Why there have never been more single women over fifty

What a twenty-nine-year marriage looks like when it ends

The numbers on this come from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University, and the detail that stops you is the length of the marriages.

The median first grey divorce ends a marriage that lasted twenty-nine years. Half of them ran between twenty-two and thirty-seven years. Only 3.6% ended marriages of five years or less.

So do the arithmetic out loud. A woman whose twenty-nine-year marriage ended in 2009 married in 1980, somewhere between Carter and Reagan. She was in her twenties. She is in her seventies now. She has been single for longer than some of the men messaging her have been able to drive.

Second marriages break differently: median eighteen years, and 15.3% of those end inside five. But the headline figure is the first one, and it describes a very particular kind of person: not somebody whose marriage failed quickly, but somebody who did the whole thing and came out the other side.

Which is roughly the profile of most of the women on this site. The ones looking for sex with younger men are mostly not newly single. They’ve had three decades of one arrangement and have decided they’d like a different one.

Who worked this out

Susan Brown and I-Fen Lin, both sociology professors at Bowling Green, co-coined the term “gray divorce” and have spent most of their careers on it. Brown founded the university’s family research centre with Wendy Manning in 2007. Between them the group has published more than fifteen papers on the subject, funded by three grants from the National Institute on Aging.

We mention this because almost nothing in this corner of the internet is sourced to anybody. Across about thirty competing pages on these subjects we found exactly one cited statistic. One. So when the numbers on this page have names attached, that’s deliberate. You can go and check them, and we’d rather you did.

Their core findings: the divorce rate among older adults doubled between 1990 and 2010. The share of adults over sixty-five who are currently divorced has tripled since 1990. Nearly one in ten people getting divorced in America today is sixty-five or over.

The part that has stopped

Here’s the bit that gets left out of most coverage, including the coverage that cites the same researchers.

Grey divorce isn’t still climbing. The rate has largely flattened since 2010, and for people between fifty and sixty-four it has drifted slightly down. Only the over-sixty-fives are still moving.

We could have left that out. It’s the one sentence on this page that makes the trend sound smaller. But the surge is what matters and the surge already happened — twenty years of it, affecting a generation that is now in its sixties, seventies and eighties. The rate normalising doesn’t send anybody back to their husband. All those women are still here.

Longer lives have pushed in the same direction from the other end. Widowhood has fallen by more than a tenth as life expectancy has improved, which means more of the women who are single at seventy got there by choice rather than bereavement.

What happens after a gray divorce

This is the part nobody writes about, and it’s the most useful thing on the page.

Brown, Lin and a colleague, Christopher Julian, followed 561 people through the Health and Retirement Study (a long-running federal survey) for the ten years after their grey divorce. A decade on:

• 13% had remarried
• 23% were living with a partner
• 64% were still unpartnered

Now look at who’s in each group. Men were 64% of the people who remarried and 70% of those cohabiting. Among the ones who were still on their own, men were exactly half.

Read that twice, because it’s the whole story. Men are the clear majority of people who find somebody after a grey divorce. They’re only half of the people who don’t. Earlier work by the same group put the repartnering rate at roughly 37% for men against 22% for women.

The money moves the same way, and harder. Lin and Brown found that after a grey divorce a woman’s income relative to her needs falls by 45%. For a man it falls by 21%. Wealth drops by about half for both. In an earlier study the same group, with Kagan Hammersmith, found poverty rates among grey-divorced adults of pensionable age running at 27% for women and about 11% for men.

And when older people do repartner, increasingly they don’t marry. Just over four million Americans over fifty were living with a partner they weren’t married to in 2022, about four times the number in 2000. Men do it at nearly twice the rate of women: 118 per thousand unmarried men against 67 per thousand unmarried women.

So the pool of long-term single older women isn’t just larger than it was. It’s larger than the equivalent pool of men, because the men keep leaving it. How unevenly that plays out across the country is a separate story, and we’ve put the numbers on where the single women over fifty actually are on their own page.

Two honest limits on all that. The follow-up covers 561 people, which is a real federal survey rather than a poll but is still 561 people. And “divorced” does not mean “available.” The data says there are far more single women over fifty than there used to be and that most of them stay single. It says nothing whatsoever about what any individual one of them wants.

Why we’re telling you this

We sell memberships to a site where older women meet younger men. We have an obvious commercial interest in you believing there are a lot of single women over fifty, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

So we’ve sourced every number above to people with no stake in it: university researchers working on federal survey data, all of it published and linkable. Including the 64% who stay on their own, which is not a figure that helps us sell anything.

If you want to know how the site works before you sign up, getting started covers it, and how verification works explains what we do and don’t check. The women here have mostly been single a while and are specific about what they’re after, which makes this a straightforward place to meet somebody and a poor one for anybody hoping to be mysterious about it.

Sources

Marriage duration, the 8%-to-40% shift and the post-2010 flattening — NCFMR Family Profile FP-24-12. The doubling, the over-65 tripling and the researchers — Bowling Green State University. Repartnering over ten years and the cited economic findings — Susan Brown, I-Fen Lin and Christopher Julian, Social Security Beneficiary Status and Repartnering after Gray Divorce. Cohabitation among the over-fifties — NCFMR Family Profile FP-24-14.