Free Harley and Me by Bernadette Murphy

interests, like starting a business or returning to school.
    â€œSome [couples] are so energized by their newfound freedom and passion that they fall in love all over again,” Northrup writes.
    Some, however, do not.
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    Waiting to see our counselor the next week, a copy of The Wall Street Journal in the waiting room catches my eye. “The Gray Divorcés,” the headline reads. I try to show scant interest, but I’m dying to read it. Divorce is not a word J and I have ever used, not a possibility I’ve allowed in my thinking. I can’t even say the word aloud. Marriage is for life. That’s what those vows meant. But now the word is hovering in my consciousness in a disturbingly frequent way.
    I Google the article when I get home and learn that mine is the first generation more interested in finding personal happiness than in fulfilling marital roles, according to sociologist Susan Brown of Bowling Green State University, the lead author on a study about divorce among middle-aged and older adults. Among people fifty and older, the divorce rate has doubled over the past two decades, her study found. In 1990, only one in ten people who got divorced were aged fifty or older; by 2009 the number was roughly one in four.And get this: “cheating doesn’t appear to be the driving force in gray divorce.” Infidelity was cited among the top three reasons only 27 percent of the time in Brown’s study of older divorcés. So much for any ideas of a bodice-ripper affair.
    â€œMarriages that in previous generations would have ended in death now end in divorce,” the article quotes Betsey Stevenson, assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies marriage and divorce.
    â€œIn the past, people didn’t live long enough to reach the forty-year itch. ‘You can’t divorce if you’re dead,’” says Ms. Stevenson. The fact that many more women work outside the home and might be able to support themselves financially is also part of the equation, giving women options that previous generations might not have had.
    The drive to find happiness before it’s too late, though, seems to be a primary reason. Many of these divorcés may have twenty-five to thirty-five years of productive life ahead of them when they begin questioning if they want to spend that time with their current mate. And it is women, interestingly, who are the ones mostly initiating these breakups. Among divorces by people ages forty to sixty-nine, women reported seeking the split 66 percent of the time, according to an AARP study.
    I am shocked to read there are so many women like me going through upheavals like this. I live in a bedroom community where most of the couples are intact, where my friends and I volunteer on the school council, run book fairs, oversee Halloween carnivals. The few divorces I’m aware of happened long ago and most of the partners have since remarried and now show up, four parents to a child, for school functions.
    Do I even want to consider divorce?
    An unprecedented 48.5 million women are now in midlife in the United States, reports Northrup. “This group is no longer invisible and silent, but a force to be reckoned with—educated, vocal, sophisticated in our knowledge of medical science, and determined to take control of our own health.” The doctor/author herself went through a divorce at midlife after a twenty-four-year marriage. Her sentimentsecho those from The Wall Street Journal article. “With most couples for most of human history, ‘till death do us part’ was twenty-five years,” she says. But life expectancy in 1900 was forty-seven. “You saw your first grandchild being born and then you died. So we have really created this whole other stage [in life]. And quite frankly, if we do not step out of our comfort zone now,” then when will