Founder
The Family Imprint Institute
The house felt different now that Emma and Reya were off at university. For seventeen years, the demands of family life had functioned as a kind of silent third party in the marriage, absorbing attention, energy, and everything neither of them had found the time to say.
She had moved through those years like a woman crossing a river on stones, each step requiring just enough focus that she never looked up to see where she was going. Now she stands on the opposite bank, looking across to her husband and between them lay years of unspoken things. The resentments had built up in the background, from small things to more significant hurts and misunderstandings that had accumulated.
There had been apologies, they each said it was fine. And it was fine, in the moment, because there was no time to not be fine. There was a parent with a scary diagnosis that needed attention and a parent-teacher conference that night and the dentist appointment that kept getting forgotten.
Lately, the truth had started to feel more urgent than keeping the peace. Twenty years ago she would have swallowed the comment he made about her mother. This time she turned to him in the car and said, with quiet clarity: ‘That’s unfair, actually unkind, and you know it is.’
Sometimes in the quiet after the children leave, the unspoken things finally get to speak.
The Rise of Grey Divorce
This experience is far from unusual. Separations among people aged 50 and older have roughly doubled since 1990. Breakups in this demographic cluster in the mid-40s to mid-50s, that perfect storm where children launch, careers plateau, and for many women, perimenopause and menopause insist on a biological and psychological renegotiation of everything that came before.
Most people don’t decide to suddenly leave a long marriage, they simply stop being able to stay because of all that has accumulated.
Often a result of two people slowly becoming strangers under the same roof, grey divorce tends to arrive not as a shock, but as the name for something that has been true for a very long time. Arriving when the scaffolding of family life comes down and what remains is simply two people, often surprised by how little they recognize each other.
Many people talk about the end of a long marriage as though it is some sort of failure. It absolutely isn’t. The marriage that raised your family and shaped the person standing here today deserves respect, not judgement. What you shared together was real, even if what you need now is different.
What would truly hurt is to let this ending harden your heart, to stay stuck in blame, repeating old hurts that no longer have anywhere useful to go. To walk into a new relationship carrying the same patterns that broke the last one.
The wisdom is in being able to say, this mattered, this shaped me, and it is complete. That is not giving up. That is acknowledgment, discernment and the foundation every next chapter deserves
The grey divorce surge is not a generation walking away from commitment. It is a generation finally understanding that staying, at any cost, in any condition, was never the same thing as living in a healthy marriage.
Knowing that doesn’t make leaving easy. That doesn’t make the ending any less complicated to live through. The years are too tangled, the memories too layered, the love, even when it has changed beyond recognition, too real to simply file away in divorce court.
What I have seen, in 20 years of working with couples through grey divorce, is that the grief is real and the relief is real, and both of those things can be true at once. You are allowed to mourn a marriage you also know you needed to leave. You are allowed to be grateful for what it was and honest about what it became.
If you are reading this and recognizing your own life in these words, the accumulated silences, the apologies that were never quite enough, what rises is often not just the end of a marriage, but the echo of older patterns asking to be seen. The real question is not “who is to blame,” but much more connected to what is this ending here to reveal? From that clarity, you can grieve and you can exhale, before deciding your next step.
Read more articles by Johanna Lynn.
About Johanna Lynn
Johanna Lynn is a therapist with over 20 years’ experience working with couples and individuals navigating relationships. Specialising in grey divorce and re-building life after divorce. Visit www.johannalynn.ca