[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]
There’s a social trend called “gray divorce,” in which older people who’ve been married for decades split up, to the astonishment of their families and friends. Often the couples seem happy, faithful, settled, comfortable. Why upset the status quo? Why not just run out the clock?
I don’t want a gray divorce but I do think I understand it. As I get older, the idea that I have a finite and shrinking number of days on Earth grows more insistent, and I sometimes ask myself:
“Do I really want to put up with this for the rest of my life?”
“This” could be almost anything: Socializing with people I don’t like. Traveling to places I don’t want to go. Eating food I don’t want to eat. Caring what anyone else thinks. Enduring the hundreds of little obligations we all bear, many of them optional.
There’s a perception that people lose their inhibitions and get cranky as they age. I don’t think their personalities change; I think they just drop their masks because they don't need them anymore. Sometimes that reveals an angry bigot, but more often, I think, it frees them to be who they want to be, do what they want to do, and fly their freak flags in all their colors.
I’m no psychologist, but I imagine many gray divorces happen when one person looks at their spouse and thinks, “The obligation I really don’t want to put up with for the rest of my life is you.”
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