlier this year cited the figure of over seven million households in the US with a net worth of $1 million or more headed by women, most of whom reach that milestone by age 58.
Given the legal principle of a 50-50 split of assets on divorce in British law, many older women here too are choosing to maintain new relationships out of wedlock, and sometimes in separate homes, if they’re wealthy enough. Once bitten, not twice shy – but practical and unburdened by societal shame.
So I grin at the endless articles about dating in your 50s, or about happy single women, or whether “partner” is a terrible term for the person you love. And I thank the many women (and men!) who fought for my freedom for centuries. I promise never to take it for granted.
This article is from New Humanist’s winter 2024 issue. Subscribe now.
