What Does It Take for a Late-Life Marriage to Succeed?

Source: Psychology Today/AI Assisted

Marriage is perennially associated with young couples who, after some period of engagement and/or cohabitation, decide it’s time to make their relationship official. To be sure, the odds of a couple in their 50s or older deciding to marry are not high. However, for people living longer and ending a failing relationship in their 50s (the gray divorce), some aging couples decide to repartner. The question is, can these work, and if so, how?

The Facts About Repartnering

According to a 2025 study by Bowling Green University’s Susan Brown and colleagues, not only is gray divorce increasing, but so are the numbers of 50+ divorced people who decide to try again. As many as 37 percent of men and 22 percent of women repartner after a late-life divorce, with the norm being cohabitation and the exception, marriage. People who want to be together at this point in life may feel they don’t need the formality of marriage.

You might think people who decide to repartner are putting it off for as long as possible. Burned by divorce, they may want to take time to contemplate their next steps before starting anew. Men and women differ in this situation, and they differ in the choice to repartner based on prior marital history.

The men who want to repartner tend to have been married longer than women who want to try again. Also, men married more than once are more likely to seek a third spouse (or more). In general, heterosexual men have a wider range of potential new partners than do heterosexual women, due mainly to the lopsided sex ratio of male/females in later life because men have lower life expectancy.

Other gender-related factors also come into play. Older women aren’t as interested in repartnering because of the “gendered bargain implied by remarriage and, to a lesser extent, cohabitation.” Women may be more likely to exchange household labor and caregiving for the men’s economic support. However, the trajectories go in opposite directions. Men will earn less after retirement, but will also need more care. Conversely, older men are less likely to want to commit to a woman who has her own caregiving responsibilities (perhaps to a parent). This piece of the puzzle can involve the children. If a man is close to his children, this could offset the caregiving problem because at least the kids can step in when needed.

Testing the Repartnering Process

Using the extensive Health and Retirement Study (HRS) dataset, the authors identified 171 men and 78 women who repartnered, with 56 percent of women deciding to remarry compared to 40 percent of men. The key questions asked by the authors concerned the differences between those who remarried and those who cohabitated.

This comparison required the research team to control for possible influences on couples in these situations. These included years of education, employment, home ownership, health, extent of social ties, and marital “biography” (duration of prior marriage, years since separation, age at separation, whether this was the first or later separation, and whether the separation involved divorce).

Beyond the effects of wealth, the main findings to emerge from the gender comparison of repartnering were that marital biography had the biggest impact. People who divorced were more likely to repartner than those who were separated, and those who left a remarriage were more likely to repartner. In line with life course theory, this suggests, in the words of the authors, that “earlier events and experiences have enduring consequences for subsequent transitions.”

It seems, then, that people lead with their heart rather than their heads in deciding to find a new partner. Even other possible factors besides wealth had no impact, at least for women (e.g., having children and grandchildren). It is possible that instead of relying on family, women rely on friends in social networks; these are broader than men's networks.

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You might be wondering about the dynamics of a repartnered late-life union. We turn to a 2022 study by University of Haifa’s Chaya Koren. This study, unlike Brown and colleagues, included widowed late-life adults. Using in-depth interviews with 38 couples, the Haifa authors zeroed in on the components of late-life love.

These older couples (ages 66 to 92) described love as a state of “feeling good,” divided into pleasant (not heated), parental (deep and quiet), and sibling (unity). As it is true in all romantic relationships, repartnered love included being in love (in love like never before), partial love (feeling love, but sometimes), and falling out of love (but still caring for each other).

A key finding from the interview themes was that, unlike previous repartnering studies, participants reported their love to be exclusive: “Exclusivity in late-life repartnering pleasant love was found to be preserved by commitment, encompassing commitment and passion.” Unlike new relationships among younger partners, it was compassion rather than passion that seemed to characterize the love held by these late-life individuals.

What to Expect From Repartnering

Putting these findings together, it appears that older couples who repartner do so not due to practical exigencies or even economic resources, but due to a desire to express warm feelings of love with the partner they regard as their one and only. Most importantly, Koren concludes that whatever the view of love, both partners share it.

New relationships can also be constructed in vastly different ways from prior ones, even though, as Brown et al. discovered, length of prior marriage predicted desire to repartner. As expressed by a participants in the U. Haifa study, “And I love him very, very much and he loves me like no one ever loved me like this, ever, it’s not because my husband didn’t love me, he didn’t know how to show it, he [my husband] was a completely different person, he [my partner] is an optimist.”

These studies, as comprehensive as they were, still leave open several questions that might come to mind when you think about the practicalities of starting over in later life with a new partner. What happens to the house? What about all the permutations of children, stepchildren, grandchildren, and the entire cast of characters who make up an extended family? It seems that some of these stories have yet to be written.

To sum up, although some details remain undiscovered, the bottom line is that repartnering occurs in later life, and may be characterized, if not by passion, then by an exclusive sense of commitment and companionship. There’s much to look forward to if you hope to achieve fulfillment in late-life relationships; if not now, then in your future.