Episode 149: Exploring Late Love: Relationships After 50

Suzanne Noble: I'm very excited to welcome our new sponsor, Higher Nature, who have created Rekindle, which I'm currently trying out and is working a treat. A 100% natural libido-enhancing supplement for women, which contains clinically backed ingredients to give your sex life a boost. And who doesn't want that? This week's episode has been sponsored by Oh My Bod, shifting the evolution of pleasure. Hi, this is Suzanne Noble, and you're listening to Sex Advice for Seniors. And I want to thank our sponsors. I don't really thank them enough, which is a wonderful toy company called Oh My Bod. Founded by a woman, so a woman in sextech, quite unusual, one of the first to ever get into that market. I interview her for one of my podcasts named Suki. And Higher Nature, who are a supplement company that do a range of really high-quality supplements, so you should check them out. But today I want to talk about, of course, my favorite subject, relationships in later life. And I'm with someone who knows a hell of a lot about that, which is a woman called Aviva Wittenberg-Cox. And she wrote a book called Late Love: Mating in Maturity. Hello, Aviva.

Hello, Suzanne Noble. Lovely to be with you.

And you as well. And I've been on your podcast and now you get to come on mine.

So the joy of these podcasting periods, isn't it? It is.

So, Late Love, what compelled you to write this book about relationships and dating in later life?

Ah, like a lot of books, I think it was personal therapy, right? Get it all out on the page. And it takes a few years to write these kinds of things, um, takes a few years to prepare for them. So I did it after, uh, leaving a long-term marriage of 22 years and looking for late love myself. And when I found it, I wanted to share the story because I thought other people might benefit.

Yeah, so rare to hear a success story at this age.

Exactly. And there are some. I was just at a wedding last week of one of my oldest friends who is getting remarried in her 60s. And almost all the couples gathered, it was a small gathering, but almost all the couples that were there were late couples who had gotten together after 50. And I just laughed because they were all happy and loving and fulfilled in their meeting and matches. So it does happen, but I think actually people are quite shy about talking about it because you're always sensitive that others have not yet found it. And so you don't want to rub their noses in your happiness. That's not, that's not very nice. No.

And I'm curious to know, like, when you discovered the person that you are now with, how long ago was that?

Oh, that was 15 years ago now.

Okay. Because I do think that there's something to be said for a kind of what's happened with the dating apps and, and, and the way that people are meeting now or expecting to meet versus 15 years ago when perhaps maybe it wasn't so commonplace to find everybody on these online platforms. And maybe I always say that the internet was a bit more self-selecting 20 or so years ago when we didn't expect, or it wasn't so acceptable to meet people online, for instance, as it is now. So the people you found online were not like everybody and their brother. They were— it was a bit more— I was totally people back then, by the way.

But yeah, and I was totally retrograde. I mean, I pounced on a very old friend and propositioned him, so I didn't The only online version of it was that I propositioned him by email.

Very, yeah, very modern.

Very modern.

And, and, yeah, I should add that I'm a gender expert in business.

So everything about gender roles is up for grabs when I'm involved.

Yeah. And why not? And were there anything that any other personal stories or anecdotes that really shaped your perspective on this kind of gray divorce and looking for love in, in later life? Anything that you—

I mean, to write the book, I, I did a huge amount of research for a good couple of years on everything about gray divorce. Fascinating. And I interviewed a whole bunch of couples who had gotten together after 50. So the whole issue that divorce rates have been falling very steadily since the '70s among the educated, The media doesn't quite get that right, right? But it's been a 30 years really steady fall of divorce. People are also getting married less, so that contributes. But the one place that divorce has really increased is in the '50s and '60s. And what I found interesting was two— despite the stereotype that midlife crises happen and men leave their wives for their secretaries and fast cars, the reality is that two-thirds of the people leaving at that age are women.

Yeah, amazing. And what do you think is the behind all of that?

Well, listen, I'm also now a longevity expert, so I'm pushing this idea that, yeah, women outlive men. Um, we are increasingly being told we may, if we are careful, sleep, exercise, and eat right, gonna live pretty close towards 100. And I think you wake up in your 50s, um, and you look across the kitchen table and you ask yourself a very simple question: is do I do you want to be with this person for another 50 years? If you've already been there for 25 or 30, I think that's a legitimate question that deserves deep thought. And I think a lot of the answers for a lot of these women is, um, no way. Um, that would— it's, it's not really, I think, about personal fulfillment or, you know, self-actualization. I think it's about avoiding death, a kind of deep internal emotional disintegration. And I think people who are in that kind of relationship know what I'm talking about. You don't really have a choice. I think you're leaving because you have to. Nobody, nobody really leaves lightly. I don't think— I think that's another myth.

Yeah. And, and it's interesting you say that because when I posted on Substack a few months ago about being, you know, independent, being single and living in my own place and all of that. One of the comments that went back and forth, and I did acknowledge where this person was coming from, was that to leave your relationship sometimes, especially as a woman, does come from some aspect of privilege because for some of these women, they have been financially dependent on their partners for perhaps their entire life. And so leaving without anything is a big step. I was lucky that I was actually working at the time with my ex. I got divorced in my 40s and we were financially able to separate stuff out so that neither of us struggled too much when we split up. But I know that's not always the case. And I know that some women do stick with somebody that they really don't want to be with because of the fact that it's too hard. Did you come across that?

Yeah, huge. That's a huge issue. It's also a hugely historical issue. The big news, and why I'm a gender expert, is that I've been watching the massive entrance of women into the educated and the labor force for my entire life. And we are now a massive population of women who are earning just fine, thank you very much. And those are the women who are leaving. And that's the call, right? It's people with choice. You need health and wealth and networks to leave. You're not gonna leave. And many, many women can't or aren't gonna have the courage or the ability to leave. I wouldn't recommend necessarily that they do. This was really much more of a book and communication to say, listen, women, we have all changed. Men have changed, women have changed. And it's this new ballgame gives us new choices. And these new longer lives give us this very different horizon that we have to understand and proactively prepare for. And having great relationships. And I always think women, particularly bright, educated ones like you, Suzanne Noble, you really only have two choices when you pass 50. You can either have a super supportive spouse and partner who adores you and supports everything you are and want to become and dream of being, or no partner, because anything in between those two is pretty intolerable to the women that women have become.

Yeah, I mean, I have a situationship on a Sunday with somebody that's just a nice person that we just have fun together in that adult way, and we have no desire to go beyond what we currently have. So I, I do think these things are on a continuum, and part of what I believe is that we, the choices that we have as to the kinds of relationships we have at this age are broad. They can be, they can be the traditional relationships we knew about when we were growing up and we probably had, or they can be relationships that are polyamorous, or they can be same-sex relationships, or they can be situationships, or they can be whatever you want, really. I just think that there's a broad spectrum and it's just what makes you happy. And I think that's what we're really talking about here is about fulfillment, contentment, and feeling when you wake up in the morning, whether you're lying next to someone you like, or temporarily or not, or that you're happy to be there.

I couldn't, I couldn't agree more with all of that. And I'm also just a data geek. I really like looking at data. And if I look at data and see how people are behaving, it's true that I think a lot of people now at midlife are looking for. Not all of them, of course, not all of them, because thank goodness some people are happily, or at least contentedly, paired up.

Yeah.

Or they're contentedly single. More and more people are choosing singlehood as a form of life. And I think there's a substantial percentage of relationships that need renewing, and you can renew without divorcing as long as both partners are ready to lean in and redesign. And I think that redesign is absolutely essential in long relationships on a fairly regular basis.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And since we're about sex advice for seniors here, I was curious to know if in your research you discovered that sex or lack of sex played a part in people's desire to leave their relationship or to seek out a new partner. Was there any aspect of their sexual life that came into your research?

I mean, it's always— I always see sex as a component of relationships, right? And most, again, most of the people who leave, their relationships are dead.

It's—

and they're dead in many multiple ways. Either they're actually abusive in some way, either emotionally or physically, or they're dead just in terms of other forms of communication and partnership. So Is sex a part of that? Yeah, of course it's a part of that. But sex neither kills it nor saves it in the vast majority of— it's not just sex. Sex is just an expression of love or lack of it, in what I heard from a lot of people.

Yeah. And I think I read somewhere yesterday that people often think that it's the man, as you said, leaving because they want to have great sex with somebody who's like a 25-year-old secretary or something. But, but usually that is not the reason why people actually leave. They leave for a multitude of reasons, and that may be one aspect of it, or it may be that actually there— it's just dead, as you say. So how do you respond to people who say that prioritizing happiness over staying in a long-term marriage is selfish? Or disruptive?

It's certainly disruptive. They're absolutely right, which is why nobody does it lightly, I think. So listen, I'm also a studier of longer lives, right? And I talk about four-quarter lives that we have these— in these 100-year lives, we're going to have these four quarters, each about 25 years long. And when you pass from Q2, 25 to 50, into Q3, the years from 50 to 75, I think there are a lot of very under-researched new incentives and motivations of all kinds. And particularly for women who are doing most of the leaving, I think they've spent a lot of Q2 doing what society, parents, husbands, partners, families have socialized them to do is take care of everybody, raise everybody, work, juggle, you know, please. And I think come Q3, it's not just that they're looking for happiness, they're looking for so much more, right? They're looking for some much more intrinsic motivation. And finally, they've usually ticked all the boxes. They've had the kids, they've raised the kids, they've, you know, taken care of their parents, they've worked, they've juggled. And now they suddenly have more time, more energy, more freedom. They get through menopause. And then I think they start to look around and say, what do I want to do for me for the next half century? And not just for me, but my voice in the world, my impact in all the dreams I used to have. Where do I want to go? And I'm starting to see that Q3 is actually women's best decades. It's their time of independence, self-expression, understanding who they are. It often, as you know, I think, takes until 50 to be able to hear and listen to your own voice. And so when people say it's selfish when they leave, are you kidding me? We've got work to do in the world and the world needs women in full flight with fantastic support all around. And so how you get it, where you get it, and how you find it is a really serious part of Q3. There's nothing frivolous or self-serving about it, which is partly why I wrote that book, because I'm so tired of women being seen as, you know, oh, how could she? You know, it upsets the kids.

And I think what's interesting that you said about the lack of research is I suspect that And part of that comes down to the fact that we haven't yet caught up to the fact that we're going to live so much longer. And so, and so the Q3 used to be you are in now your steady decline years and you're just moving slowly towards death. And that Q3 period now is still a period of, like we said, providing you have, you know, you have good health, you eat well and you, and you have all of that. That is an ideal period to reinvent yourself, to be creative, to free yourself from any of the shackles of some of the expectations that you might have had when you were younger. But unfortunately, the research hasn't really caught up with all of that. So we have this kind of disconnect between this expectation that we're— that the academics used to say we're in decline. And people like yourself are like, screw that, we're not in decline, right? We're, we're bursting with energy. We can't wait to get started on what we want. And so there's still that friction that's taking place between all of that. And I certainly see that in still some of the pejorative words that are used around this period of life, around the expectation that we're always a granny. You know, we hit 60 and we automatically become a granny. The number of times I've been called a granny, I'm not even close to being a granny. And I think, where is all of this coming from? And it's because we haven't caught up yet. And people like yourself that are trendsetters that are talking about this third and fourth quarter are relatively new in the academic world. So I can understand why there's still this like challenge with women just wanting to do what they wanna do at this time.

I couldn't agree more. This is a very new phenomenon.

Yes.

This longevity in the world, these longer lives. Our parents didn't age this way. We don't have role models. And I'm not talking about all people or all women, right? I am talking about the women who have worked and been successful in being independent and self-financing for their entire lives. They know how to do things. They know how to grow businesses. They know how to sell things. They know how to flourish and listen to themselves. So I think, yeah, this new Q3 is a whole new phenomenon that is very shocking, I think, to people who are expecting what you say, a kind of gentle, quiet decline into retirement, which is obsolete. It can't be done. It can't be done economically. It can't be done socially. And so, yes, we are all pioneers in redefining Q3 and Q4.

Yeah, absolutely. And do you think that men are experiencing this same drive for reinvention at this age and new relationships in life, or is this still When we talk about this, we seem to talk a lot about what's going on with women. Do you think that men are experiencing any of this?

Yes, absolutely. This is what I love, right? Because the whole topic, gender disaggregated of aging, hasn't happened yet. So we don't have much study. But I think if I come back to my four-quarter model, those quarters are quite gendered, right? I think women in Q2 are deep in this juggling act of trying to build both careers and family It's really tough. They get really tired. They burn out. In Q3, they emerge into this relative degree of freedom and what I call becoming. Men, I think, have a very different track. In Q2, they're deep in this kind of linear ego-achieving, building, and breadwinning model that they have been socialized into. And when they get to Q3, they tend to be a bit exhausted. They really would like a bit of a break from this 150% devotion to the old male model. And I think the cliff-edge retirements that are still very common in the work world for these guys is a terrible disruptor in a different sense. It basically shoves them out of the world back home where their wives do not want to have lunch with them. I always say for love, for life, but not for lunch. Yeah. And it's a really complicated psychological adjustment for men who are less used to changing. Women go in and out of the workforce. They have kids. You know, they're all bumpy. Their trail is all bumpy. Men have a much more linear trajectory. So the end result of that sudden adaptation in their often 50s and 60s is something we absolutely need to address. And there aren't enough people writing about that either.

No. And I think going back to dating and relationships and why we can see such a stark increase in the number of women leaving their partners is clearly also directly related to the fact that suddenly these guys turn up Maybe they've lost their job. Everything is— everything's been going great. It's all great. And then they turn up and go, hey, honey, I'm home forever. What? I didn't— I was really happy just seeing you 4 hours in the evening before we went to sleep. What's that all about? So, so we get— so we, we've also got that going on. So we've got a whole bunch of women who are going, yippee. We got a whole bunch of men who are like, I'm fucked. And then in between that, we're trying to see others with whom to form relationships. So what are some of the other challenges that people face at this age in finding love?

Well, that's a pretty good summary, but I'd say the real challenge is that they're too late. You've got to start preparing first your couple. If you're in a couple, it's really helpful to start planning for a slightly longer horizon. Than has been true in the past. And to start discussing when you're in your 40s, what you dream of doing in Q3, rather than what we're doing right now is kind of waiting till it's like retirement time and starting then to say, what am I going to do when I don't have a job next year? And that's kind of too late for the potential of this new Q3 is to explore and reinvent and sign something new. The earlier you can start that the better. And right now, one of the great challenges is we're not talking about it or thinking about it until our 60s. And I'd suggest also the other great thing, because I do a lot of coaching of couples thinking about how they're going to plan their second halves, is you want to do it with your partner. You do not want to be at work seeing your exit consultant about what your career goals are at this age, because especially if you're partnered, And if you're not, there are different aspects of how are you going to build relationships for the second half of life. You don't have to be married to people to be in relationship. You need community, friends, and eventually a partner. And that takes time and investment. And that's something you want to start early. And a lot of men don't have any time to focus on any of this stuff.

No. And you know, what I see speaking personally is that I've set the objective for my future, you know, my rest of my, the next 10 years or so is I want to be more liberated with regard to traveling and to be a kind of digital nomad. And I find that still most of the people that I meet have some degree of responsibility to being in a place. So there's limitations to how far any of these relationships would ever go because unless they completely abandon the career that they've always had and decide to do something that's more nomadic aligned, or they, they have lots of money and they can afford to retire, everything's got a fairly short lifespan or it happens when it happens, which is the way currently I live my life. I just like, I go, I'm going to go away and I'm going to be back in 3 months and then I'm going to do this and then I'm going to come there. And I find that it's really difficult as a single-ish woman to, to find somebody who can do any of these things. And I think there's a lot of couples that I see that have that struggle where one says, you know what, I don't want to live in the UK anymore. I want to live in a warm climate and we'll meet 4 times a year. And that's, and they're long-term married. I know people that do this and they're just like, that's the way it works. I don't see him too often and it's good. We speak on the phone, we have our Zoom calls and everything, but I think that's another level of complexity to this whole thing is that the pandemic freed a lot of us up from having to be in a place and now we're looking at other options that we didn't know we had before and going, oh, I can do that as well. That would be fun.

I think it's a huge, really promising part of the story is sharing economy you know, freedom, flexibility. And a growing part of later life is you don't actually need much anymore. We need less and less. Or, you know, you don't have anything to prove. You don't need the big houses. People do desire a certain degree of flexibility. And I think there's, you know, that growing phenomenon of LATs, living apart together.

Yeah, yeah.

People are much more able in later stages of maturity to be clear with partners and families about what they want, what they don't want, and how to set boundaries. I mean, that is why I called it Mating in Maturity. Not everybody gets to maturity. Everybody grows old. Not everybody gets mature. But if you have matured, you generally build relational skills And those skills really help in defining first yourself, also in coming to terms with yourself and being compassionate with yourself and listening to what you want, what you don't. And then sharing that vision and those dreams with another human, which then you can design together something that works for both people and not be so tied by convention, you know, the house, the the little garden and the gardening that you're supposed to be wanting to do when you turn 70, maybe.

And maybe we don't still want to do that. Yeah. And I know one—

I'm getting a puppy next week. That was my dream.

Oh, that's very sweet. So I just want to sort of talk a little bit about confidence, because I know that one of the biggest challenges in all of this is that it's a big, scary move. To leave a long-term relationship.

And scary. Oh my God, it's huge.

Yeah, right. And it, and it can, and especially at a stage of life where you might feel less attractive than you did in your younger years and where confidence starts to play a really big issue in, in just how you re-engage with the world. It doesn't really matter whether you've left or someone else has left. I think it's still, it's still a bit of a thing when you're like, oh my God, am I going someone? How am I going to meet someone? How do you think people can rebuild their confidence after a long-term relationship has ended?

I think it matters a huge amount who leaves. In the book, I talk about two categories of people. There are the leavers and the left, and I do not think they're the same people at all.

Yeah.

Um, and I think the challenge is, in my experience, the leavers usually start planning their move 5 to 10 years before they actually communicate that they're walking out the door.

Wow.

The left are often only just discovering this at the moment they leave— their partner leaves. So there can be a 5 to 10 year gap between these two people and their preparedness. So confidence, I don't think a lot of leavers have a lot of problems problems with confidence because it takes a hell of a lot of courage and confidence to break all the rules. Not, you know, you're suddenly not pleasing everybody, you're suddenly hurting people you love most in life, you're disobeying society. It takes a certain amount of guts and confidence to choose to walk. And I don't think those people, in my experience, have a lot of trouble with confidence. I think being left is then the beginning of a multi-year analysis and digestion of that change, which the other people did invisibly, still under the aegis of coupledom. Um, so, and there, that, that's hard, right? And it takes time, it takes a good social network, it takes friends. And it's mostly a lot about the first years on your own, or the first phase. I mean, I talk about 4 phases in divorce. There's leaving, looking, loving, and leaping. Leaving usually takes, as I say, a number of years. The looking phase is when you're starting to look for love. The first person you need to love is yourself. And so the work in maturity is coming to terms with who you are, who you are at this age, who you are at this stage. That can take some time. It can take psychotherapy and coaches and help and support. You gotta go get it. You gotta, you don't find confidence in relationships. You find confidence inside and you gotta go hunting. And it can take some people more or less time. But if you don't invest that time and you just quickly recouple you tend to then just repeat the patterns that you're trying to escape from in the first or second time around.

Yeah, and I think one of the, one of the really good points you've made is that because the leavers take so long to leave and they've been doing this work the whole time building up the courage to leave, often the people that are doing the work to support others who have recently been divorced are supporting the left. And that's what I notice with dating coaches is it's almost inevitably that their clients are the left, right? Their clients are not the leavers. Their clients are the left. And because the left are in shock, they didn't see it coming often, even if they kind of subconsciously knew something was going on. They didn't fully step into that place until it was too late. And then suddenly they feel abandoned and all sorts of other things. And, and, and that's where the coaches are making all their money. And again, I think because they need lots of time to catch up, right?

And the image— and again, the gendered aspects are interesting. The image we have of the left is the women who are more likely to go find the dating coaches and ask for help. But remember, the majority of the left are men. And I do worry because we're not serving them very well. We're not listening. We're not helping them. And it does take some digestion. I think they don't have much trouble recoupling. There are some terrifying stats on this too, right? I think 80% of men recouple within 2 years.

Not surprised.

80% of men— 80% of women stay single. So they'll get recoupled, but whether they go through the useful phases of thinking about it, digesting, learning from the first relationship in order to build the next isn't always done. And then I think they can keep those wounds without addressing them. And that's a bit of a shame that they can carry into a new relationship.

Yeah. And it's, you know, what I'm hearing is that in your role as the person who really has delved into gender, that there are a lot of massive gender differences when it comes to all of this, when it comes to finding a new relationship, when it comes to who decides to leave and why, and when it comes to just how people deal with the end of a long-term relationship.

Very, very different ways of coping, which doesn't always help to And one of the, one of the strange gendered aspects I discovered writing the book was, um, it's a lot harder for men to leave than women today. Yeah, yeah, because they've really been socialized to care, to be breadwinners, to be responsible. And a lot of them are carrying some pretty impossible women, um, in impossible circles for years or decades. Um, and I think The trouble is if they leave, society now judges them extraordinarily harshly, whereas if women leave now, it's kind of still— it's not exactly approved, but, you know, poor women, we're always a bit of a check for certain things and being so emotional or something, you know.

Yeah.

Oh, she went through menopause, she left.

Um, yeah, yeah.

I, I— they're real double-edged swords all over the place on gender in almost every situation, but Generally, I think there's— women make a lot more noise now about all of their issues, whether it's menopause or Q3 or— men don't make noise. They go quietly into a hut and get a little depressed. And I think, you know, sheds aren't good places for aging humans. And we want to get them back out. Yeah. Not necessarily remarrying really fast. But no, no.

And I, you know, We are both people that like to solve big societal problems, and I certainly have seen— I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna feel sorry for old white men, but I do see the fact that there's challenges that they have that, that aren't being addressed in the same way as they are for women, and that is being reflected in the struggle that many women find in trying to find appropriate age partners, because these guys just, they are like, these women are just asking too much of me. I don't, I don't, I don't know if I can step up to all that, right? And we haven't been, and women are like, but hey, my girlfriends step up to that. They don't have a problem with that. And so, you know, lots of it, like the leavers on the left, right?

I mean, I think we also have to accept as women our age in history, that we are the first massive generation of women who've exploded every norm. We've educated, we've worked, we've succeeded. I mean, this is the first time the world has experienced women like us, and we have fought and learned and talked and read and written. It's taken 50 years of thinking and digesting. And so now I think I always said at the beginning of the 21st century, men had to start thinking too, because we aren't the women they used to have access to. And for older men, I think because they have kind of accompanied this journey without necessarily being fully implicated in it, they thought it was about us. And then they discovered somewhere along the way that actually it's about them too. And so those, I think they are beginning their journey. There's a lot of talk and research now on masculinity and men, and it'll take another half century. We'll get there eventually. I think young men are already very, very different than older men. So, yeah, I agree with you. I think the disconnect now between these, especially the kind of women I'm talking about, the enlightened, empowered, successful women looking for men who can put up with us.

Yeah, that's right.

And, and not, you know, get scared off, terrified or disgusted is, is small, right? It's, it's small. It's, and that's, that's a real challenge.

Yeah. Well, let's end on that happy note, shall we?

But we know how to find the good ones because we've developed. No.

Yeah. Look, I've got, I've got all sorts of, you know, my, my best friend's a man. My Sunday person's a man. I just make it work in the way that it works for me. And I think that's what this time of life, that's the opportunity that we have is just to go think about what works for you. It doesn't have to be what works for everybody else. And there are ways and means to go about finding that if you have the energy and the time and the desire and all of the kind of fun stuff that goes along with with trying to find anybody that's suitable for whatever it is that you're looking for.

I opened my book with a quote from Margaret Mead, with whom I violently agree, who said, every woman deserves 3 men in her life. The first that you fall in love with, the second that you mate and eventually create a family with, and the third is the soulmate for the later part of life. And if you're lucky, it's all in the same man. But for many of us, it may be a few different ones.

Absolutely. 100%. I I totally agree with Margaret Mead, as long as she meant 3 different people. She didn't define it that way.

Left it open for us to decide.

Absolutely. Anyway, it's been lovely to chat with you, Aviva.

And you. Thank you so much, Suzanne Noble.

And I will no doubt see you around at some interesting conference somewhere.

Debating all of these big issues.

Absolutely.

See you soon. Bye. Bye.