The New York Times likes occasionally to run articles about “gray divorce,” i.e., the phenomenon of people 50+ splitting up. Case in point: its approving commentary on June 22, “Older Adults Are No Longer Staying in ‘Empty-Shell’ Marriages” (linked below). It reads, “[N]early 40 percent of divorces today occur between people 50 and older. While divorce rates have been dropping across age groups in recent years, the exception to that trend is among Americans ages 65 and up.” Conceding the reasons for this explosion are “complicated,” the Times nevertheless focused on one: meaningfulness.

According to the interviewees, longer life expectancy sets “higher expectations.” Those expectations apparently no longer include establishing home and hearth (and the communio personarum that entails). No, people “are now living through a time when marriage is seen as a vehicle for love and self-actualization” — and apparently not feeling enough of the latter. In the case of women, it may also involve a post-menopausal loss of “tolerance.”

Behind all this, one smells whiffs of the “soulmate” model of marriage. Now, marriage should be a union of persons. But American (and, increasingly, Western) ideals of marriage have turned a spouse into the exhaustive fulfillment of one’s physical, personal, emotional, and “spiritual” needs. The problem is: one person can hardly satisfy all that. It’s unrealistic, and to the degree it is imagined to be realistic, it in fact establishes expectations that crash on the shores of real life, resulting in spouses thinking “it is now good for the man (or woman) to be alone” (Gen 2:18, revised).

Traditional Catholic theology considered one could enter a valid marriage if one understood that, in Joe taking Mary, he was establishing a single and indissoluble relationship for life, open to children and intended to build a mutual life of support together. The much more elevated expectation of “soulmate” marriage might arguably be responsible for the doubts some canonists seem to have about whether a marriage “truly” took place. It might also arguably be responsible for the increased disappointments and “settling” alone that follows from a life together with unrealistically high expectations. One might ask whether the expectations, far from promoting satisfaction, are rather the causes of significant dissatisfaction and marital breakdown in whose aftermath “tolerance” of nonmarital mediocrity returns? One hint: women who obtain “gray divorces” tend not to remarry. Now, I am not advocating remarriage, but the behavioral pattern suggests that perhaps some people entertain an abstract notion of marriage they think unattainable in real life.

And, finally, there’s one other issue the Times touches on: the economic consequences of “gray divorce.”

Divorce often leaves the ruptured couple in an economically worse state than before. Traditionally, it was usually the woman who got the economic short end of the stick, though in modern times, it’s arguable it’s the man who loses out economically in divorce. In any event, two people together live more economically than two separately. Add on the fact that increasing numbers of Americans are ill-prepared for retirement and that many find the need to undertake part- or even full-time work to make ends meet (Teresa Ghirladucci’s Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy, found here, is eye-opening reading) and one learns that the quest for self-actualizing meaningfulness runs up against seniors’ rent, mortgage, and/or property tax payments.

But the Times doesn’t completely omit that. It admits that one way a divorcée after 40 years of marriage settled that was getting the couples’ “financial advisor to pay them equally every month from their shared pot” while splitting up the house and apartment they held.

I’ll prescind from the question how many people (apart from well-heeled Times readers) have multiple dwellings to choose from to tackle a more basic question: What is marriage for? Progressively stripped of its social standing and increasingly defined however the two people want to define it, is “marriage” anything but a label that serves no other purpose than whatever two people want it to and to erect legal obstacles? One might honestly ask: Have these two people, their quests for “meaningfulness” and “non-stagnation” notwithstanding, ever became two in one? Or have they become two and one with their financial advisor, attorney, best friend, and whatever other person(s) these self-contained monads momentarily need? Isn’t their solution precisely a reflection of the “living alongside” each other approach they blamed on and spurned marriage for?

The vision of “soulmate” marriage — an ever-closer union of two people — is quite compatible with a Catholic vision of marriage. Where it comes off the rails is in failing to recognize that no spouse, no matter how loving, can so completely fulfill one’s soul. The human person’s only real “soulmate” is God. Tempering expectation with realism might go a long way, even in addressing “empty-shell” divorce.

[A link to the N.Y. Times article is here.]