Landmark report

As the founder of Noon, a community of women in midlife, I’ve spent the past couple of months researching a landmark report about midlife divorce that examines why so-called silver splitters (those in their 50s and 60s) have the highest rates of divorce, and particularly why so many midlife women are calling time on their marriages.

In the era of the “100 Year-Life” (those of us in midlife now are statistically likely to live to our 90s or beyond), 50 is only halfway through – it’s only lunchtime. The survey we conducted with Survation for the report (2000 women aged 45-65 benchmarked against the UK population) found that increasingly, these so-called “walkaway wives” are realising they don’t have to stay in marriages that no longer work for them.

Indeed, nearly half of divorces are now being instigated by midlife women, with 56% of the female respondents saying they would end a marriage because they were unhappy.

And while divorce used to be seen as a personal failure, and carried a stigma, our report found that nearly two-thirds of the 220 divorced women interviewed for the study thought there was no shame attached to ending a marriage – while a third of “walkaway wives” said that in the aftermath, they felt “happier than they had ever been”.

Few were worried about being alone, and 76% of women who had already divorced said they would do it again in a heartbeat if a subsequent marriage wasn’t to their liking.

When we asked the women to describe in one word how they felt about their divorce, the top answer was “sad” (of course), but interestingly, the next three were “relief” “happiness” and “liberation”. Helen*, also in our Cheshire focus group, summed it up: “Ultimately, I just got fed up. It was constant: not turning up when he was supposed to, not being there physically, not being available for the children or me.”

Rather than suffering in unhappy unions, today’s midlife women are voting with their feet and getting out. At the launch event at the London offices of Mishcon de Reya, the prominent City law firm (which, alongside private bank Julius Baer, funded the Noon research), model and wellness entrepreneur Jemma Kidd, 51, talked about how she’d felt about her own marriage breakdown: “I am having way more fun on the other side of divorce,” she said (to cheers from the largely female midlife audience).

“You walk through that fire, and then you come out the other side, and you just thrive. I’ve really learnt that the best revenge is to live well, to thrive. The people who got me through it all were my girlfriends – they were my lifeline, particularly as I divorced during Covid.”

Jennifer Howze, a 57-year-old entrepreneur, says: “My ex is a good person, and a great dad. There’s always sadness about what happened, but I’m happy we’ve both come through it. Since then, in fact, life has got better – I’ve had amazing opportunities in work and travel that I couldn’t have imagined… Post-divorce, I’ve moved into a positive new phase, but I could have got here quicker with more support.”

Comedian Shappi Korsandi, 52, said at the launch event: “Divorce is agony, I’d lie in bed at night with an elephant on my chest, my heart pounding. It took a long time to come through it – I’d be crying before a gig, and crying on members of my audiences who came out with me afterwards. I remember being in the park with my son, and seeing a family of three and just weeping – and they were just geese!”

She explained how she’d gone to therapy to cope and became so fascinated by it that she is now training to be a psychologist herself, explaining: “I kept a deep empathy for my ex-husband – he is the father of my child. I told my son I was divorcing his father as a husband, but not as his daddy.”

Of course, the elephant in the room in all of this is the men. While married women report less satisfaction with their lives, married men tend to be healthier and happier than their unmarried brothers. Our survey looked at midlife divorce for women, and we wanted to understand the drivers for this new “walkaway wives” phenomenon.

Sandra Davis, a partner at Mishcon de Reya who has been working in this area for 40 years, commissioned the research because she could see the new dynamic and wanted to understand more about it. What emerged through the stories that we heard was of a generation of husbands often lacking the emotional tools or communication skills necessary to heal the rifts with their long-time wives.

While women traditionally just stayed put, they are no longer content to do that. Many of the women talked about how the old-fashioned marital deal summed up by Theresa May when she talked about pink jobs (kids, cooking, domesticity) and blue jobs (wine, bins, finance) in marriage has run its course – many of those who had given up work to raise families regretted relinquishing their careers and agency. Over half of women in midlife are the main breadwinner in their family now, and with that financial independence has come a diminishing willingness to tolerate an unsatisfying situation.

Many of the women talked about finally becoming the women they always wanted to be in midlife. They spoke of how, having spent their lives up to that point looking after everyone else, they had decided that “it’s my turn now, my turn to do something for me”. Having felt taken for granted by their husbands, they were leaving to have a shot at “living my best life”, as one of the women put it.

So what of the husbands? Anecdotally, it doesn’t sound good. I’ve heard of one who, six months after his wife left, was found by his teenage children passed out in an alcoholic stupor. Another “was just mouldering at home”, according to Fiona* in our Surrey group. “I’ve gone out and made new friends, been travelling a lot, got a promotion at work. He just seems to be feeling sorry for himself.”

There was a sense in the focus groups that while women went through a grief process, but then picked themselves up again, men either fell into a new relationship – often repeating old patterns with a younger woman and finding themselves fathers again later in life – or became depressed, lonely and bitter. Perhaps the lack of empathy their wives were complaining about also meant they lacked some of the social skills necessary to start again. Certainly, they lacked some of the community that women had found to reinvent themselves, and the friends.

It was striking in the groups how many of the midlife women who had found new male partners were not intending to cohabit: “My days of picking up someone else’s socks, of dealing with their s— are done,” said Elaine*, 61, in our London focus group. Another woman who had remarried had kept her own establishment: “We’re not living together, I value my independence now above everything,” she explained.

As we all live longer, this sense of starting a new phase in midlife is only going to get stronger. The longevity bonus is this new period of healthy, active life between 50 and 75, when we are not yet old, and have the possibility of revisiting the dreams we had when we were younger.

Many of the women explained that those dreams were put on hold by motherhood, and other caring responsibilities. Midlife women are realising that there is still time to do something for themselves. That having spent 50 years ticking everybody else’s boxes and putting themselves at the bottom of their to-do lists, they now have this phase where – fuelled by the sod-it hormones of the menopause – they are finally going to please themselves.

The upshot is that if men want to hang on to their “walkaway wives”, they are going to have to try a lot harder to keep them happy.

*Names have been changed.