The number of older Americans living alone is on the rise. Nearly 16 million people aged 65 and older in the US lived solo in 2022, three times as many who lived alone in that age group in the 1960s. And as Baby Boomers age, that number is expected to grow even more, raising big questions about the country’s future.
To be fair, Baby Boomers are actually statistically the reason divorce rates are so high, and also why they’ve been going down recently.
Not trying to be insulting, just wanting to speak about the statistics I’ve read, so I’ll try to use the full generation title to distinguish.
Speaking about the generation as a general group, Baby Boomers had many marriages and many divorces per capita. Your stereotypical “on my fifth wife” dudes were Baby Boomers and were a disproportionate percentage of marriages that ended in divorce - basically “Divorce Georg”.
From a statistics perspective, a large part of the reason divorce rates are going down these days are because as people get older, they tend to settle down and have less energy for those kind of antics basically, and the rate of Baby Boomers marriages and divorces was slowing down in response - with other generations being pretty much stable.
So on that level I’m not particularly surprised that those attitudes towards divorce are still affecting them in old age. It does pose interesting questions for our elder care infrastructure (or lack thereof) though.
This reminded me.
As a kid, I was so used to meeting adults who were on their 2nd or 3rd marriage. It felt super common.
But now im hitting 40 and only a small fraction of my friends are divorced.
Fewer people getting married. A lot of my friends are long-term common-law partners, but never do the actual marriage.
Maybe it’s just the people I know personally, but it seems like very few have gone through multiple marriages. Most seem to just skip the formal marriage thing the second time around, even if those relationships last much longer than the ones that lead to divorce.