Catching My Second Wind - The Downhill Stretch (Part Deux)

Catching My Second Wind - The Downhill Stretch (Part Deux)

IF FIFTY IS THE NEW thirty and sixty is the new forty, we shouldn’t be surprised that divorce among men and women ages forty to seventy-nine is rising—not just in the United States but worldwide. This phenomenon has been dubbed “gray divorce,” but I think it should be called “dismayed divorce.” Or at least I was dismayed when my father announced, as I was planning my parents’ silver wedding anniversary, that there wouldn’t be one. As a totally self-centered seventeen-year-old, the first words out of my mouth were, “Can’t you guys just wait until one of you dies?” (Oh, how mature of me.) I didn’t know then what I know now—that only about 55 percent of all newlyweds will dance to the oldies at their twenty-fifth anniversary celebration.^a

I have two theories on why people wait thirty years before divorcing, and neither hypothesis involves children. My first theory is this: they think it will get better.

Even though they have moved through their marriage more as siblings than as lovers, they think that one day the old libido is just going to magically correct itself. It will not. Ladies, your box springs need to get the same pounding as your treadmill. And like your exercise routine, this takes discipline. Not a very sexy term, but, girlfriends, you need to get back into the routine of making love to your husband, and he must get into the discipline of making love to you (though this never seems too hard for them).

I also think that couples believe that their friendship will rekindle. Just like bodies need to be fed daily, so do marriages. You can’t go twenty-five years stifling rich conversation, failing to develop mutual interests, and forgetting how to dream together. Your relationship will die of starvation.

You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. (James 4:2)

Are you on the downhill stretch, thinking it will get better? Maybe it will—ask God to show you how to make it to number fifty.

^a Alison Clarke-Stewart and Cornelia Brentano, Divorce: Causes and Consequences (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 16.