Divorce on the rise for couples over 60

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Al Gore's divorce is the Tipper the iceberg

The couple's split after 40 years shows how many people discover in their 60s and beyond that they want different things

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This week's announcement that Al Gore and his wife Tipper are divorcing after more than 40 years of marriage has caused many to ask: why bother? If you're old enough to divorce after your daughter has been divorced, maybe that's a sign that you are too old.

Now, there are many fascinating aspects to this development, including the chance to reread the Gores' jointly authored book on the joys of marriage, Joined at the Heart, or indeed to follow the new Twitter trend of thinking up pick-up lines for Al ("wanna see my hanging chad?"). But unnoticed among them is the fact that it is pensioners such as Al (62) and Tipper (61) who are the only ones bucking the trend of a lower divorce rate. It's as if, like taking up golf or ballroom dancing, this is another hobby that you have time for only in your retirement.

The Office of National Statistics shows that the rate of divorce is dropping sharply in every age group, except the over-60s - this includes every age over 60, because the statisticians never anticipated the need to start separate graphs for the seventies, eighties, and nineties. The world's oldest divorcés, Bertie and Jessie Woods, made history last year by divorcing when they had both reached the age 98.

So why, instead of cruising off into their dotage hand in hand, are the grandparent generation single-handedly dragging the average divorce age up every year? I talked to Andrew Smith about his parents' recent separation. Normally you would expect to conduct this discussion with a shell-shocked pre-schooler, or a resentful teenager. But Smith is himself 55, and his parents are in their eighties. Was that not, I inquire tactfully, a little late in life to look for pastures new?

"I think so, yes, in that this is the time of life when they actually need each other," he says. "But there is also an intolerance that comes with age. My mother and my father wanted different things in terms of where they wanted to live, and in the end they decided not to compromise. At lot of people of their age lead increasingly separate lives - separate bedrooms and so on. But they needed more. There's independence of spirit there, but selfishness too. The support that my mother needs, other people in the family have to take that responsibility."

Stephanie Coontz, the author of Marriage, a History notes that getting married in the late 1960s or 1970s was a big risk factor. Why? Partly because people still married very young (Tipper was 21 and Al 22 when they got hitched). And partly because life expectancy is now so much longer that those who are unhappy by the time the kids leave home know they have many decades stretching out ahead of them. In 2007, the latest figures available in the UK, 50 per cent more over-60s got divorced than ten years previously.

For women such as Ella Cook, who married young and had children young, it takes longer to find the confidence to leave. Cook left her husband at the age of 65 after nearly 40 years of marriage.

"One of the reasons I hung on was that I had a very powerful husband, and having married young I didn't see myself as an individual. It took me a long time to imagine a life of my own," she says. "In the end the unhappiness becomes so great that you are prepared to sacrifice 40 years for it. It's very sad, because that's 40 years of history. If you divorce after 15 years, you can do it all again, get married again, maybe have more children. But after 40, you don't have as much time. It's sad for grown-up children, and complicated for grandchildren. But you just can't go on."

A study of post-40 divorce by the American support group for older people, AARP, found that 60 and 70- -year-olds appreciate life after divorce the most of any of the ages, citing a fresh lease of life from forging a new identity. Christine Northam, a counsellor with Relate, said that the service was seeing increasing numbers of sixty-somethings divorce: "It is a trend of significance, and I think that it has something to do with the changing role of women. They may have stayed together for the children, but after the children have gone women are looking for more self-fulfilment; they feel more independent. In their fifties and sixties, they realise they may have another 30 years of active life, and they think that life could be more exciting."

In some ways, then, it's not a fear of death that prompts the change, but the confidence that old age gives you. In talking to people who escaped a marriage when they were issued with their Freedom bus pass, I realise that I kind of admire them for not crumbling away into her kitchen and his garage and silently rancorous mealtimes. They chose a new life, at the end of life.

In his novel Immortality, Milan Kundera poses a difficult question. If, after death, you were given the chance of another turn, another spin on earth, and you were given the opportunity to have the same life partner for another 40 years, would you? It's a tough one, because even in the happiest marriages, people do wonder.

And when you're nearing your own mortality in a long and unhappy marriage, increasing numbers of people do more than wonder.

Some names have been changed