Seven years ago, I went through a very unexpected divorce after being together with someone for 24 years.
My ex's decision took me entirely by surprise, and the choice to divorce wasn’t mine. The two factors lent an acute sense of helplessness and abandonment to the whole experience.
To get a better handle on what I had experienced, I turned to the scholarly literature.
I focused in particular on a piece by M. Tosi and T. van den Broek in the April 2020 edition of Social Science and Medicine, “Gray divorce and mental health in the United Kingdom.”
This article explored the mental health effects of divorces in which at least one of the partners was aged 50 or over. Although this kind of “gray divorce” has historically been rare, its incidence is increasing dramatically. Good news, I guess – I’m not unique.
Possible explanations for this rise include longer life spans, greater income equality between spouses, no-fault divorce laws, and the growing sense, at least among some, that marriage is not a life-long commitment.
Tosi and van den Broek’s goal was to track self-reported mental health conditions before, during, and after divorce. They were keen to learn whether and how long it took for respondents to regain the mental health “baseline” they had experienced two years before their marriage’s dissolution.
The researchers used survey data from nine waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study, which questioned the same over 16 individuals from 40,000 households in 2009, 2010-2017, and 2018.
For this particular study, Tosi and van den Broek selected only those respondents aged 50 and over who reported a divorce or separation during 2009-2018. The resulting sample included 909 adults, and these were questioned, on average, 5.1 times during the survey period.
The dependent or outcome variable in the study was a numerical score of 0-12 in which 0 = “least depressed” and 12 = “most depressed.” The researchers computed these scores from responses to 12 questions about mental health and mental health-related behavior (eg, sleep interruption).
The independent variable of interest was time to and from divorce, divided into six categories: (0) two years before divorce (1) one year before divorce; (2) the year of divorce; (3) one year after divorce; (4) two years after divorce, and (5) three years or more after divorce. The researchers added a few moderating variables to their statistical models, including sex (male/female), number of previous divorces (0+), and parenthood status (childless/children).
The researchers studied the impacts of time on mental health by setting the baseline at self-reported mental well being two years before divorce.
Their statistical results showed that depressive symptoms increased in the year before the divorce and then during the year of the divorce itself.
By the second post-divorce year, however, subjects had recovered, on average, to their “baseline” condition.
In other words, things got tough just before and during the break-up but improved substantially soon after. These findings suggest that gray divorcees follow what the researchers call a “crisis” pattern, in which mental health declines just before and during divorce, and then rapidly improves.
The "crisis model" differs from the “convalescence” pattern, in which post-divorce recovery takes three to five years, or the “chronic strain” pattern, in which divorcees never return to their mental health baseline, remaining chronically depressed for many years.
In other statistical models, Tosi and van den Broek found no statistically significant differences between male and female divorcees.
They did, however, find that parenthood mattered. Childless divorcees aged 50 and over recovered and even felt better than baseline at divorce-plus one year.
Divorcees with children, by contrast, took three years, on average, to return to baseline, suggesting there is a fair bit of stress involved in dealing with offspring’s responses to the marital break. The researchers did not find statistically different trajectories for respondents who had experienced more than one divorce in their lifetime.
I find myself taking heart from this study. The year BEFORE our divorce in October 2018 was rough, as my spouse had already announced her surprise intention to leave, and the two years SINCE the divorce were equally nasty, or worse.
By 2021, however, things were beginning to get better, and by now, in early 2025, I feel entirely like myself again. It helped that I began dating someone wonderful in 2019 who has been both patient and enormously understanding. My divorce-related mental health trajectory, in other words, has followed a more-or-less average trajectory. As an over-50 divorcee with children, it should have taken me three years after the divorce, on average, to return to baseline.
Now, seven years after divorce, I feel better than ever, largely due my relationship with my current partner.
Survey findings can't tell us much about individual lives, as everyone’s trajectory is somewhat unique; very few of us fall directly on the statistical regression line! In this case, however, I feel like the study of 909 UK divorcees generally described my own experience. The pain was very real and felt unique, but it turns out that I’m just an average Joe.
About James Ron
James Ron is an international research consultant who taught for 22 years in higher ed in Canada, Mexico, and the US. Prior to that, he was a consultant for Human Rights Watch and other international agencies, and reported for the Associated Press. Learn more about James on his website and LinkedIn profile. To read his scholarly articles, please visit James' ResearchGate and Academia.edu profiles. To learn how other scholars have used his work in their own research, please visit his Google Scholar page.
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