Gray Divorce & Gray Affairs: Why Happy Marriages End After 50

[00:00:00] Chalene Johnson : What’s up, buttercup? Well, you’ve been asking for this. I can’t even tell you how freaking fascinating this research has been. Today, we’re talking about couples who experience major trauma, whether it’s a divorce or an affair later in life. We’re talking about couples who’ve been together for decades, sometimes in what seems like a really happy marriage, and then suddenly someone cheats, throwing away 30 years of a happy relationship together.

[00:00:38] Chalene Johnson : And was it for this other person? Was it for sex? Or was it for something entirely beyond that? And what about the couples who shock their kids when they leave for college? Mom and Dad have been married for 30 years, and now suddenly what? They’re filing for divorce? What is going on? Is it hormones? Is it a midlife crisis?

[00:01:03] Chalene Johnson : Does Steven need to buy a yellow Corvette and get a younger girlfriend? What is going on with gray divorces and gray affairs increasing almost 70%? Y’all, these statistics are wild. The research I’m gonna share with you today, what’s happening psychologically, I don’t know. I think it’s gonna blow your mi- It blew my mind.

[00:01:27] Chalene Johnson : Actually, before we do get to it, I want to mention that the very first part of this episode, I was recording while I was traveling on my way to Dallas. So you might hear just a f- a little bit of faint noise in the background for the first, I don’t know, like 15, 20 minutes, and then we’ll be safe and sound and nice and quiet in my hotel room.

[00:01:47] Chalene Johnson : I don’t even know why I’m telling you this, ’cause y’all are used to me recording wherever I am. And you always ask what kind of special mic I use. I’m telling you, I just open up my phone and I literally record without a mic. I just record into the bottom of my iPhone, and then my team does a great job of editing it.

[00:02:07] Chalene Johnson : And there’s so many cool AI tools. Now you can just throw it into a filter, and it removes all the background sounds and makes it appear as though I’m speaking on a $500 mic in a podcast studio like I used to do back in the day. Dude, so much has changed. This is one of the ways I am so grateful for technology.

[00:02:28] Chalene Johnson : But yeah, I’m just using my phone. Anyways, enough about the audio side of things. Let’s get to this juicy episode Today, we are talking about relationships with people who are over 50. Specifically, many of you said you wanted to dig into the topic of the gray divorce and the gray affair. Let’s talk about it.

[00:02:53] Chalene Johnson : The gray affair is typically when couples who are over 50 and in a long-term relationship stray It’s an affair that happens after decades of marriage. Because I don’t think you can understand a gray divorce really without also looking at the gray affair, and not all gray affairs result in divorce, and certainly not all gray divorces are as a result of an affair, right?

[00:03:24] Chalene Johnson : But before anyone starts sending me angry messages or thinking that this episode is about advocating for divorce, it’s definitely not. As per usual, I’m not trying to change your mind, I’m trying to open your mind. I’m trying to help us all understand human psychology and behavior. I wanna understand. I personally wanna understand why this happens.

[00:03:44] Chalene Johnson : I’ve been in my marriage for more than 32 years, and so I would definitely fall into that category, the category where things don’t necessarily meet the same criteria of couples who have been together for far fewer years. Because if your goal is to stay married, if your goal is to just stay in the relationship that you’re in, understanding why marriages fall apart, sometimes after 20 years or 30 years or 50 years, might be one of the most useful conversations, one of the most useful things that we can understand.

[00:04:17] Chalene Johnson : So let’s start with a WTF stat. Why are so many people divorcing after 50? Now, this really surprised me. Overall, Americans are actually divorcing less than they used to. That’s good news. In 1990, about 19 out of every 1,000 married Americans divorced in a given year, okay? By 2023, that number had fallen to 13.7 per every 1,000 couples, so it was actually coming down.

[00:04:50] Chalene Johnson : But ironically, that’s not what’s happening with older adults. The opposite is true. With older adults, I’m talking like 50 and older, the divorce rate has more than doubled since 1990, and among people who are 65 and older, it’s more than tripled. Now, these statistics you can look up yourself. It’s a study done by Bowling Green State University.

[00:05:14] Chalene Johnson : But the statistic that really put this all into perspective for me is this. Okay, think about this for a second. In 1990, people 50 and over represented only 8% of people getting divorced. Today, are you ready? 40%. So from 8% to 40%. WTF. That is massive. Another piece of this that I find quite interesting is that these divorces are mainly among people who are in their first marriage These aren’t people who just, like, suddenly got married three years ago.

[00:05:51] Chalene Johnson : This is their, you know, third marriage, and they’re, they’re divorcing, and s- that just correlates with their age. No. In 2022, 55% of recently divorced adults over 50 had only been married once. 31% of them were only on their second marriage. In other words, a lot of these couples have been married for decades and decades, which raises the very obvious question Why now?

[00:06:17] Chalene Johnson : When a couple seemingly seems to have it together, like it was the couple that you or other people looked up to and thought, “Man, they made it, so there’s hope for me.” They’ve been together for 30 years or 40 years. They’ve got grandchildren. They’ve built successful businesses, and they’ve traveled the world, or it looks like they’re having so much fun.

[00:06:39] Chalene Johnson : It looks like they have it all. But now suddenly, they’re divorcing, or we hear that there’s cracks in the marriage. An affair has happened. Sometimes people divorce after three years, and you’re like, “Oh, okay. Well, yeah. All right, they picked the wrong person.” But when it’s been decades, it makes all of us feel a little unsafe.

[00:07:01] Chalene Johnson : Are you with me? I know this has happened to my own acquaintances, and it kinda rocks my world. Maybe it is because I’ve been with my husband for almost going on four decades that we’ve been together, 32 that we’ve been married. Like, yeah, that does kinda freak me out. And maybe it’s the wrong way to think about it, right?

[00:07:23] Chalene Johnson : Maybe staying married for a long time doesn’t tell us anything. It doesn’t tell us if a couple was happy. It doesn’t tell us if they were authentic. It doesn’t tell us what was going on. It, it only tells us that they stayed together. You know, they often say you really don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors, and that’s certainly true.

[00:07:42] Chalene Johnson : There’s actually research looking specifically at people who divorce later in life after long-term marriages. One 2024 study interviewed former spouses, most of whom divorced again after 60 following a long marriage in which they had raised children, done lots of things together as a couple, and researchers found something really interesting.

[00:08:07] Chalene Johnson : The gray divorce, researchers found, fell within two different categories. The first category, the first type of couple, are those that they had a long-standing marriage. People probably said they, they get along fine, but I don’t think anybody is trying to convince them to write a marriage book. And they might have looked relatively happy because they have all the things that are supposed to symbolize success in America.

[00:08:33] Chalene Johnson : You know, they’ve got grown kids. They show up together. They sit next to each other. They do things together, but they just never really maybe clicked the way people assume they did. And in this particular category of relationships, one or both couples have always known, like, this ain’t it. Sometimes they had intermittent bouts of, like, really difficult times.

[00:08:57] Chalene Johnson : Maybe they’d even discuss divorce throughout their marriage, and then they would have bouts where things were pretty stable. But again, divorcing later isn’t a surprise to either of them. It was just something that felt maybe inevitable. And then there’s the second category of couples, and this category is more concerning.

[00:09:19] Chalene Johnson : For me, anyways, this is the category that’s more surprising. This is the category of couples who most people would say they had a great marriage. In fact, both parties in the relationship would have characterized their overall time together as very positive. Others see them as very loving. In fact, many couples say it was a satisfying, rewarding relationship until one day, one party decides they want something different.

[00:09:51] Chalene Johnson : They want out. They’re done. Now, of course, there’s always exceptions to every rule, and every couple is comprised of two separate individuals, so there’s going to be lots of variables and lots of exceptions. But in the second category, it was more typical that one party was caught completely off guard, that they woke up one day and their partner said, “I’m kind of surprised you’re surprised.

[00:10:17] Chalene Johnson : I’ve been unhappy for years.” And the party who was most surprised is left standing there going, “What? Why did you never tell me this?” And I wanna be really careful here because You’ll see headlines everywhere saying that women initiate 70% of divorces, and that’s based on broader research about heterosexual divorces.

[00:10:41] Chalene Johnson : And we shouldn’t automatically slap that number on every gray divorce. But there is evidence that women, especially in recent years, frequently play an active role in initiating that later-in-life divorce. It’s true that it’s often the woman who says, “I can’t believe you didn’t know, but if you would’ve just paid attention, yeah, I’ve been unhappy, unsatisfied, dissatisfied, unfulfilled for years.”

[00:11:13] Chalene Johnson : Again, that’s not to say that men don’t do it, too, but more often than not, especially in recent years, it’s been her. Did she change? Did the marriage change? Did her willingness to tolerate the marriage change? So let’s first talk about the empty nest reckoning, okay? This is what happens in a marriage between roughly the ages 30 and 55.

[00:11:38] Chalene Johnson : You know, you’re building careers, you’re raising kids, you’re paying for everything, you’re driving somebody to soccer, you’re making somebody dinner, you’re taking care of your aging parents, you’re trying to accomplish goals, you’re trying to get somebody into college. You’re, you’re exhausted. Both of you are exhausted.

[00:11:53] Chalene Johnson : And marriage can become incredibly efficient as a business partnership. Like, you’re both getting so much done, and you’re able to do this because you’re great teammates. You ham and egg it, as they say. But are you still lovers? Is that couple, are they still friends? Are they still sexually charged by each other?

[00:12:14] Chalene Johnson : Do they even know each other? Because for 20 years, there’s this section, chunk of life, especially if you’re having kids, where there’s always something else to talk about besides the two of you, besides how you feel, besides the relationship. And then the kids leave, and suddenly it’s Friday night, no one needs a ride anywhere.

[00:12:39] Chalene Johnson : No one needs to be picked up. No one has a project to work on this weekend. No one needs you to coordinate their schedule. And here you are, the two of you, sitting in the same room, looking at each other from across the couch and wondering, “What are we gonna talk about? What do we have in common? Do we like each other?

[00:13:02] Chalene Johnson : What do we do now?” Researchers say that studying late-in-life divorces, specifically when there’s, like, a major transition, like empty nest, might actually be the answer to the question, like, why now? Why after all these years? And friends and family members will often ask that. Like, kids whose parents have been together and now suddenly they’re in college and Mom and dad are getting a divorce?

[00:13:31] Chalene Johnson : Why now? Well, researchers again believe the why now is because the empty nest, the no longer having this common job, this thing that you were both probably pretty successful in terms of being like partners at managing the household and the kids, well, now you no longer have that joint project. The kids were filling a lot of space that you didn’t even realize existed.

[00:13:57] Chalene Johnson : And once you’ve shared this thing, and now that thing is gone, and you’re finally forced to answer the question, “Okay, if we’re not raising kids together, if we’re not building a business, if we’re not growing our income, if we’re not creating goals together, is this the person I really wanna spend my time with?”

[00:14:19] Chalene Johnson : And that’s a pretty brutal question. I watched countless Instagram and TikTok content creators who had been through a gray divorce talking about their own experience. And whether it was on the guy’s side or the lady’s side, I didn’t see too much content from a divorcee talking about what a wonderful life they had together, and they just decided to go their separate ways.

[00:14:45] Chalene Johnson : Like I, again, this might be very much biased because these are the people who are creating the content, and when you’re creating content, there’s a specific demographic or target audience that you’re trying to reach. And, and so maybe it’s like a, a dog whistle. Is that the right word? When you’re like, you’re trying to attract people who think the way you think maybe.

[00:15:07] Chalene Johnson : So maybe it’s an exaggerated version of what it is you really feel. But like, for example, this guy, his account is called The Divorce Club Wow. In this particular video, he’s, again, talking about the fact that he’d been married for three decades, and really the only reason why he ended up divorced is because his wife went through menopause.

[00:15:28] Chalene Johnson : It was hormones, that’s why she left. Okay, take a listen.

[00:15:34] Clip: 31 years. Here’s what I got to say about that. You know, the real reason menopause causes so many gray divorces is because men back away. That’s what you hear all the time, man. Women left because they feel like they were just living in a house with somebody else, no interaction, no intimacy, just two people living in the same house not speaking a lot to one another, not having any connection.

[00:15:55] Clip: So the wife leaves, but the wife always blames the man. “He just pulled away. He just didn’t wanna have nothing to do with me. We just don’t talk anymore. We don’t have any kind of intimacy. We’re just two people living under the same roof.” So they get tired of that and they leave. Instead of asking themselves this one question: Why did he pull away?

[00:16:15] Clip: After all the years of marriage, why all of a sudden did he pull away? Well, I’ll tell you why. Because when a woman goes through menopause, she becomes a nasty person in a lot of cases. She becomes total drama, constantly combative, contentious, and men don’t wanna deal with that, man. They don’t wanna deal with all the argument and all the contention.

[00:16:37] Clip: But the woman always wants to look outside herself ’cause she doesn’t wanna take any accountability. So men just say, “Forget about it,” and eventually that gets old and they leave.

[00:16:45] Chalene Johnson : So if that’s made your blood boil the way it made mine, I can just tell you, I checked out the comments section, and it’s loaded with guys who are saying the same thing.

[00:16:57] Chalene Johnson : “Yeah, my, my marriage was fantastic until my wife went through menopause.” I kind of doubt it, sir. It might have been that perhaps she just kind of came to her senses and was like, “Why am I dealing with this dude?” Maybe it was timing, but I do think, at least for myself personally, not in my marriage, I think my husband’s phenomenal.

[00:17:20] Chalene Johnson : I don’t wanna make this about my husband, but I’m just saying, when I went through menopause, there was fewer to be given, and I don’t know what this guy was like before his divorce, but I’ve watched quite a few of his videos since his divorce. I’ll tell you what, he’s got a healthy male audience, let’s just say that.

[00:17:39] Chalene Johnson : But listen, it’s not just the guys who are pointing fingers at the ladies because of midlife. I watched plenty of content from women, and their stories were a little different. They weren’t talking about their husband having a midlife crisis. A lot of them were talking about them reaching a point at which they realized their nervous system was constantly fried.

[00:18:07] Chalene Johnson : Again, I don’t have any scientific studies about this. I’m just saying the preponderance of content that I consume from women talking about what it was that made them realize, like, “I’m done. I’m over this.” So they would fit into that category where their partner was kind of surprised that their wife was leaving.

[00:18:29] Chalene Johnson : These women all talk about having spent decades managing their husband’s mood, energy, making sure everything was right, taking care of everything as if they were an employee, just all the responsibilities placed on them, and never feeling like it was good enough. But yet the guy really didn’t know that she wasn’t down with that, ’cause she was just doing it.

[00:18:54] Chalene Johnson : And then one day she just realizes she’s been walking on eggshells for decades, so much so that she, or many of these women talk about not even knowing how to regulate their own nervous systems. It, like, takes them a while to realize that the stress or feeling that state of having to walk on eggshells, that that isn’t normal.

[00:19:19] Chalene Johnson : Okay, take a listen. You know what I don’t miss about my toxic marriage? And many of you agree. It’s walking on eggshells. It’s brutal. Always monitoring your words, your actions, even where you’re gonna be, your body language, just trying to keep the peace. It’s exhausting And after a while, you don’t even know what calm is.

[00:19:43] Chalene Johnson : You forget. Your nervous system is completely out of whack. You have no idea how to relax, and this was my case. When that constant tension finally stopped, it was like this exhale. I didn’t even recognize calm, though. My nervous system was so used to the chaos that stillness felt wrong. These days, that’s my work, is trying to lean into stillness and quiet, and catch myself when I start to brace, when I over-program, choosing softness instead.

[00:20:15] Chalene Johnson : And then there are those who admittedly say, “I was in a relationship that just wasn’t healthy, and I stayed until I realized this isn’t what I deserve, and I can be more, and the time for me to do that is now.”

[00:20:34] Clip: After nearly three decades in a very emotionally unhealthy marriage, I left clear. Clear that choosing myself was not selfish, clear that I needed peace.

[00:20:48] Clip: Starting over was very scary, but I knew that God had released me. I knew that He was with me. I was able to move in fear one decision at a time, one boundary at a time, one day at a time, one week at a time. And as I rebuilt, I met myself for the first time. I got to know myself, and I fell in love with myself.

[00:21:16] Clip: Not the version of me that was surviving, but the woman that God has called me to be.

[00:21:25] Chalene Johnson : Ladies, the more research I do on collagen, the more I realize it just needs to be a must. We’ve gotta supplement with collagen, well, especially if you care about the texture and the tone of your skin, the way your hair grows, your nails.

[00:21:39] Chalene Johnson : And all of these things become, like, an issue once we’re over 40, and it just feels like it goes downhill from there, which is why it is so important that you supplement with collagen. It’s what the body uses for your joints, your muscles, your organs. It’s how you can support your gut health, your metabolism, your cardiovascular health, your immune system, and so much more.

[00:21:59] Chalene Johnson : I have been getting mine from Organifi. Obviously, you know I love Organifi. And as a listener of The Chalene Show, you get 20% off when you go to Organifi, O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I, .com/chalene. Use code Chalene. That’s gives you another 20% off at checkout. That is O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I .com/chalene. Use code Chalene for 20% off. Listen, get yourself some collagen.

[00:22:24] Chalene Johnson : Make that a regular thing. I just mix in my water bottle every single morning, and a few other supplements as well. And we love that Organifi is 100% certified organic. It’s a great company with great products. Check ’em out. Again, organifi.com/chalene And there’s a big difference between a gray divorce and a divorce that happens much earlier with couples maybe when they’re in their 30s.

[00:22:47] Chalene Johnson : That is time. Not because you’re necessarily running out of it, but I think being over 50, you start to realize, like, “Okay, I’m on the last half. I still have decades ahead of me.” You know, if you’ve ever watched The Golden Bachelor, you realize what we used to think of as old just isn’t anymore.

[00:23:09] Chalene Johnson : Psychologically, that’s really important. Imagine that a woman who has spent most of her adult life putting everybody else first, building her career, raising the children, taking care of everybody, taking care of her parents, taking care of the household, you know, running a family, and not having a lot of time for herself.

[00:23:29] Chalene Johnson : Then all of a sudden she looks up and she realizes, “Wait, I actually have more time. Wait a minute, my kids are grown. Hold up, I’m financially more independent than my mother or my grandmother might have been at this age. I know myself better.” And she’s looking around and she’s seeing what’s possible for her physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially, and wondering if she can spend another 30 years.

[00:24:00] Chalene Johnson : Like, do I wanna do this with this person for another 30 years? And even though I can joke about the guy who’s talking about how menopause ruined his marriage, I think he was oversimplifying it, but let’s face it, menopause, perimenopause, both those things, it’s a lot to handle. You’re losing sleep. Your mood is changing.

[00:24:25] Chalene Johnson : Your sexual desire might have decreased. You may have gained a few pounds. I know that put me in a hell of a bad mood. I know I didn’t feel as sexual when I felt uncomfortable in my own skin. By the way, side note Yesterday I posted a before and after photo and somebody commented underneath it, “Shelene, I’ve been following you for a really long time, but I’m sorry, this photo is fake.

[00:24:48] Chalene Johnson : I never saw your body looking like that.” And I get it. I wasn’t offended at all that she said that. I can see why she would think that, because I never, ever, ever posted any of those photos. There was a period of time at the height, at the worst part of perimenopause, just as I was entering into menopause, where you can’t scroll back on my Instagram and see any full body photos.

[00:25:15] Chalene Johnson : I shot everything from the shoulders up, and if it was a full body photo, trust and believe I knew how to angle my body fully clothed. You never saw me in anything revealing, because that was my body. And the reason why I have, like, you see the same stupid three before photos from me is because every single photo I had, I deleted.

[00:25:40] Chalene Johnson : I took a few photos in bathing suits that I put in, like, a folder on my phone that where nobody could ever find them, and I thought I’d deleted all of them. I’ve… I have three, exactly three, because I hated the way I looked. I just didn’t even recognize myself. So the only reason why I was taking photos was really just, like, to track my progress.

[00:26:03] Chalene Johnson : But I just feel like when you aren’t feeling comfortable in your own body, and thankfully my husband was, like, super understanding and super patient and still, like, very complimentary towards me, you just don’t feel as sexual. I don’t know. I didn’t anyways. So you hit menopause, and it can hit you hard.

[00:26:26] Chalene Johnson : It’s not just your body. It’s like a lot of things feel different. Your friends are different. Your children aren’t looking at you the same way, like your relationship with your children is different. Your parents need you more now. Maybe your career is changing. Your relationship with just how you look in the mirror is changing, like your skin is changing, and sometimes, frankly, your tolerance for bullchanges.

[00:26:52] Chalene Johnson : You just, you tend to have less patience because you’re dealing with so many things. And maybe she did spend decades taking care of everybody else, and when exactly does she get to live her life? When does she get to go spend a couple of hours in the gym? And that doesn’t necessarily mean that the answer is divorce.

[00:27:10] Chalene Johnson : But I think it explains why… Like, it’s all these things coming together about the same time. Yeah, it’s hormones. It’s having all this extra free time. It’s realizing the two of you, you kind of had a work project, especially if you had kids, and now if the kids are gone, you’re like, “Okay, so what are we doing now?

[00:27:29] Chalene Johnson : What do we actually want? And what have we been tolerating? And what have we sacrificed? And is this it?” Am I proud of the life that I’ve led? Is there more that I want to accomplish? Is there more that I want to experience? Is there more that I want to feel? Do I feel seen? Do I feel understood? Do I feel appreciated and adored?

[00:27:52] Chalene Johnson : And this can go both ways, but what’s really wild is when the other partner seems to feel like this came out of nowhere. And how can that be? How can two people be in the same marriage and one person is perfectly content, and the other person is suffering in silence? Or they’re allowing that resentment to quietly build to the point when they do bring it up to their partner, like, “Okay, I want out,” the partner who’s been surprised is like, “What?

[00:28:27] Chalene Johnson : Are we having a discussion? Are we going to therapy? What do you mean you’re out? What do you mean you’re throwing in the towel? We’ve been together for 30, 40 years. What are you talking about? Who are you? Who have I been married to? Why is this the first I’m hearing of it?” And in those instances, the research says the partner who never expressed, never felt safe or comfortable for whatever reason, it might be on them, it might be they were just from their own childhood that they never were very comfortable or at ease expressing their own desires or communicating what they’re really feeling.

[00:29:06] Chalene Johnson : But the partner who didn’t communicate it for whatever reason Slowly and quietly builds resentment. And once that resentment sets in, it’s like a cancer, and it just slowly starts to erode to the point when they do finally tell their partner, “Hey, I’m done,” it is past the point of return. She or he began quietly or emotionally leaving the marriage years ago.

[00:29:40] Chalene Johnson : And research on late-in-life divorce describes this very interestingly. And the reason why it’s a surprise to everybody around them is because oftentimes the partner who stayed silent, the partner who maybe earlier in the marriage, they tried to get their partner to go to therapy, and they tried to get them to work on things, and they, you know, they tried, and they fought maybe.

[00:30:03] Chalene Johnson : And people notice that, and then suddenly things are kind of quiet. They’re not lovey-dovey or anything, but things tend to be a little bit more peaceful in the relationship. And researchers say it’s because that partner, that partner who’s emotionally checked out of the marriage already, they’re just done.

[00:30:23] Chalene Johnson : They’re done trying. They’re done fighting. They just want peace. They may not have yet told their partner, “Hey, I’m over this, and I’m leaving.” But in their heads, they’re quietly building an exit plan. And it’s a surprise to everybody because, again, oftentimes it doesn’t come with lots of fighting or arguing or any of those things because one of the two in the relationship had already kind of given up.

[00:30:56] Chalene Johnson : The partner who’s surprised, when push comes to shove, if you ask them, they will remember moments when their partner was a little short-tempered, less than patient. They had a certain l- distant look in their eyes. They become complacent roommates. The passion for each other seemed to be gone. But what about the gray affair?

[00:31:23] Chalene Johnson : Because this is something very different. The gray affair is a term used to describe, as you might expect, when a partner who’s been in a long-term, happy, content relationship suddenly strays. Imagine this, you’ve been married for 30 years. You’ve built a family together. You own a home. You’ve got shared friends.

[00:31:50] Chalene Johnson : You’ve got grandkids, shared finances, and your entire identity is intertwined with the other person. You’re having great sex. You love your partner. Everything is perfect. But you’ve been together for a really long time. You trust each other. You know each other. You know exactly how you’re gonna respond, and maybe you’ve got a really great sex life.

[00:32:17] Chalene Johnson : You’re attracted to each other. You can never imagine leaving this person. You would have no reason to. The relationship is, is really good. It’s really comfortable. You’re both content. You’re not looking for anything outside your marriage. But then a member of the opposite sex pays a little extra attention to you And you notice something.

[00:32:47] Chalene Johnson : Okay, you start to feel alive. Butterflies. It feels kind of nice to have this attention, and here you are over 50, and suddenly you feel like, “Well, maybe, maybe I still have it. Maybe other people find me attractive. Maybe this is what I’m missing from my partner.” And it’s taboo, and it’s secretive, and that makes your heart race.

[00:33:16] Chalene Johnson : And it’s not even necessarily that you’re attracted to this person of the opposite sex who’s giving you a little bit of attention, but suddenly you feel seen. Suddenly you feel attractive again. Suddenly you feel desired, and that makes you feel alive, and it’s secret, and it continues. And when it does, those feelings become addictive.

[00:33:48] Chalene Johnson : And researchers say that in these cases, it’s not that the partner who strays is looking for a different spouse. Instead, as Esther Perel, relationship expert, puts it, they’re often seeking a different experience of themselves. Someone can look around and think, “I love my partner, I love my kids, I love our life, but I feel like something is missing, or I feel like a part of me has disappeared, or a part of me isn’t being seen.

[00:34:25] Chalene Johnson : There’s a part of me that isn’t alive.” You know, and after 25, 30, 40 years of being in the same relationship with the same person, you definitely accumulate an identity. You have an identity with your spouse. You have an identity in your family, and those identities can be meaningful and satisfying, but at the same time, they can also as experts say, kind of quiet or crowd out another version of yourself that you miss or you’re, you never have been able to experience, and there’s a curiosity there.

[00:35:03] Chalene Johnson : Okay, we’re gonna take a quick break to talk about your hairline. Ladies, I know this is a huge issue for so many of us, and extensions and hair toppers and all those things are great, but they’re a Band-Aid. It’s not fixing the problem. Is it possible to fix the problem? It is, and I’ve had doctors on the show, not affiliated with any products, who I’ve said, “I need to know what works and what’s a gimmick.”

[00:35:31] Chalene Johnson : And without question, red light does help to regrow hair, and unlike some of the serums and topical treatments which when you stop using them, you stop getting hair growth, when you use red light, it actually stimulates the hair follicles, and there’s fantastic science behind it. So I invested in a…

[00:35:52] Chalene Johnson : Basically, it’s like a cap. You just put it on your head. It’s made by the iRestore, that’s the name of the company, and it will, if you’re looking to have thicker, fuller, healthier hair, you just pop this thing on your head a couple of times a week while you’re, like, watching Netflix, watching TV, gluing rhinestones onto something.

[00:36:11] Chalene Johnson : And I’m telling you, it’s gonna improve the thickness of your hair. In a four-month double-blind clinical study, nearly every single participant reported having increased hair growth, and that is because of the technology behind the red light lasers. Listen, it’s a new year, and it’s the perfect time to feel better, more refreshed, more confident about your hair, and iRestore is here to help.

[00:36:36] Chalene Johnson : Right now they’re having this huge New Year’s sale, and when you use my code, code chalene, and you go to iRestore, the letter I, restore.com, that will unlock an exclusive discount just for our listeners on the iRestore Elite. Again, use code chalene at iRestore.com. It’s a fantastic way to support the show and a fantastic way to support your hair growth.

[00:37:01] Chalene Johnson : Esther Perel’s central observation, I don’t know if you guys have listened to anything from her, but she’s phenomenal. Highly, highly recommend. She’s got a series, a podcast series called Where Shall We Begin? Oh my gosh, it’s so good. I’d love to get her on the show. I’d love to get her at Camp Be More.

[00:37:19] Chalene Johnson : Anyone have any connections? Hook me up. One of her observations about happy couples who cheat is essentially that sometimes they aren’t trying to leave their partner. They’re actually trying to escape a part of themselves that they are tired of or no longer content with. They’re trying to reconnect with a lost version of themselves.

[00:37:48] Chalene Johnson : And I don’t know how that makes me feel. I guess it kind of makes me feel sad. Like if I think about my husband Me not being able to give him the space to connect with a lost version of himself. I, I want to be that. We want to be that for our partners, don’t we? But then there’s aging, and there’s this existential clock that’s ticking.

[00:38:11] Chalene Johnson : I mean, when you’re in your 30s, it just feels like you have so much life ahead of you. You think, “Okay, when, when I’m much older I’m gonna travel. When I’m in my 50s, I’ll reinvent myself.” But now suddenly here you are in your 50s or 60s, and maybe you’ve lost a parent, or you’ve got children who are gone, and retirement disappears, and your body’s changing, and all these things.

[00:38:35] Chalene Johnson : Someone finally realizes, “Wait a second, I have more years ahead of me than I thought.” Yeah, I think for some people it can be a midlife crisis when you aren’t strong in your foundation and you wake up one day and you’re like, “Who am I? What am I gonna do with the rest of my life?” And maybe your partner isn’t into the same things, isn’t as eager to embark upon personal growth.

[00:39:01] Chalene Johnson : And then somebody sees you differently. Someone lights a spark. And again, this happens in happy marriages, marriages where they’re having sex on a regular basis. They find each other really attractive, and it’s not about the sex. It’s not about that piece that’s exciting. Experts say what arouses people, what lights them back up, is imagining themselves as an entirely different person.

[00:39:39] Chalene Johnson : Esther Perel says when you’re in a long-term relationship, your spouse, your partner, gets all of you, the unedited version. Not the cleaned-up-for-Instagram version. They know about the cholesterol medication, and the mortgage, and they know about your irritating habits, and the ways that you do things that bug them.

[00:40:02] Chalene Johnson : They know about the problems you’re dealing with with your kids, and taxes, and, you know, the bad knee that you’ve got, and they, they know what you look like first thing in the morning without an- any of your makeup on But the affair partner, you get to show them an edited version. And more importantly, the person who’s having the affair gets to experience an edited version of themselves.

[00:40:27] Chalene Johnson : Suddenly, she isn’t the mom who’s been married for 42 years. Suddenly, she’s sexy and interesting and strong and mysterious and wanted and spontaneous. And feeling those things, feeling that way about yourself, can make people feel something that your partner can no longer give you. And what is that?

[00:40:57] Chalene Johnson : Novelty. It’s new, and novelty is exciting. It’s like gasoline being poured on the whole situation. And long marriages are, they’re secure, and they’re predictable, and they are safe, and those are all things we desire. We wanna be safe. We wanna feel comforted. We want something to feel familiar, a soft place to land, someone to cuddle up with, somebody who’s our person.

[00:41:29] Chalene Johnson : But safe and soft and secure and comforting, those are important feelings, but they’re the opposite of exciting. And so for a lot of couples who’ve been together for decades, again, in very happy marriages, researchers say the allure, the excitement, the novelty, the thrill of something that feels uncertain, where you don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen or when you’re gonna see that person next or what they’re gonna say to you or how they’re gonna respond to you or how you’re going to f- feel, how you’re going to experience yourself, and now your imagination is running wild.

[00:42:19] Chalene Johnson : An affair artificially produces all of these things, and it gives the partner who’s the affair partner, it gives them something that they may not have been looking for and may not have known that they were missing: something exciting, something dangerous, something risky, something ambiguous. And Esther Perel describes the kind of incompleteness, the unknown of affairs, is the thing that perpetuates the desire.

[00:42:53] Chalene Johnson : And researchers find that when couples who’ve been married for decades, when one partner strays and has an affair, they often don’t want to leave their married partner They find that the affair, if it can go without being detected, teaches them something about themselves. In one study I read, partners who had strayed from their long-term marriage, whose affair was undetected, reported anonymously that they didn’t regret the affair.

[00:43:33] Chalene Johnson : The majority of respondents said that while they never wanted their partner to know about the affair and that they would be devastated to think about the pain it would cause their partner, respondents often said that the affair helped them to realize that they were still desirable, that it instilled an exciting new component to their marriage.

[00:44:01] Chalene Johnson : And this becomes particularly relevant for couples in midlife. Aging can quietly threaten identities. And, uh, listen, I wanna make it perfectly clear, I’m just telling you what I’ve read. I’m not endorsing any of this. I’m not saying any of this is right. I think it’s incredibly painful. I think there’s probably nothing more devastating than being in a marriage for decades, 20, 30 years, and finding out that your partner has betrayed you when you’re both so content and so happy and there’s so much you could lose, there’s so much at stake.

[00:44:50] Chalene Johnson : I don’t know how you could experience that and not feel that it was about you, to not take it personally, to not wonder if you were sexually not enough, or if they just weren’t attracted to you. Is there something you had done wrong? Were you just not good enough? Why did they have to stray? I can’t imagine not blaming myself, not wondering what was wrong with me.

[00:45:20] Chalene Johnson : If I thought I was in a happy marriage and my partner Found somebody else because he was looking for something exciting, and then somehow I’m supposed to accept that it’s not about me, it was about this person trying to figure out their own identity? I’d be like, “How about you, uh, go find your identity somewhere else, pal.”

[00:45:44] Chalene Johnson : Like, I just… I can’t imagine, and I’ve had friends in recent years who, very much like what I’ve been talking about now, were in marriages where they were really attracted to each other. Both parties seemed so happy and so content, and then one partner has an affair. And I asked all the questions, like, “Are you joking?

[00:46:12] Chalene Johnson : At this age? What would be the point? Are you kidding me? Why would they throw all of this away?” And I don’t know the answer, but I can tell you that researchers often say that at this age, the gray affair is for evidence that the party who strayed needs confirmation that they’re not invisible, that they’re still sexually desirable, that they’re still interesting, that they’re not too old, that they still got it, that they’re still capable of making somebody lose their mind, and that is incredibly reinforcing.

[00:46:56] Chalene Johnson : It’s addictive, and explains something that otherwise just doesn’t make sense. The cheating spouse may sincerely say, like, “I don’t wanna leave my marriage,” and everyone thinks, “Well, then what the are you doing?” But psychologically, those two statements aren’t necessarily contradictory. That’s what the experts say.

[00:47:17] Chalene Johnson : The experts say they may actually want to stay in their marriage and also experience an alternative self, an alternative identity, an alternative life. Okay. I’m gonna reserve judgment here. I’m sharing with you what the psychologists say, that home represents attachment and history and family and stress and security and belonging and love and things that are predictable, but the affair represents possibility and youthfulness and freedom and a fantasy life.

[00:47:56] Chalene Johnson : It’s not reality. They aren’t necessarily choosing between two people. They’re choosing their life and a fantasy. They want the fantasy. They’re temporarily living two separate versions of themselves. But sometimes those worlds collide and they can’t be maintained. I found it fascinating to learn that couples who discover an affair after 50, after decades of marriage, actually have the highest reconciliation, meaning they have a higher rate or likelihood of successfully staying together after the affair of any other age.

[00:48:44] Chalene Johnson : And it may be in large part because these affairs are often happening in marriages where the partners are actually content in the marriage. And I started reading through some of the respondents’ answers. When they asked the partner who had been betrayed, “Why did you stay?” When it is a couple in a gray affair, the partner who was betrayed often said that they had so much invested and that they truly did love their partner and they wanted to understand, and oftentimes many said it created a newness, a second version of their marriage, a second version of their relationship.

[00:49:34] Chalene Johnson : Esther Perel’s central kind of theology about this is that once an affair is exposed in a, a long-term relationship, then what happens is the marriage or the relationship that existed before the affair is essentially over, like it’s done. You have to grieve it. That couples cannot truly go back, and they really shouldn’t want to go back, but that it’s powerful for them to like grieve it and to question how things between the couple may have allowed this to happen.

[00:50:10] Chalene Johnson : But the question really becomes: Does this couple want to have something new? And that ironically, this is crazy to think about, like how this is full circle, but like that the affair creates for a couple that’s been together for a really long time, and obviously very hard to heal from that, obviously a lot of couples can’t heal from that, but those that do are then experiencing a brand-new relationship together as a couple She’s often expressed this concept as, and she’s got a TED Talk that in it she famously says, “Your first marriage is over.

[00:50:55] Chalene Johnson : Would you like to create a second one together?” Because doing so does not mean that you’ve said the affair was fine or that you’ve justified it or that it makes it okay or any of those things, but it just means that a crisis can force a level of honesty and renegotiation and rediscovery of yourself, your new identity, an undertaking of vulnerability between the two of you that maybe you’ve never had before.

[00:51:26] Chalene Johnson : And Esther Perel says that affairs can actually, in some cases, provide an incredibly painful experience, but an alarm system where couples are kind of like, it, it forces them to confront conversations that they’ve avoided for years. It forces them to open up in a way that they’ve never opened up before, to finally talk about their resentments, to finally experience things sexually that they have never talked about, and express how their unmet needs in the relationships and their desires and their identities and, and hurt and pain and all these things.

[00:52:03] Chalene Johnson : But she specifically says that after an affair, some couples talk in a way that they have never shared with each other before, even when they’ve been together for like 30, 40 years. I feel like we’ve really just kind of scratched the surface on this. I can tell you, like this was fascinating for me I also wanna say there’s many different types of betrayal.

[00:52:29] Chalene Johnson : I think betrayal is when you are with someone that you fully trust, you feel safe around them, you can let your guard down, and then something happens where you just… You almost feel like your world has been turned upside down, like what is real? Betrayal can be finding out that your partner is looking at porn and you weren’t aware of it.

[00:52:52] Chalene Johnson : It can be a gambling addiction. It can be a shopping addiction. It can just be lying. It can be hiding money. It can be financial betrayal. There’s so many ways that we can experience the trauma of betrayal. But when it comes to marital affairs, I think this is all super fascinating, and I think it’s really interesting when we couple the gray affair and h- and how different it can be compared to an affair that happens when we’re much younger.

[00:53:23] Chalene Johnson : I also think it’s the idea of a gray divorce is something we could explore further. I’d love to do another dedicated show on each one of these topics, but I wanna know from you which of these is more interesting to you. If by chance you’re willing to share your story with me, I would totally keep it anonymous.

[00:53:44] Chalene Johnson : You can just send an email to theshaleneshow@gmail.com. I can keep everything anonymous if you’re willing to share your story as it relates to maybe a gray divorce or a gray affair. But the last thing I wanted to leave you with in this episode is hopefully some positive insights if you’re dealing with a gray affair.

[00:54:10] Chalene Johnson : Researchers studying couples who have successfully stayed together after a gray affair repeatedly find several things that make it work The couples who had the highest satisfaction successfully recovered from it had these things in common: radical honesty, deep communication, a commitment to rebuilding safety, trust, an equal commitment to the relationship, forgiveness, and the ability to respond to each other’s emotional needs.

[00:54:44] Chalene Johnson : There’s even research on post-traumatic growth after betrayal trauma, meaning that people sometimes report feeling genuine psychological growth and a depth of their relationship after processing this type of trauma. I mean, again, this doesn’t mean that any– I would wish this even on my worst enemy, but it does mean that humans sometimes…

[00:55:09] Chalene Johnson : Well, n- not sometimes, we always come out on the other side of things stronger and better. So whether you’re recovering from a betrayal trauma or putting your life back together after a gray divorce, you’re gonna be stronger and better for it. This is not gonna be the worst thing that ever happened to you.

[00:55:29] Chalene Johnson : You’re gonna survive this. You’re gonna be better for it. Hey, I love you. I wanna get your feedback. I mean it, and I’ll talk to you soon