With billionaire couples splitting up, American divorce experts say the same old problems of finding “irreconcilable differences” with one’s spouses resonate across all economic levels, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The divorce between Melinda and Bill Gates last Monday has focused global attention to how even billionaires—with everything in them---can still not find a future together because there is nothing, but money, that binds them.
In announcing their decision to divorce, Bill and Melinda Gates cited the work they had done on their marriage, and a mutual sense of pride in their children and philanthropy.
But in identical joint statements shared on Twitter, they said, "we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives."
When Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos announced their intention to split in 2019, divorce lawyer Nicole Sodoma highlighted this universal challenge in staying together long-term.
"The people we marry are not the people we divorce," she said, "because people change."
I was intrigued at a column in Washington Post where it says that “divorce rates in the United States, for couples, 50 years and up, have doubled since the 1990s.”
Bill, 65, and Melinda, 56, are just a normal couple have shown they are a normal couple.
“As the stigma surrounding divorce has eroded, the divorce rate for Americans 50 and older has doubled since the 1990s,” the column noted.
Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos were 55 and 49 when they divorced. Al and Tipper Gore split while in their 60s.
Vicki Larson, who's written extensively on divorce and is working on a book about aging as a woman, says that when couples have raised their children to adulthood – the Gateses' are 18 to 25 – they often feel their job as parents is essentially "done," prompting them to reassess their lives.
"You go through phases in your marriage and you go through phases as a person, and sometimes they don't jibe," Larson notes. "When you have kids, you're on a path together." Once they're grown, you have to figure out what your shared path will be, or decide this isn't what you want anymore,” Larson said.
Pandemic impact
For many couples, the pandemic has made it impossible to ignore those shifts.
The big pause of the past year kept couples home together for longer hours, canceled work travel and created new roles and routines unexpectedly, Sodoma says, forcing couples who were ignoring problems in their marriages to suddenly face them head-on.
From April 2020 to this past month, Sodoma says, her family law practice in Charlotte has seen a 20% increase in requests for consults.
She also thinks that, because the pandemic made many of us grasp life's fragility, there's "more permission to be authentic now than there ever has been."
And sometimes that return to our true selves spurs big changes.
Among his clients, Lastra has seen two distinct outcomes for couples who were pondering a split during the pandemic: Stronger than before, or no desire to see each other again.
"We have a lot of scripts when we're young for how [life] should look," Larson says, adding that "there's no script for midlife. You get to create it on your own. That's both liberating and scary."
So much for money
Yes, money is one of the main things couples fight about.
But having so much of it that you can give billions away doesn't eliminate the questions that every couple faces: Do we still want similar things in life? Can we still create that life together? Or would it be better if we forged ahead on our own?
This is one of the reasons we regular folks are fascinated when billionaires split.
It is comforting to know that relationships are difficult no matter who we are.
"They're real people. They are not above it all. You still have to deal with each other on a human level," says Carlos Lastra, a partner in the family law practice at the Maryland firm Paley Rothman. "They somehow figured out what worked in their relationship for the past 27 years.
They could not figure out what would work for another 27 years. It doesn't matter what your background is: You've got to figure out your own secret sauce and keep working at it."
Local context
Yet, here in the Philippines legislators are still debating about House Bill 7303 proposing to legalize divorce, which was approved by the Committee on Population and Family Relations of the House.
If divorce naturally happens in the US (regardless of socio-economic class and maturity) because of digressions in the direction and motivation of a couple in their lives and since it is legal in the US and several other developed countries to do so—why must we copy that measure just to fracture our already-fragile society.
There are other more important aspects of life that we have to address—our peace and order, giving our youth a nurturing environment to grow up, fostering unity for our economic and social developments and ensuring a sustainable habitat for current and future generations of Filipinos.
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