PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao 0:00
I don't know if anyone ever said it to me explicitly, but the narrative I inherited about divorce was that you just don't do it. In my parents' generation, especially, divorce was pretty much a dirty word, but that is changing in the past 30 some years, the divorce rate for Americans over 55 has doubled, and for couples over 65 even tripled. The trend also has a name, Gray Divorce.
Linda Lingo 0:38
I divorced after a 40 year marriage, and because of my strong circle of friends and family, my circle stayed pretty much the same. My family was very supportive. In fact, my kids said, what took you so long, mom? So I had support, and yet it was very difficult at times, like any life changing decision can be.
Nanette Murphy 1:10
I went through a gray divorce about 10 years ago, except at the time, I was not even aware of the term my social and family life. Of course, it changed. I think the hardest part was being at family events, and my children weren't there. They might have been with their dad. My kids were teens and adults, but it was the almost being an empty nester, and now you're also being single again.
Anita Rao 1:44
That's Nanette Murphy and Linda Lingo. I'm Anita Rao, and this is Embodied, our show about sex relationships and your health. There are many reasons why great divorces are growing. We're all living longer. There's less social stigma about divorce, and cisgender women have more economic autonomy now than in decades past. While divorce at any age is a huge rupture, going through one after a decades long marriage presents a whole host of unique challenges, and today we're talking particularly about the experiences of heterosexual women who are the most likely to initiate divorce across all age groups. One person who's become a leading voice on love life and Gray Divorce is Laura Stassi. Laura is the host of dating while Gray, a podcast on relationships and dating after 50, and that project started with her own story. Hey Laura. Welcome back to the show.
Laura Stassi 2:38
Hi Anita. Nice to hear from you.
Anita Rao 2:41
So we just noted that women are the most likely to ask for divorce. But for you, it was a little bit different. You were in your early 50s. Your husband of nearly 30 years, with whom you'd raised two children, said he wanted a divorce. So take me back to that moment. What was the first thing that went through your head when you heard the word divorce?
Laura Stassi 3:00
Well, it's interesting. What you said about divorce was a dirty word. I come from a long line of long marriages, and so I never thought divorce was even an option. I thought couples just soldier through, regardless of how happy they may or may not be. So it wasn't that dramatic. I mean, I clearly knew my marriage was in trouble, but I just always thought we could work through it. I mean, we had history. We had two kids, you know? Why not? So when it became very clear that we were not going to stay married, and it was actually a house sale that precipitated this, we got a knock on the door, and we've been talking about downsizing, but this realtor knocked on our door and said they had somebody interested in our house. They named a price that was too good to refuse. I thought, Okay, that's great. It'll give us, you know, we can downsize to an apartment and figure out, you know, really get to know each other again after all these years and now that the kids are out of the house. And he was like, No, I think this is the time to just go our separate ways. And so, yeah, it was very jarring, I have to tell you.
Anita Rao 4:09
Yeah, I mean, that sounds jarring and like that maybe caught you off guard. Like, what were some of the fears that started to come up for you in the wake of that first kind of conversation?
Laura Stassi 4:19
Well, and again, there had been multiple conversations. I just did not I just wasn't hearing him. I wasn't hearing how unhappy he was. I didn't understand how unhappy he was. I will say we are two very different people. What I really didn't realize is we had two kind of totally different outlooks on whether a relationship is worth working on, and some of the issues that might cause you to decide to split. And I will say my ex, I used to say divorce was a family tradition, but he had parents who got divorced in the early 70s, when he was in. Junior high school, and he also had grandparents who got divorced, so at a time when it was very unlikely. And so I don't know if he was more familiar with divorce, but he maybe subconsciously knew divorce was an option. So it took me a long time to figure out, okay, he really means this. We're not going to stay married. And it was terrifying, because I had been, you know, we got married when we were not even 23 we were a few weeks away from our 23rd birthday. I had been a wife my entire adult life, and then we had kids. I freelanced, and I was a writer, freelance writer and editor, or I worked part time, but I never really had to rely on my own financial juice. I focused more on the kids, and so it was really, I don't know, discombobulating to realize, okay, this is it. You are on your own. You are alone. It was kind of scary. It was very scary.
Anita Rao 6:00
Yeah, so he brought up the initial conversation, but then it was actually you who filed for divorce. So what led you to being the one to take that more official step?
Laura Stassi 6:10
We got separated under, you know, two roofs living apart. So where we lived, Virginia, you could be separated under the same roof. So that was in like, 2013 and I'm embarrassed to say this now, but I spent the next year thinking, Oh, we're gonna get back together. Yeah, he just needs his own space. I was still doing kind of dumb things, like, like he had presentations or proposals, so I would go over to his apartment and help him with that, or he was going on a business trip, so I would go over there and iron his shirts. And, you know, I really thought that we were going to get back together. And then it became very clear which he ended up buying a house in 2014 and again, it was a house that I found. I love looking at real estate. And so I saw this advertisement for a townhouse, and it was, he's an architect, and it needed complete renovation. And I thought, Oh, that would be a great he would love that house. He loves to do that kind of work. It's a house we could live in together. And then it became very clear, after he bought the house, that somebody else was going to help him with the move, and he did not intend for me to ever move in.
Anita Rao 7:26
I mean, there's so much in that story that I think is so relatable. Of like, when you're in a long term relationship, there are patterns that just get established, and so you just you do certain things, you take care of someone in a certain way, you respond in a certain way. How did you begin to start defining your own identity beyond that? Once it was really clear, like, Okay, this is not we're no longer in partnership together. I'm gonna be creating my own life. What steps did you take?
Laura Stassi 7:52
Yeah, well, first of all, I have come to feel grateful for the divorce wings because I was terrified. But there were a couple of things I did that in retrospect, they really helped me think of myself as an independent person. The first thing that I did, before we even got divorced, you know, we had been separated, I took back my family name, Stasi. I just felt like I had spent more years being his last name than my own last name. And if I wanted to think of myself as an independent person, I really needed to take back my maiden name, and then I also bought a place of my own and moved so it was, you know, Northern Virginia, where we were both, you know, living as a couple, and then when we split up, we were both still living in Northern Virginia. So it wasn't like I made a dramatic move, but the place I moved to, everybody I met, you know, I joined a running group, I joined a church. I got involved with the town Association. Everybody there met me as Laura Stassi, single woman. They knew I had two kids and I had been divorced, but they didn't know me as any other identity, and that just really helped me feel like, Oh, I'm I'm Laura Stassi, you know, I'm a whole person. I'm not part of a couple. Yeah, that helped a lot for me. I actually had the luxury of doing that, though, because my kids were grown and out where I know a lot of, a lot of women don't feel comfortable taking back their family name if they changed it in the first place, or they can't move because of, you know, kids school situations and that kind of thing.
Anita Rao 9:30
Yeah, we're going to talk more about kids a little later on, but I would love to hear about your beginning to kind of put your story in context of this bigger trend, you were going through this thing, and you started to soon realize that there were a lot of other people going through it, a lot of other gray divorces. What were some of the parallels that you began to see between your own experience and that of other folks around you?
Laura Stassi 9:59
Yes. So what happened was, as a journalist, I was really curious about later in life divorce, because I had no personal experience, of course, and I come from a big family, and there was no Gray Divorce, you know, to speak of. So I was curious about, just like I had, you know, read a bunch of relationship books when I was trying to, quote, unquote, save my marriage. I started reading about divorce, and I found a book, and I have to give you the title, because it sort of like the Bible. It was called, calling it quits, late divorce, late life divorce and starting over. It's from 2007 and the author, Deidre bear, she's actually a National Book, award winning biographer, and her story goes, she was getting a divorce after a 43 year marriage, and she was in her dentist's office one day, and came across an AARP magazine, and in there was a survey about divorce, and she read it, and it was like a light bulb went off. It was like, Oh my gosh, this is what I'm going through. So in her book, she talks all about the great divorce trend. And it was deirdres book that led me to studies, and there was one from the National Center for family and marriage research, and they are the ones who originally found some of the statistics that you cited at the top of the show. So I just started exploring the topic, which also led me to wonder about dating and recoupling after Gray Divorce, and that's kind of what led to my podcast, dating while gray.
Anita Rao 11:33
When Laura started looking for other people with shared experience, she found no shortage of folks going through similar life transitions. One thread that runs through many Gray Divorce a stories is that while there's all the emotional stuff to consider, there's also a lot of logistics, especially when your retirement plans and real estate are all tied together, getting through the legal system while sorting out the financials. That's what we're going to get into right after this break.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao in 2018 after 20 years of marriage, Stephanie Han began divorce proceedings. She was in her early 50s with an adolescent kid, and had the feeling that life, at least as she knew it was over the process of sorting through the personal and financial sides of the split were complicated and sometimes contentious, but Stephanie got some advice from her lawyer, but helped her find her way back to herself. Write your divorce story, Dr. Stephanie Han is a literature scholar, award winning author and educator who now teaches classes for women on writing their own divorce stories. Hey, Stephanie, welcome to Embodied.
Dr. Stephanie Han 12:53
Aloha. Thank you for having me.
Anita Rao 12:56
So as you were undergoing your divorce proceedings, your lawyer gave you that piece of advice, write your divorce story, which is a narrative of your family background, your married life, and most importantly, this kind of thesis of why you were divorcing, and you ended up writing 60 pages in a couple of days. And I'd love to start with what that thesis statement was in there of why you were divorcing,
Dr. Stephanie Han 13:21
Right, so this was a very difficult project for me. I've been writing my whole life, obviously, but when presented with trying to encapsulate the most significant relationship or philosophy anything of my life, I was really stuck. And so the thesis I finally came up with, more or less, was that I wanted to live an honest, authentic life and be true to who I was. And by this time, the marriage wasn't authentic, if it ever was. And so that was my thesis statement. People don't divorce for things like he didn't do the laundry or, you know, the carpool was forgotten. They divorced for very profound belief system violation reasons, and so, yeah, I wanted to be truthful to who I was.
Anita Rao 14:17
As you wrote that story of that 20 year marriage, and you looked back on your early days of your relationship and kind of traced who you were and who you had become. How was that person from 20 years ago different from the person writing the divorce story?
Dr. Stephanie Han 14:32
The person from the early days was someone who believed that marriage was for life, and the person also thought that anything could be overcome. And if, if somebody wants to change, they can change. The person who wrote the divorce story really understands much more profoundly that the desire to change is something that is up to the individual you. Can't force somebody to change and to even change oneself requires tremendous amount of will and resourcing and an ability to see oneself. And I always thought that things could be overcome. And what I realized was that this wasn't necessarily true. We didn't have to get married for life. One does not, and that, I think, is one of the biggest takeaways I got.
Anita Rao 15:29
You have talked before about how you know this was a deeply introspective, transformative process for you personally, but it also changed the outcome of your divorce and the legal proceedings. So how did that divorce story document alter what happened next in mediation and negotiation?
Dr. Stephanie Han 15:48
So what happened was I finally wrote the divorce story, and I came up with this divorce story structure. I was a writing and literature teacher, so I taught the analytical essay, five paragraph essay, all that stuff, and I knew I had to follow some kind of structure. So I finally brainstormed a way of doing it, and once I got through and I shaved it down from the 60 pages, it was put into my file, and we went to a mediator, and upon reading my file the first thing when I walked into the mediation building that morning of my divorce proceedings, the presiding judge or mediator said, we need two separate rooms for these people, and that changed everything, because I was very difficult for me to utter all of The problems, the humiliations, the difficulties, the challenges, it was really hard for me to orally state this, even to my lawyer and even to myself, but on the page, I could do it, and I could reveal everything. And so revealing everything allowed me to get that separate space. And since I had that separate space, I could collect myself. I could negotiate differently. I didn't have to be intimidated by the person who had intimidated me for 20 years.
Anita Rao 17:11
In the process of writing all of that out, you began to kind of identify core beliefs that you had about marriage, about divorce, and some of those were beliefs about money, which is one of the more difficult pieces of the divorce process. What were some of the biggest emotional beliefs about money that you started to reckon with in these initial phases of divorce?
Dr. Stephanie Han 17:33
Money needed managing. We have to figure out money now. What's interesting is, in the first decade of the 20 year marriage, I was more consistently employed with the second decade of the marriage. I was primarily concerned with the raising of my child, although I did continue to work and obtained my PhD and taught and wrote, but what happened was an imbalance I feel, of funds and money and income really skewed the dynamic of an already imbalanced relationship, and so this really affected how I came to see money, how I came to see my Right to discuss money, oversee money. And so money is really fundamentally connected to marriage. What I really learned was that there are two parts to a marriage. There's the emotional part, but marriage really was a business agreement. It was founded as a business agreement between two families to better the status, position and wealth of the two families. And so the difficulty and challenge was for me to separate this and to understand that I was attempting to extricate myself from a business, and this required me to understand more about the business and to acknowledge what I didn't know about money, and to acknowledge what money can do in terms of power dynamic, in terms of how one moves through society, in terms of how one thinks about life in general.
Anita Rao 19:15
There's so much there, and the research on Gray Divorce in heterosexual relationships shows that women's household income tends to drop between 23 to 40% in that year after they really tend to fare worse financially after a split. And that was true for your own experience. How did you begin to kind of adjust practically to the changes that were coming to your financial security.
Dr. Stephanie Han 19:42
Oh, it was really scary, and it was really terrifying. And I do have to say that I believe that studies show that it can take up to seven years to fully recover. So what we have to understand is that divorce doesn't happen in a vacuum. Divorce is a feminist. Issue, because what it brings up is ideas of unpaid labor and sweat equity and the invisible labor that women do in the home. So we can talk about divorce, we can talk about 5050, split. But what is 5050? If a person only, in general, as most women do, make only 80% of what a man makes to $1 so a lot of this discussion, in other words, is predicated on a broader understanding of how women navigate economically. If that makes any sense.
Anita Rao 20:34
No that does. And I want to talk more about kind of how it played out in your your personal life, but I want to bring Laura Stassi back into the conversation first. Laura is the host of the podcast dating while gray and Laura, the financial picture, as we've been talking about, is really complicated. For a lot of gray divorces, you have potentially had joint accounts that you've been building for decades. You might have had retirement plans that are fully intertwined. How did you and your ex kind of practically negotiate the retirement account piece in particular?
Laura Stassi 21:08
Well, it's very everything Stephanie has said, I'm just shaking my head in agreement, because what she's talking about is, you know, the rights and that fundamentally marriage is a business agreement. Fundamentally, divorce is also a business agreement. And those things about the 5050, splits, and you know, not recognizing the financial cost of household labor and family labor that women do, that all can come to a very ugly head when it's time to split things up financially. Now, let me preface this by saying divorce laws and finances around divorce, they vary by state. In the state that I'm in, Virginia, I had the option of getting spousal support for life or until remarriage or cohabitation. I I'm not sure how I feel about this, because I said, Oh no, that's not right. He shouldn't, you know, that doesn't see I can go out and work, you know, I'm only in my mid 50s. I can find a full time job, but there's a lot of guilt surrounding not bringing in money from outside sources. I think that a lot of women experience and so, and then the retirement accounts, there was a, again, I'm not sure if this is Virginia or federal law, but there is an equalization so that for me, luckily, the accounts were split so that, you know, whatever I had earned in, you know, my 401, KS, or whatever, and whatever he had earned, we did it so that we both left with the same amount of money in our retirement accounts. But it is scary, because, you know, we have more earning days behind us than ahead of us. And so what do we do to rebuild those retirement accounts? Or can we ever expect to rebuild retirement accounts if we have not been working full time, you know, up until a certain point in our lives.
Anita Rao 23:07
Yeah, there's a total, total recalibration that happens. And for many people I know Stephanie, for you, it was part of it was kind of a an awakening of like, Oh, I really need to get more active and involved in figuring out my financial picture, figuring out what I want to do. What were some of the kind of steps that you took to learn more about finances and figure out how to play a bigger part in your own money future?
Dr. Stephanie Han 23:40
Well, one of the big things I did was I did obtain the services of a financial advisor, because I was involved in a house sale, and, you know, there was a considerable sum and, and to be perfectly honest, it just freaked me out. I just didn't know what to do with it. And I was lucky that I obtained the advice and knowledge of a trusted person now who could help me with this and discuss it without making me feel really bad, because there's this whole thing that especially I experience, like here I am, this educated woman I was supposed to, quote, unquote, know better than to marry someone, As I did, to get in a situation where I'm divorced as I am, to know more about money, and yet I did not. So there was a lot of shame that was linked to the lack of knowledge about money. I mean, now I really, I don't have it. I advocate for it, et cetera. But I think this is also what Laura was talking about because a Western capitalist society states that labor is only paid. So as we're exiting a Gray Divorce where we've put in years of unpaid or invisible labor, we are reluctant to ask for money for alimony for. Compensation for all those years. But as everybody knows, men benefit from a wife that supports their career, and women actually financially do not benefit from marriage in this sense. And the vast majority of women across the US, any age, do at least, what is it? Five to 15 more hours of invisible, unpaid labor in their households? So I think that you know, again, I like to bring up the broader discussion of what it means to have been married, what it means to split. And when you exit a Gray Divorce and you attempt to enter a workforce as an older woman, you have so much discrimination, the comments, the idea that you should be at a certain position and that you're not, or a discounting of all your past work history prior to having a child or child rearing. I mean, it's really incredible. There's ageism for men and women, but let me tell you, the way it comes down on women is a million times worse.
Anita Rao 26:08
I want to follow up Laura with this. I mean, there is this financial upheaval. There's kind of a bit the business of marriage upheaval, but there have been some interesting studies that have shown that women are happier after their divorces than their male counterparts, even when taking this negative financial impact into account. So I'm curious how you've seen that dynamic play out in the lives of some of the great divorces that you have spoken with.
Laura Stassi 26:34
Wow, absolutely. It's interesting, isn't it that even though we are financially worse off statistically than our ex spouse, we tend to initiate the divorces, and we are happier after the divorce. And it just there was another study that came out, and it was about wives who out earn their husbands, and the out earning wives are less likely to divorce. And for me, that brings up questions of, does that mean the money is the most important thing in keeping the relationship together? I mean, who knows it is such a I don't know sticky wicket. I hate to be kind of flip about it, but money, it's playing a role in why couples decide to stay married, whether they're happy or not, or whether they have to stay married because they can't afford a divorce. In some ways, Gray Divorce is kind of a privilege in that if we have been with somebody for a long time, there's conceivably more to split. And so even though it might not split to you know, men are able to rebound quicker, maybe it's worth it to the women who are initiating divorce to get out of it. I do have to say, though I know a lot of women, or I've talked to a lot of women for the podcast, who were equal earners with their spouses, but also kind of gave them the power to keep an eye on everything, and as a result, they experienced financial infidelity. One woman I talked to, she, you know, they split the bills, and he was in charge of the mortgage, and she just assumed he was paying it, and guess what? He wasn't paying it. He lost his job. Some contracts fell through. And so I would just encourage everybody to be aware of what's going on in your relationship, so that if it ends, you're not so blindsided with what it costs to run a household, what it costs to, you know, put away money for retirement, unexpected medical costs, how that can impact your your life. And Stephanie brought up getting help from a professional. And I, I had no idea they existed. But there's all kinds of people now called divorce financial analysts, divorce financial planners. And I really think that's a great idea for a woman who is divorcing to seek someone who has her best interest in mind, only because I have talked to some women who, if they were in charge of their finances during the marriage, and now they've got like, this pot of money and they don't know what to do with it. They say, Oh, I'm just going to, you know, my ex husband's guy said he'll help me take care of it and figure out what to do. Well, okay, is that such a great idea to kind of continue that financial tie to someone who may be more vested, I guess, in the welfare of your ex spouse, I don't know.
Anita Rao 29:26
Yeah, it's a complicated thing to calculate, and we don't have a lot of time left in this section. But Stephanie, I just want to briefly ask you about this. We've been talking a lot about all of these kind of really logistical things that were on your mind during the divorce proceeding, figuring out how to advocate for yourself, learning about the financial picture, emotionally, where did you kind of find yourself, and how did you balance the emotional and the rational as you moved through this process,
Dr. Stephanie Han 29:56
it was extremely difficult. I would only compare it. To burning completely to the ground. Wow. You know, you just my entire self. I feel got rewired after divorce. I was completely broken. What kept me going was I had a son. I had a young son that I had to figure out how to provide for, how to be stable for. And I was determined, because I was determined to live a life with integrity that also kept me going, and I was so fortunate to have the support of a lot of friends and family who really came through for me. I can't even tell you how important this is but it's the remaking of an identity. So for over 20 years, you're part of this construction of family, and women frequently are tasked with this concept of holding the family together. If a family splits, the first thing most people default do is look at the woman as if you could not keep your household together. And so this is really devastating. So the first thing I usually tell the women who come to class to learn how to write their divorce story, depending on what phase they're in, is you're burning to the ground right now. You've got to burn all the way after you burn, though, you can rise like the Phoenix, because in the end, freedom, despite whatever financial hardships there are, despite the inequities of how society views you, you will be free. And it is worth it.
Anita Rao 31:45
The Road to Freedom for Stephanie and Laura was paved by everything from online dating to lessons in surfing and hula. We're going to hear those stories just after this break.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Getting divorced after age 50 can turn your life upside down. Your finances and family dynamics are thrown into a state of flux, but there's also an opportunity to redefine what you want.
Linda Lingo 32:18
My retirement plan was cut in half. I no longer had the security of two retirement incomes, but only mine. And the flip side was I was free. I was free to create my life my way and live life fully.
Nanette Murphy 32:43
You had a goal in retirement with someone traveling, and suddenly you're making these plans on your own, which, in hindsight, is fun because you get to make your own rules and set your own pace, but changing the trajectory of your life and trying to figure out what's next. What now I'm 50, there's convincing myself that your life isn't over, and I've learned to say I'm not starting over. It's just a new beginning.
Linda Lingo 33:17
Was the glitch in my retirement worth my emotional freedom? Absolutely.
Anita Rao 33:30
There's a lot of heaviness in the divorce process, but that emotional freedom after a Gray Divorce can make space for new relationships and love still with me to talk about that are Laura Stassi and Dr. Stephanie Hahn. Laura is the creator and host of the podcast dating while gray and Stephanie is an award winning author and educator who has coached women in reclaiming their life narratives by writing divorce stories. I'm excited to talk more about this rebuilding process. Stephanie, I know for you, there were some new hobbies you began to explore. What were the moments of kind of feeling like you'd begun to discover new parts of yourself in the wake of everything you'd been through?
Dr. Stephanie Han 34:13
Yeah. So there were new things that I gave myself permission to explore, two of them surfing and hula, which are very integral and part of life here in Hawaii. And surfing, I think is really interesting, because, actually, that was the last activity that myself and my ex and my child tried together. I booked us a surfing lesson, figuring, if we could all surf together. We would stay together as a family, which is really, you know, hobbies don't keep you together. But what I noticed was I said, this is a metaphor for everything. So we go out to Waikiki, my son, he's able to pop up on. The board and ride to shore, because he's a kid, and low center of gravity. Then I get up, and I'm so stoked, because I've wanted to surf my whole life, and I never have, and I'm riding the board into Waikiki. And then I go to those tourist video cameras, and I see my ex, and he's on top of the board. And they always say the best surfer is the one having the most fun, and he's grimacing as he's riding into the shore, you know, because Damn it if his wife and his son got up, he has to get up on the board. And I was just really down when I saw that video, you know, so right after we decided to split, I thought, Okay, I'm gonna take some surf lessons. So I started to take some But literally, when I went out, my heart hurt and I decided I wasn't really ready. And then as time went on, I tried it with different lessons, with different people, and it got worse, and then it got better, and now I can surf. I'm not the best surfer, but it's something that gave me an idea of freedom, of belonging, of knowing I can do something, because you have to go through the fear before you get to the joy on the wave.
Anita Rao 36:26
What a beautiful story, and such a perfect metaphor for that finding a new beginning and getting back on the horse or the surfboard, I guess, as you call it.
Dr. Stephanie Han 36:38
Yeah, you know, it was great. And hula also really helped. Hula is a expressive art form, but it's also an idea of prayer and communion with other women and my Kumu, my hula teacher, I always say that she taught me to smile again. I'm forever grateful.
Anita Rao 36:59
I love that, Laura, you started some new hobbies yourself. You also nerding out and being a journalist. Started doing a lot of research, and you started thinking about dating again. How did you kind of identify that you wanted to explore something new in the realm of relationships?
Laura Stassi 37:20
After the dust had settled, I realized I, you know, I had spent most of my life as part of a couple, I did want to find another committed relationship, but the last time I had been single, I mean, telephone answering machines weren't even invented. So what I wanted to do, you know, I'd heard about online dating, but I thought, surely this isn't the only way to find somebody else. I just didn't want to do that where I didn't want to do that immediately. So what I started doing was looking for people who had gotten together after age 50, and I wanted to know how they were meeting. And then as I'm having these conversations with people, I'm realizing, you know, it's not just about meeting someone else. It's about what does your relationship want to look like for the later years of life? Because conceivably, we don't want to have more children. We don't feel the need necessarily to get married from either a spiritual or a you know, family structural standpoint, how are people organizing their lives at this stage to include a romantic partner?
Anita Rao 38:27
What was the best date that you went on in those early years?
Laura Stassi 38:31
It was the first date that made me realize, and I know this sounds a little weird, but it made me realize that I'm an attractive person.
Anita Rao 38:38
Yeah, you are.
Laura Stassi 38:41
But no, not that I thought I was ugly or anything, but I just didn't think I had, you know, I was a wife, I was a mother, and it was somebody that I actually knew from back in the day, and we ran into each other online, and I remember him being a nice guy. Let me go out, you know, we'll meet for dinner, whatever. So we met for dinner, and despite 40 years or whatever, I was attracted to him, and I thought, Oh, I didn't know that you could feel this way after a certain age. So that was great.
Anita Rao 39:14
Stephanie, I'm curious for you about this thread of kind of noticing yourself and thinking of yourself as a sensual and sexual person again, and what has opened up for you in that realm, in this chapter of your life?
Dr. Stephanie Han 39:30
Well, it's interesting, because I have been open to dating, and I did find somebody, somebody walked into my life who, like Laura, had been in my life prior, but I do have a young son, and people always with great divorce, they're going to assume that your kids are out of the house. This decision that I made was I didn't actually want to co parent with anybody, and I was a single working mom, or I am, I don't have. Have a lot of time to cultivate and dedicate to a relationship. Is it going to change as my son gets older? Yeah, but I think that for me, the biggest change has been me seeing that I am not lonely for one single second I was much more lonely being married to somebody, and now I'm not married to somebody. I don't actually actively have somebody at the moment in my life, and I'm never lonely, not for a single second.
Anita Rao 40:32
You've mentioned your son a couple of times. I'm curious about the narrative of divorce that you want to pass along to him, and what you're kind of trying to show him in this phase of yours life as a family,
Dr. Stephanie Han 40:47
it's been very challenging. My son, he's going to be a senior in high school. What I've ensured is that I've always tried to have male mentors around him, because we don't have active involvement, and so I want him to see different role models of men. But also what has been really crucial is reformulating an idea of what a family should look like. He has a family. This family includes his aunt, who's right next door, nearby, and his two grandparents, his maternal grandparents and the guinea pig, cookie and his grandparents, dog mommy and we reconstructed a family that, in a sense, is far more supportive and healthy and loving and giving than it was when he had a nuclear family, when it appeared, probably publicly, that everything was fine. We look a little different now as a family, but we are a much better family.
Anita Rao 41:52
I love that, and that kind of rebuilding a web far beyond the nuclear family is something that we love talking about on this show, and as part of that, there is kind of a renegotiation of what your family dynamic looks like. And Laura, I want to put that to you. Your kids were older when you got divorced, but then there was a period when you were back on the dating scene, and then your daughter moved in with you, and she was on the dating scene. So what was it like to kind of re establish your dynamic with your kids as a single person?
Laura Stassi 42:23
Yeah, so I will say that I feel like my kids, and I don't want to speak for them, but it seems, from my perspective, they have a better relationship, not only with me individually, but also with my ex husband individually, that it's tough though, because they have had to negotiate relationships with each of us, whereas before it might have been easy. You know, I'm going home, home, meaning mom and dad are both there, but yes, my daughter, I was thrilled when she came home to live with me for a few months. I was surprised. We were both surprised at how well we got along, and she's got a different perspective. And I was talking to her the other day about another topic related to dating, and I realized that some things are just age related, like some of the things, you know, not that I'm her mother or that I have perspective, but the way she comes at things, and you know, not that she's speaking for an entire generation of millennials, but it was just very interesting to me. So I I love her perspective. However, I'm really glad not to be a millennial trying to date.
Anita Rao 43:32
How do you think things may change as Gen X ages into this Gray Divorce zone? Most of the gray divorces right now are baby boomers?
Laura Stassi 43:44
Yes, so supposedly, Gray Divorce is a boomer phenomenon, and I'm a young Boomer, but now that the oldest Gen Xers are in their 50s, I think time will tell. I've heard from a lot of listeners, like in their early 50s, and I posted something on Facebook, and it was a, I think, a study from AARP talking about the divorce rate among people 65 and older. And I said something like, I really hope someone now is looking at these older Gen Xers. And so many women responded saying, Yep, I turned 50. Got a divorce. Please talk about it, because it's our thing too. So I'm wondering now, as I've gotten older, you know, I thought, of course, I'll get married and have kids, but after talking on the show with divorce financial analysts prenup attorneys, I'm wondering, what is the appeal of marriage? Other than that, the government really does subsidize married couples, in a way they don't subsidize single people. You know, anthropologist Margaret Mead suggested we should all have three marriages in our lifetime if we're going to get married, the first for love, the second for parenting, and the third for companionship. And I think, not. I'm pro divorce, but I do think it's increasingly rare that the person that we fall in love with and build a family with when we're in our you know, late 20s, early 30s, is that the person we can stay married to for the rest of our lives, and both of us are happy and fulfilled.
Anita Rao 45:18
Stephanie, I want to land with you on this question that Laura poses of why is marriage still worth it? And I think one of the things that's challenging is that there is a lot of cultural narratives around marriage. It's really important in certain cultures to bring families together. I know that's true for Indian American families like mine. I know it's true for Korean American families like yours. And I guess I would just love to end on hearing about where you are in your relationship with your parents today, of them accepting this change in your marital status and supporting you in this life after divorce.
Dr. Stephanie Han 45:58
Yeah, so I want to say I'm a Gen X CUSP Korean American, and so I think on one side, my fan, I'm the first person to divorce in 34 generations. This is documented my dad, my mom's side is from Hawaii, so it's a little different. Initially, it was a real shock, because if I really looked hard at why I stayed married. Part of it was because I felt it would be something that my family would like and they wanted. I'm from a family of three girls. I was the only one to marry and I was the only one to have a child, so I did feel that pressure to maintain a marriage. And when I divorced, one of the first things that my dad did when I went over to tell him, I'm getting a divorce was hand me some skin care cream. I met my mom, it's like dad brought you some skin care cream. And I realized, I thought, oh my god, this is about a statement about I'm very old now, but it's also literally about saving face. You save your face. You save your public image, you you're saving whatever you can. And literally, I was supposed to save my face with this expensive skin care cream, and when I went home, I was really upset. I threw the skincare cream into my drawer, and I thought, I can't believe it, maybe if we all focused on something other than skincare, I wouldn't even be divorced in the first place. I mean, this was my interdependent Korean thinking, right, as an Asian American. But later I went, I went to see this Korean facialist, and she told me when I told her the story, and I kind of expected her to sort of agree with me, because when I told my white American friends, they're like, oh my god, they should be talking to about other things, other than saving your skincare, the Korean woman started tearing up, and she said, your parents, they love your skin so much. So for her, it was this idea of care and love that they want you to maintain stability uncertainty, whether that be in your skin or not, but my parents have really rallied, and they're very supportive. You know, my son listens to my mother more than he listens to me.
Anita Rao 48:20
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC, a listener-supported station. If you want to lend your support to this podcast, consider a contribution at wunc.org now. Special thanks to Nanette Murphy and Linda Lingo for contributing to this week’s show. We appreciate you! We have some special financial tips from Linda that we’re gonna share on our Instagram and Tiktok feeds, so make sure you’re following us there at embodiedwunc. This episode is produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Jenni Lawson is our technical director, and Quilla wrote our theme music. If you have thoughts after listening to this episode, we would love to hear them. Leave us a voice note in our virtual mailbox, speak pipe, write a review and let us know why you listen, or text your favorite episode to a friend. Word of mouth recommendations are the best way to support our podcast, and we so appreciate your support. Until next time, I'm Anita Rao taking on the taboo with you.