Since 1990, the divorce rate among older people has almost tripled

New research shows a nearly three-fold increase in the divorce rate for older adults compared to three decades ago. An increasing number of older people have never married.

The results suggest opportunities for changes in the design and programming of senior living communities to adapt to changing lifestyles.

“Traditionally, when we study older adults, we tend to focus on thinking about marriage and widowhood,” Bowling Green State University sociology professor Dr. Susan L. Brown said in a statement. She authored the study with graduate student Jaden Loo. “These numbers show that we really need to broaden our perspective and think more broadly about the changing composition of older adults who are increasingly divorced or never married,” Brown added.

Researchers from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research in Bowling Green, Ohio, found that the divorce rate among people aged 65 and over increased from 5.2% in 1990 to 15.2% in 2022. saying: one in 10 people divorcing in the United States today is 65 or older.

Although the reasons for the increase in divorce rates were beyond the scope of the study, Brown theorized that longer life expectancy and the fragility of remarriage may be contributing factors to divorce.

“This cohort of people experienced the divorce revolution in the 1970s as young adults, and many of them eventually remarried,” she said. “We know that remarriages are more likely to end in divorce than first marriages, which may be one reason for the increase.”

In addition to the increased divorce rate, researchers found that the percentage of older adults who were not married rose steadily from 5.2% in 1990 to 6.6% in 2022. At the same time, the study found, increases in life expectancy widowhood has decreased by more than 14% over the last three decades.