National Center for Family and Marriage Research Family Profiles

Document Type

Report

Abstract

Divorce increasingly occurs among adults aged 50 and older, an event termed gray divorce (Brown & Lin, 2012). From 1990 to 2010, the rate of gray divorce doubled, a trend that belied a modest decline in the overall divorce rate during this same period. More recently, the gray divorce rate has largely stagnated, and even declined slightly for adults aged 50-64, signaling that gray divorce is largely a Baby Boomer phenomenon (Brown, Lin, & Julian, 2024). The rapid acceleration in gray divorce coupled with the aging of the married population means that a growing share of divorces in the U.S. occurs to middle-aged and older adults. Whereas only 8% of all persons divorcing in 1990 were aged 50 or older, today the share is nearly 40% (Brown et al., 2024). In this profile, we use data from the 2022 American Community Survey to examine the marital characteristics of people experiencing a gray divorce in the past year. Specifically, we track their marital history and marital duration.

Publication Date

2024

Publisher

National Center for Family and Marriage Research

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