Divorce after 50 already climbed dramatically over the past three decades — but new research shows a less-discussed layer underneath that trend: a meaningful share of the boomers going through a “gray divorce” aren’t doing it for the first time. According to a family profile from Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research, 8.5% of men and 6.5% of women who have divorced after age 50 have actually gone through it more than once, a pattern researchers tie directly to the same generational shift that drove the initial gray-divorce boom.
The Overall Gray Divorce Boom, By the Numbers
The backdrop to this story is already striking on its own. The share of divorced adults 65 and older nearly tripled between 1990 and 2022, climbing from 5.2% to 15.2%, according to research from Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR). One in 10 people who get divorced in the US today is 65 or older, according to the same analysis. Meanwhile, the share of older adults who never married at all barely moved over that period, and widowhood among older adults actually declined by more than 14%, partly because people are living longer and staying married longer before a split occurs.
What’s New: Divorce Is Repeating Itself
What NCFMR’s more targeted analysis adds is a layer most gray-divorce coverage skips entirely: how many of these later-life splits are actually repeat performances. In a family profile focused specifically on multiple gray divorces, researchers Trey Williams and Francesca Marino, drawing on data from the long-running Health and Retirement Study spanning 1998 to 2018, found that among adults 50 and older who have ever divorced, 8.5% of men and 6.5% of women have divorced more than once. That means roughly 1 in 12 men and 1 in 15 women in this group aren’t experiencing their first gray divorce — they’re repeating a pattern.
Who’s Most Likely to Divorce More Than Once
The BGSU data also shows this isn’t evenly distributed. Among men, those who are Hispanic and have a history of gray divorce show the highest rate of multiple divorces, at 12.7%, compared with 8.8% for non-Hispanic white men and 4.9% for non-Hispanic Black men, according to the NCFMR family profile. Among women, the pattern flips: non-Hispanic white women have the highest rate of repeat gray divorce, at 6.9%, versus 3.4% for Hispanic women and 3.0% for non-Hispanic Black women. Education plays a role, too — multiple divorces were most common among men and women with less than a high school education (10.1% and 8.5%, respectively), and the rate for men declined steadily as education level rose, while women’s rates stayed comparatively flat across education levels.
Why Boomers Specifically Are Driving This
NCFMR researchers, including distinguished sociology professor Susan Brown, connect the repeat-divorce pattern directly to this generation’s dating and marriage history. Brown has explained that many boomers came of age during the divorce revolution of the 1970s, then remarried — and remarriages carry a higher risk of ending in divorce than first marriages do, she has noted, describing it as “part of what has changed the calculus about getting divorced.” Longer lifespans compound the effect: if people are staying married through their 50s, 60s, and beyond rather than being widowed earlier, there is simply more time on the calendar in which a second or third marriage can also come apart. NCFMR co-director I-Fen Lin has said the pattern “underscores that the gray divorce phenomenon is not an anomaly, but rather a manifestation of deeper, enduring societal shifts,” per BGSU’s own reporting on the research.
What It Means Going Forward
As boomers continue aging into their 60s, 70s, and 80s, this compounding pattern is likely to keep showing up in the data — a generation that divorced once, remarried, and in a meaningful minority of cases, is now doing it again. For family researchers, that reframes gray divorce from a single-event story into something closer to a recurring life-stage pattern for a specific slice of this generation. And for anyone assuming a first divorce after 50 is the exception to a lifetime of marital stability, the numbers suggest it’s sometimes just chapter one.
