On Woman’s Hour recently, Anita Rani and her guests set out to celebrate the positive sides of a woman’s midlife. Forget the crisis: your forties and fifties could instead be a time for change, a refresh. You could take up a new hobby, they said, or a new exercise regime. Or you could get a divorce!
What’s alarming is that this sort of discussion isn’t unusual. I regularly spot articles in newspapers and on social media that talk about divorce as if it’s just the latest wellness trend. They usually go like this: a middle-aged woman walks out on a long marriage and insists that she’s never been happier, that she’s free, that she’s ‘starting a new chapter’ in her life. She then demands through a rictus grin that you be happy for her. Here’s one headline: ‘I love my husband. That’s why I’m divorcing him.’ Is that supposed to make everyone feel better?
In the past decade, 62 per cent of divorces in England and Wales were initiated by women. That’s not to say women are to blame for marital breakdown. After all, most affairs are instigated by men, although a study done in the past ten years shows that adultery accounts for only 14 per cent of divorces in the UK. The past decade has also seen a sharp rise in older women ending marriages of 20 years or more. The number of women over 65 seeking a divorce in the US has tripled since 1990. What’s pushing these women out of their marriages?
Some of the reasons women give in the media are offensively trivial.
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