Hey guys, I’ve recently realized I’m not maximizing my presence here on YouTube with videos about scientific research and progressive politics, so it’s time to pump up my subscribers by picking a topic that’s sure to be a hit with the kids: old people getting divorced. You want to know more about that, right? This is the first time you’ve seen my channel because the algorithm was like, yes, “grey divorce” is the hot topic for you. You’re gonna love this.
So normally when I’m covering “gender” stuff it’s from my own feminist perspective, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know or care about the way our society fucks up men. In the past I’ve talked about incels, the older male suicide epidemic, and other problems specific to men. And so it’s maybe no surprise that last week I was fascinated by a new study that found that when couples get divorced at an older age (over 50), after their children have grown up and left the home, the divorced men have worse outcomes. Specifically, adult children tend to strengthen their bonds with their mothers following a divorce, while drifting away from their fathers and thus leaving them “at a higher risk of social isolation.”
German sociologists got this result by examining the familial relationships of 606 adult children of parents who got divorced at an older age, specifically looking at how the divorce altered “contact frequency, emotional closeness, and instrumental and emotional support provided to parents.” They found that “Adult child solidarity intensified for mothers but eroded for fathers. This impact was strongest for changes in contact frequency, moderate for changes in emotional closeness, and smaller for changes in support.” Daughters tended to be even more supportive of their mothers, compared to sons.
My initial knee jerk reaction to that was to feel intense pity for the fathers. Like, how awful for them that they not only have to go through a surely traumatic breakup of a long term relationship, and you know that often comes with losing various friends as well, but to also be abandoned by your adult children!
But then I started thinking more about the “why,” which this study did not explore. Might the kids be more annoyed at the parent who initiates the divorce? Maybe, but it turns out that most “grey” divorces are initiated by women. Would they be more likely to only support the partner who comes out of the divorce worse off? Maybe, but while women tend to take a bigger financial hit, men also tend to be worse off after the divorce. If you love them both, why only support the mother?
I was thinking about all of this when I got a text from my mom asking me to call her soon because “it’s important.” I hate these texts because it means that either a relative has died or she’s accidentally locked herself out of her Words With Friends account again. I called, explained how to reset her WWF password, and just before hanging up she said that my father just walked in and would I like to talk to him. In the distant past I would always say yes, and my dad and I would have a very awkward 30-second conversation consisting mostly of very long silences before one of us says, “Whelp” and we agree that it is time to wrap this up. These days I usually just say no thanks, let him know I say hi and I love him, and then I hang up.
And that got me thinking: if my parents were to get divorced, would I strengthen my relationship with my dad? Probably not. And it hurts to admit but yeah, it would probably damage our relationship, even if the divorce was completely friendly and mutual and with no nasty accusations on either side. Because right now, my mom does 99% of the work to maintain the relationship between me and my dad. I can count on one hand the number of times my dad has called me, ever, in my entire life, and I’m pretty sure that each time was to tell me that my mom was in the hospital or something.
And so if my mom is no longer there to force my dad to get on the phone with me on holidays and birthdays, it would have to be on my dad to suddenly start doing work that he probably has no idea is required to maintain relationships.
I don’t think my experience is unique. I think a lot of people who grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s have a similar situation: dad was the primary breadwinner, and my mom worked part time and performed the majority of the childrearing. Now they’re both retired and of course there are no kids living at home, but for the past 25 years my mom has continued to be the primary parent to me and my siblings. It’s just the emotional labor that women in relationships have been saddled with for generations.
I think things are changing for the better and have been for some time. I’m pretty sure a growing number of men these days realize that they need to step up and actively parent their children, not least because women are now staying in the workplace. It’s unfortunately much harder these days to support a family with just one income, which means the days of the stay-at-home mom who does it all are pretty much over. And so more and more people are realizing the benefits of both parents pulling their weight.
Despite the increasing gender equality, research shows that overall women still perform more unpaid and emotional labor than men, and not even just at home! They’re doing the same in the workplace and in all other kinds of relationships. And it’s not because our chromosomes just come with a level up on emotional intelligence – vast amounts of research show that how much unpaid emotional labor people perform isn’t their sex but their gendered construction of themselves. It’s how they see their role in society, which means that even in same sex relationships between two men, the partner who is more feminine is the one who will most likely take on the bulk of that labor, so that’s fun. Congratulations lesbians for being the only type of relationship studied who seem to be able to effortlessly avoid this shit.
I’ve personally experienced women my own age continuing to be the ones doing the extra labor of building and maintaining relationships. When I go out with other couples, it’s usually the women who make the plans and communicate about the details. And I even had a long term relationship in which not only did I have to do all the housework, but I had to force my boyfriend to hang out with the few friends he had, and the few friends I had who he would “tolerate” (he claimed to just be annoyed by everyone). When I finally broke up with him I heard from a few friends who were upset with me because now he had no one to lean on. And I was like, well, YEAH, he put in zero work on maintaining any relationships at all! Should I also feel bad that now he has to wash all his own dishes and do his own laundry?
And I DO feel bad, still, probably because I’m a woman who is conditioned to feel bad for men even when they hamstring themselves. But it sucks that there are all these adult men walking around who legit have no idea how much work women are doing for them, and the only way they’re going to find out is when something horrible happens and they’re forced to confront the world without all that free labor that was being done for them in the background.
Actually this just reminded me of another anecdote. At the funeral for my mom’s sister, the widower, my uncle, turned to my mom and said that his glasses were dirty. My mom was very confused as to why he felt it important to share this information. But then he removed his glasses and handed them to her to clean. “Clean your own glasses,” she said. He was surprised. He didn’t know how, because my aunt always did that. It was a big red flag of what was to come, because it turns out my aunt did absolutely everything for him, and after her death he just became this giant elderly baby who had to be coddled and cared for with kid gloves until he inevitably ended up in a home where people were paid good money to do those things for him.
And man, it’s just so sad! It’s sad that my aunt spent her entire life raising children and then caring for the adult child who was her husband, and it’s sad that when she was gone he had absolutely no skills to interact with his family or take care of himself and his house. Patriarchy just really fucks over everybody.
Rates of “grey” divorce are on the increase, and other research demonstrates that parents who don’t maintain relationships with their adult children end up with worse outcomes. So it seems like we’re just going to continue to see an increase in the “male loneliness epidemic” that people like talking about these days. More and more elderly men are going to be left floundering when their wives leave them, and there’s really no easy fix: conservatives are trying to do away with no fault divorce, which is one solution, of course, but personally I think that a better solution would be to somehow teach these men how to maintain healthy relationships: with their kids, with their partners, honestly with anyone. Maybe a dog? Could we start a charity that pairs divorced elderly men with shelter dogs? That sounds flippant but I honestly think the only solution will be an effort where we reach out to men to help them learn the skills that society failed to teach them. Plus we’d get some dogs adopted, so, win-win?
