Get the facts

Love and marriage

• Divorce rates have risen significantly faster among the over 50s than any other age group in the last 20 years. This is in marked contrast to the 22-year low in annual divorce numbers for the rest of the population.
• One of the major reasons has been linked to the increase in life expectancy. Once children have left home, people are re-evaluating whether they want to stay with their partner for potentially another 40 years.
• However, remarriage is increasingly prevalent, especially among men, with older widowed or divorced men more likely to remarry later in life than older women.1
• Over the last decade there has been a big rise in LATs - Living Apart Together relationships.2 These are people in committed relationships who live quite happily in their own separate properties. It cuts down on arguments about whose turn it is to do the washing up and can often be the key to keeping romance alive for longer.
• Famous LATs are Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton, and Toyah Wilcox, who lives on a separate continent to her husband.
• The British Sexual Fantasy Research Project, which examined the sex lives of more than 13,000 Britons, suggested that 30% of people over the age of 50 have had sexual relations with someone outside their marriage or partnership.
• Increasing numbers of people in their 50s and 60s are finding themselves single, often for the first time in decades.
• A survey by the online dating service, parship.co.uk, found that 37% of single over 50s would have sex on a first date compared to just 18% of under 40s. However, of the women polled who would have sex on a first date, 76% wanted to be wined and dined first.
• 60% of single over 50s said they didn't care if their family didn't approve of their date choices.

Family

• Social support is shown to be linked to quality of life and well-being. Family support followed by the support provided by friends is most closely related to well-being for all age groups.
• Life-expectancy increases have led to a change in the shape of many family trees. Instead of three-generation families with a large assortment of children and grandchildren, more and more families are stretching to four or five generations, with fewer people at each stage.
• This trend has been referred to as the 'beanpole effect' by the Office of National Statistics.
• While we may have fewer brothers, sisters and cousins, we not only have more living parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, but we can also now enjoy an array of new relationships with step- and half-brothers and sisters, step-parents and children, step-grandparents and grandchildren and step-cousins.
• Almost one million adults are still living with their parents, even though they are approaching 40.3 To describe this trend, Prudential created the term Kippers - 'kids in parents' pockets eroding retirement savings'!
• Research for the Skipton Building Society in 2004 showed that parents were prepared to pay an average of £8,000 to help them flee the nest - £5,000 to help them on to the property ladder and a further £3,000 for their upkeep.
• A national poll of 1,000 Americans shows that older people get along better with their mothers-in-law than younger people.4
• People in their 40s, 50s and 60s are more likely to get along equally with their own mothers and their in-laws, while those in their 20s and 30s usually get on better with their own mothers.
• In Britain, a survey conducted by Travelodge5 showed that almost one in five of us dread our mothers-in-law's Christmas visit because they stay too long, criticise the dinner and moan about the cleanliness of the house!

Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet.
Mae West

Friends

• American sociologists have reported a dramatic drop in people's experience of having 'close confidants' (people they can turn to for help, advice or just as a sounding board with whom they can discuss matters that are important to them). People now have 30% fewer people they feel they can turn to than 25 years ago.
• People also have less face-to-face contact with neighbours, clubs and organisations outside the home.
• The decline has been mostly in the number of friends people have, resulting in people expecting and needing more support from their immediate family.
• However, increasing numbers of over 50s are using social networking websites. A recent study by analysts comScore6, showed that nearly one third of Facebook users are aged between 35 and 54. This age group also made up 41% of MySpace users.

1 www.statistics.gov.uk
2 www.bbc.co.uk
3 www.bbc.co.uk
4 HighBeam Encyclopaedia
5 www.travelodge.co.uk
6 www.telegraph.co.uk