Rediscover Your Spouse!

When Al and Tipper Gore announced their divorce earlier this year after 40 years of marriage a new term was born - gray divorce. It appears that breaking up after 20 or more years in a long-term partnership or marriage is on the rise, particularly among boomers. And the most common reason, according to a recent survey, is no longer sharing common interests.  

Is gray divorce a natural consequence of our changing times or can we learn to avoid it? In a recent article in The Positive Aging Newsletter authors Kenneth and Mary Gergen suggest that rediscovering our partner or spouse is a positive aging skill we all need to cultivate and they offer the following suggestions on how to get started: 

• Seek out new contexts of relating: travel, sports, hiking, theater
• Explore new relational activities: massage, cooking, gardening,
• Expand personal hobbies to include the other: golf, bridge, fishing
• Re-explore the past together, with particular sensitivity to possible re-ignitions of old feelings of joy and togetherness
• Explore the activities you once liked to do together, but which were abandoned for lack of time
• Allow one’s partner time and space for individual development and exploration, the results of which can later be shared
• Be on the lookout for contexts in which you can pleasantly surprise the other. If readers would like to share their own skills of re-discovery we would be happy to pass them on in future issues of the newsletter.