FamilyLife Today®

Ron Deal: I had a professor in graduate school who said, "Yeah, marriage is like that old grandfather clock." For those of you that don't know what a grandfather clock is, it's that thing at the end of the hall in your grandmother's house. It has two big dumbbells that you would pull and it would wind. Marriage is like that grandfather clock. If you don't go wind it up every once in a while, it just runs out of energy. It just stops.

Dave Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Let me read you a stat that you might find surprising. 40% of divorces are now between people 50 years old and older.

Ann Wilson: That is surprising.

Dave Wilson: Here's another one. The divorce rates have almost tripled in recent decades of people age 65 and older. What is happening? We're going to find out. We've got Ron Deal in the room. Not that you've gone through this, but there's a term for it now, right, Ron?

Ron Deal: It's called the "gray divorce." This is gray as in color gray. It's so prevalent that there is now a term.

Dave Wilson: Explain it first of all and then let's talk about what's going on.

Ron Deal: First of all, let me ask you a question because I have to say, as I was prepping for this conversation, I was surprised by some of the things that I discovered. I've been hearing about the gray divorce for over a decade now. Family sociologists have been tracking this and looking at it and studying it.

Essentially, over the last 15 years in the United States, there's only one group of people in which the divorce rate has risen, and it's those over 50 years of age. The other cohorts' ages have begun to decline a little bit, but 50 and over, it's gone up.

Dave Wilson: Tripled?

Ron Deal: 65 and over. That's right. Tripled. I'm glad we came back to that because it scares everybody. Is this the end of us? If you're married and you're over 50, are you going to? Actually, here's the perspective we need to keep in mind. Still, even though it's tripled, the divorce rate for couples over 50 is half of what it is for couples under 50.

Ann Wilson: That is reassuring.

Ron Deal: It's important. But there's a trend. It's moving up. I thought, here was my assumption before I did my preparation. My assumption was it's 30, 35, 40-year marriages that are finally unraveling and coming to an end. Actually, no. That's a very small percentage. That's a third of all of these 50 and over gray divorces. It's people married for a really long period of time. Two-thirds of them are blended family, remarried couples.

Dave Wilson: That caught your attention.

Ron Deal: Absolutely. They're married 10, 15, 20 years, maybe six years. I think the gray divorce phenomenon has more to do with blended family dynamics than it does necessarily long-term marriages that unravel.

There's a little bit of both. Two-thirds are remarriages for one or both parties, blended families. They've got adult kids, grandkids, the whole bit. Only a third of them are long-term marriages that finally come apart.

Dave Wilson: If you're listening right now and you're a blended family and you're over 50, that's a scary stat.

Ron Deal: It's a little striking. We don't want to scare our listeners. The point is, be aware and be intentional.

Ann Wilson: Intentional because all of us, no matter how long we've been married, as we say all the time here on this program, we drift toward isolation if we are not intentional to bring ourselves back. This is something that can happen to any single couple.

Ron Deal: There's actually been some research where they talk to those long-term couples and they said, "Why did your marriage come apart after 30, 40 years?" About 20% of them said, "It's because we just drifted. We just sort of pulled apart from each other over time."

We know that's a real thing. Couples with young kids, the kids, you're so wound up in caretaking and going and blowing. There's no time for the two of you. If you sort of settle your marriage, and let me just say what I mean by that, you stabilize your marriage in activity around the kids.

You and I, we're not quite sure how to do that, but we know how to do life with children and we can get by. Well, kids go away. They grow up. Life changes. You get to a new season, and then you're really strangers.

Ann Wilson: You feel like, "I don't even know you." As you said, "You're a stranger to me."

Ron Deal: That is a reality for a lot of couples. Nan and I, let's push pause. Our testimony outlined in *The Mindful Marriage*, I don't know that we're classic drift. I would say we loved deeply and intensely and we fought deeply and intensely and never could really get past those arguments and those issues.

Somewhere around the 30-year mark, and we've been married 40 years now, but somewhere around the 30-year mark, it sort of all came to a head and we were like, "We have got to push into this in a very significant way." Thank God by His grace and mercy, we're in a completely different place now than we ever have been.

I get this. I really understand how good, well-intentioned people wake up one day and go, "I don't know how to be married to you anymore." I don't think that represents bad people, God-haters, vicious folks that are just finally throwing their marriage to the trash can.

I think it's a lot of really well-intended Christian people who are trying and just sort of stuck in a rut. That ultimately gets to a place where they go, "I just don't know how to do this. Maybe we should quit."

Ann Wilson: Let me ask you, Ron, have we discovered, I've read and you probably know the stats better than I do, that 70% of divorces are being initiated by women? Is that true?

Ron Deal: That is true. 70%. We call them "walk-away wives." That's the phenomenon that you're referring to. I think it's a reality. I'm not sure how many of the gray divorces are walk-away wife situations.

I do know the dynamic could be at play in a situation where somebody's just frustrated. She's been fighting for more in the relationship for a long time and then she just gives up the fight. At that point, she's done.

By the way, when we try to save marriages that are in that place, by the time somebody gets to the "I'm really done," it's super hard to save because she's fought for so long she has no more fight left.

Ann Wilson: There's no hope left.

Ron Deal: Right. We always want to hold out for hope and repair and restoration of that relationship.

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Dave Wilson: Talk about what you think the contributing factors are to couples at 50, 60, maybe 10 years married, maybe 30, 40 years married, but they say, "I quit."

Ron Deal: I think there's two stories here. The long-term marriages, those are the ones that they've found themselves in a rut and haven't found their way out. Of course, there's always circumstances where somebody has an affair or somebody just sort of completely gives up on the relationship. The other person tries and tries.

Those narratives happen for couples married 30, 40 years just like they happen for couples married two or three years. So there's that story. The other story is that big bulk of these gray divorces that have something to do with the complexity of living in a blended family, multi-generational, remarriage situation.

There's a lot that we could unpack. Everything from, "Wow, you and I got married at 60 and we both had had really difficult first marriages and this seemed like the great fit. Actually, you and I do get along really well. It's adult children. It's former spouses. Now we don't know how to navigate the space of parenting the kids that are still hovering in orbit around our relationship."

Those blended family complexities, as we've talked about so many times on this program before, get in the way of the couple really thriving in their relationship.

Dave Wilson: I even wonder how many blended marriages are a guy or gal who comes from a former marriage, has kids, and marries a woman or guy who's never been married. That person comes in thinking this is going to be awesome, not understanding you married into a complex world with kids and cousins. If you didn't know that that's the world you're stepping into, it's a shock.

Ann Wilson: It can be a rude awakening.

Dave Wilson: What about just the boredom that can creep into a marriage over decades? I'm not acting like we've never experienced that. You become empty nesters and for a year you're like, "This is awesome." Freedom. This house hasn't been quiet in years. Maybe Ann didn't feel that, but for me, it was wonderful.

Ann Wilson: It felt very sad to me.

Dave Wilson: I knew she was going to say that. But then even after 18 months or so, it feels sort of sad to me too. It's like, "Wow, it's very quiet. Let's get a dog." But then if you don't really work on the relationship, the next thing you know, you are just drifting because there isn't something pulling you together.

Ron Deal: You're hitting on something really important. That quiet in the house pushes to the surface. This is all about you and me now. What do we talk about?

I will say, Nan and I have lots of great conversations. She's very vocal. I'm pretty expressive with emotions and all kinds of things. I'm not afraid to share any of that. But after 40 years, what else is there new to talk about? You have to work at this.

You've got to find something, and not just what's happening in the news or whatever the crisis of the day is, but something of substance. FamilyLife has said this for 50 years now. Marriage is by nature entropic. It runs out of energy.

I don't care how long you've been married, how well you know each other, how much you love each other, it takes energy. Me contributing and you contributing, us trying to find our way to that. The quiet in the house is lovely at first, and then it's a bit scary. "Wow, this is about us."

For somebody listening right now and you have younger kids, what I would say is keep the energy going. That's why date night is so important. That's why a little couple devotional time where you connect to keep the energy in your marriage going. You can just give all your energy to children and activities and Instagram, and then you wake up one day and you're like, "I don't even know where to begin with you."

Ann Wilson: I talk to countless couples that are right there. They've put the kids and we all know it's overwhelming when your kids are little under your roof of the activities, of school, of the dynamic of relationship that you're constantly talking about.

It's very easy to let your relationship with your spouse go a little bit and place it to the side. We're saying put God at the very front, then your spouse. If you have not had a conversation with your husband because you're so busy with the kids, after a while you don't know what to say. We've had couples come up to us and say, "We don't even know how to talk anymore besides what's happening in the world today. We don't know how to go deeper." That's pretty common.

Ron Deal: If you've had a disappointing relationship at some point in your life, again, two-thirds of these gray divorces is a remarriage for somebody forming a blended family with multiple generations, and you have been burned before. You may be listening to us right now going, "Yeah, boy, I tried that. It didn't work the first marriage. It cost me a lot."

That feels really risky to me. I just want to say, yes, it is risky. That's what investing in marriage involves for everybody, but for you in particular, there is something, a residue on your heart that is about self-protection. You wall up and pull back rather than leaning in and opening up yourself to your partner. That comes with a risk and a cost.

Dave Wilson: Some of it could be sitting down with a counselor. Part of the gray divorce could be, "We've been married 40 years. Counseling is not going to help at this point. What's the point?" We went to a counselor in year 38.

I remember saying to him on the first day there, it was a five-hour session because I needed a lot of help. At the end when he's giving me my assignment, I said, "Man, I should have been here 30 years ago." He goes, "You're here now. Let's go."

Stuff I didn't unpack from my childhood that I should have, I now am doing it, and I think it in some ways kept us from gray divorce. The next 20 can be better than the last 30 because we got somebody to help us, a third party that's got a faith component to it that says, "I'm going to help you and God's going to help you. Let me navigate you through that." That can change everything.

Ron Deal: We have been to counselors so many times throughout our lives. Part of what you're looking for there is somebody to help you recognize your rut and jump out of that rut. I really think when you're in the rut, you can't see how tall the walls are. You don't know how deep you are in this thing.

Ann Wilson: Even when your spouse tells you.

Ron Deal: You can't. Absolutely. You get stuck in that space and you're sort of like, "I don't even know what to do anymore because in my mind, I've tried everything I know to do." That's why it's a rut. Seeing somebody, talking to somebody, is often just about getting some perspective on what's happening so that you have new choices that become available.

Dave Wilson: What else, Ron would you say, or Ann, if a couple's listening and they're like, "We're headed there. We're not getting divorced, but I could see us possibly feeling that." Or they feel the isolation, the drift. Blended or not, they're in year 20, 30, 40, or maybe year 10, five, but they're in their 50s and 60s and they feel this: "We're roommates. We live here, we've been married for years, but we're roommates."

There's not intimacy, and I'm not just talking sexual. There might be both. There's nothing really magical here anymore. I'm not going to say it's going to be magical like it was when you were newlyweds, but there's nothing really. I don't want to run home. I'm here. I'll go watch TV, you go watch TV. I'm not going anywhere, but if we don't change something, I feel like I could be a statistic.

Ron Deal: Conventional wisdom, stuff you hear from the pulpit and sometimes in a lot of marriage books, I hate to say it, but would say something like, "You need to tell your spouse what you're frustrated with." If you're in that spot, I've been there. That's the last thing you're going to want to do because you do not feel there's no safety in the relationship. You guys have fought about this a hundred times.

For you to say, "Our marriage stinks," is probably just going to be another blowup. Rather, first of all, go to your knees in prayer. Begin to search and really ask God, "What is it you're requiring of me?" To me, this is speck versus log stuff, Matthew chapter seven. It's so easy to see that the other person's doing wrong, that you're so frustrated with. You need to refocus and start saying, "What are the logs in my eye that I can do something about so I can bring a better me?"

Again, this is the material that we've discovered that has changed our marriage that we put into *The Mindful Marriage* book. It is a refocusing on who I am and what I can bring that's different. But then I also want to say, as we just discussed, go talk to somebody. Sit down with somebody who can help bring a little perspective to the process. Maybe you're going to go as a couple or maybe you're just going to go as an individual.

But you need some sort of perspective or an intervention from outside your couple-ness. When you're really in the trenches and stuck, something outside of you is helpful to offer a spark, a new perspective, a new thought, a new idea, so that you're just not ending up in the same rut.

Dave Wilson: Something just hit me is the book of Revelation when Jesus says to the church, I think it's Ephesus, "You've lost your first love." So he says to the church, "You've lost your first love," and then what's he tell them to do?

Ron Deal: Repent, remember, and do the things that you did at first.

Dave Wilson: Obviously, that's a walk with God. When we first found Jesus, we're passionate and reading the word and we're praying. I think he's saying sort of that. But I think in a love relationship, he's like, "Okay, so you're 50 years old and it's dead. You're just roommates. Hey, why don't you turn? Repent. I'm not going to live this way anymore. Maybe she won't respond, but I'm going to do this. I'm going to do the things I did at first. Let's go on dates. Let's talk. Let's hold hands. Let's kiss."

All that little stuff. That's hard to do. You get stale. You get lukewarm.

Ron Deal: Especially when you feel like a victim. I'm not going to initiate. I'm a victim of what you're not doing or what you are doing that's wrong. Then I feel justified in withholding myself. The repent part is about me dealing with logs. Me. Not her. The remember part is, "Okay, how did we get into this? What is this about? This journey that we've had. There's so many great moments. There's so much worth fighting for here."

Do the things you do. Now I've got to push myself into action that's a contribution to the relationship. Obviously, this passage is about a vertical one and they've lost their first love for God. The same dynamic happens, I think, in marriage and earthly relationships.

Ann Wilson: Sometimes we wait for our feelings to get there and then we'll act on them. This is an obedient act of your will. You may not even want to say, "Hey, hun, let's go on a date."

Ron Deal: I guarantee you, you won't want to.

Ann Wilson: You won't want to initiate a hug or to sit next to your spouse if you're feeling isolated, but just make the right move. Not all the time, but many times then there's a little ember that's sparked. Just doing that, just ask God to give you the power to do that is really important.

Dave and I did a conference where this couple just stood up at a sharing time. They'd been married how long, Dave? They go to our church. I didn't know them. I go, "How's this hitting you? How's this going?" and they go, "This has saved our marriage." I go, "Tell me your story." This is back of the room, five minutes.

They said they came to the first summit, which was three months prior. We did the weekly date nights because we encourage them to do a weekly thing. We sent them a weekly email from Dave and Ann saying, "We're encouraging you." He literally said, "We were roommates."

Ron Deal: Grandfather clock had run out of energy. You've helped them wind it up.

Ann Wilson: They both said, "We both had divorce in our minds, but we never said it." I remember saying to them, "Why did you want to get divorced?" and they said, "Because there was nothing left. We have nothing to talk about. We live separate lives. We have different jobs. We come home for dinner and we don't talk about nothing. We don't know how to talk about anything."

All this was, was a place to say, "Here's a couple questions in the book," and they just started answering. They're probably in their 60s or 50s. Kids are gone. It's this couple. And it's a second marriage.

We're talking right now to somebody listening and they've got a friend and they're like, "I think they're in this gray divorce thing," or they're a fresh blended family, they're struggling, or maybe somebody's listening right now and you're a ministry leader. The church can stimulate energy in relationships.

Honestly, our material that you guys have written is so good. Nan and I have invested relationship material. It's good. It's great. It gives people direction and some answers. Just diving in is half the battle. Just having the dialogue and conversation, getting people in a room together for a small group or a class is so valuable. If we could just invite the church to find your little place to intervene and step in, I think a lot of unnecessary broken relationships could be saved.

Dave Wilson: It's a FamilyLife value, influence or impact your corner of the world. Ron can't do it. Nan can't do it. Dave and Ann can't do it. You can. We don't know your neighborhood, you do. God's given you an influence there that only you have, but it takes somebody like you to say, "Okay, God, use us. Here I am, send me," and guess what? He will.

I'm sitting here thinking about Jim and Sandy Stevenson at Friends Church in Yorba Linda, California, who brought me in last week to do a stepfamily conference. They've been married less than 15 years, each divorced young in life, met, married later in life, started going to a blended family group to get some help with their dynamic and their relationships.

Within a few years, they started teaching it. Now for eight years, they've been mentoring younger couples. They've been pouring into the lives of others. Are they perfect? No. They're the first to tell you. But they have something to give. Sometimes facilitating is just about getting people in the room and the Holy Spirit does the teaching and the training. Your job is just to make it happen. I think about all the people, the lives. I did an event last week for them and probably 25 of the people who came to that event were directly touched by this one couple. You have more to give than you realize.

Ann Wilson: One of the questions that we get most often this time of year, and I get it personally, is when women come up to me and say, "What study should we do with our small group this year?"

Dave Wilson: I get it from guys, I get it from couples. Here's the thing: you can pick. We've got *The Art of Marriage*, we've got *The Art of Parenting*, we've got *Vertical Marriage*, we've got all kinds of video studies and workbooks tailor-made for you and a group of couples in your home that literally can change their life.

We've done this and you want to do it as well. Let me tell you right now, the FamilyLife video and workbooks are 25% off right now through the end of August. So you can go to familylife.com/shop. You don't need a discount code, you just go there, pick the one you want to do, you put it in, you hit play, and you watch God work.

Ann Wilson: It's so good, you guys. I really hope you'll take advantage of this sale. Again, it's 25% off. Just go to familylife.com/shop.

Dave Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru Ministry. 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.