Let's sing a song. Bring it home with Sarah and Teneel, Sarah. Got some alcohol. I love that song.
Fun fact, that song was performed at my wedding reception. I do remember that. Yes, it was. That is one of my favorite songs.
And so we're talking, let's stay together. Hey, Ballet Times is coming up soon. Friday. It's Friday.
It's on the weekend. That's fun. Well, I think the restaurants are fun. Oh my goodness.
I'm going to be there if I don't know if you will or not. I'm going to say it doesn't look real kind of person. Well, now I don't mind getting out there with them, but we know that we want to stay together. But there's something new that's kind of pop up on the horizon.
It's been kind of climbing for a while and it's called Grey Divorce. Have you heard of Grey Divorce? No, but that's not where I thought we were going with Ballet Times. Well, we're going to give it a positive spin here in just a minute.
But what it is, it's divorced for people 50 and older. Now, number one, I don't like that we're being called Grey. People that are 50 and older. We are not good.
We are not good. But anyway, divorce is in that group basically doubled between 1990 and 2010. So back in 1990, this group accounted for like one in every 10 divorces. So, you know, then it grew to one in every four divorces.
So basically a quarter of all divorces are now Grey Divorces. Okay. Wow. Now they don't even know why this is happening.
Okay. But the Journal of Gerontology did share some insight. These are some things that could lead to it. Yeah, could be contributing.
So what happens in retirement? Just talk through this retirement. What happens? We both retire.
We'll work together a lot more. We're together more. We're home together. We're going to be together.
We're working together. We eat together. There's a lot of together. And when that happens couples sometimes realize that they're going to part over the...
They've been having so much time apart during the day. Right. They've been running and going to work and when they get home they're only together for hours before it's going to go to bed. I mean, you know, we don't spend a lot of hours back to back.
So we're going to get there. It can be really great. But for others it can be a realization that we're not the same people we were. Okay.
So the second thing they brought up was that our kids leave home. So what happens? We've got this emptiness. Lovely.
We talk about it. We talk about having an emptiness. But the kids were kind of acting as a glue. They were holding the couple together.
And they might not even realize that. No. And now that the kids are gone, it's kind of like the same thing with retirement. We're here together, but now we want to say, oh, that's really sad.
Yeah, it is. It is. And there's one more. And it's pretty sad too.
You know, as we get over 50 health problems start to creep up from one of us or both of us. And that means new realities. So if we were coupled with love, adventure and traveling and, you know, doing all these things, you know, our marital quality goes down when our health starts to decline. How do you expect it to be able to do some stuff and that's not happening?
And we're stuck in the house now and we realize that we don't want to be stuck in the house together. And these kind of intertwine if you think about it. Because it's all kind of overlaying with each other. That high quality marriages may be less vulnerable to these experiences.
So this is where I'm going to kind of spin it around. No, we're going to spin it around definitely. So Blue Moon senior counseling, and I believe that's in Illinois. They produce something that has six tips on it to prevent great divorce.
And so I want us to just kind of share these with our listeners because you start doing these as young as possible and keep doing them. You are strengthening your marriage. You know, and we all want to have strong marriages. We do.
We do at all ages. So what's the first thing that, um, well, I love it. Don't stop dating no matter what phase you're in in your marriage, newlywid, middle, marriage, later years, whatever. Okay.
I'm going to call you out. I'm going to call you out. Do you guys date? Not as much as we should.
Yeah. I mean, that's honest. Yeah. I think my husband would be like, okay, Sarah, I hope you're listening.
I really, yeah. But actually a couple of weeks ago, you know, last month, we had our anniversary and Josh was like, I want to go do this. And I was like, I do too. And we brought it up the other day.
Yeah. And we were like, we never took that weekend. And it's like, we looked at the counter like when we, you know, we had so you've got to make it work. And we put it on the calendar.
Just like everything else is on the calendar. It's important for couples to stay connected. And I want to quote something from this Blue Moon senior council that says that shared space at home is not the same as committing time solely to your partner into a shared activity. And we know this is true.
I mean, we can say, oh, well, watch a movie at home. Yeah. But yeah, it's great. And you can do that, you know, but what do you, you know, you've got other people that live there or your phone is going off or something different.
You want to get out of that? Yes. Yes. Yes.
So I agree. It's important to keep dating and as you age your date activities, they may change. And they probably do change. So the nightclub together and dancing will do it like a morning.
You may not be doing that at 40. I mean, now we may be like, hey, let's go to IKEA. We're going to do that. Let's make that same experience.
Hey, Paul, and for that, because you're going to spend money at IKEA extra money. But it could just be instead of let's go grab a late night something, let's go grab breakfast. I mean, yeah, day days are wonderful because you're fresh, you're not sleepy. Yeah.
Or there's a fun band playing at the water. Let's go do that. Yeah. But again, putting away our technology and really focusing on each other.
A shared activity. Absolutely. Yeah, very important. I think the way they suggested try something that your partner likes to do that you don't necessarily love so much.
That's no surprise that you're caring enough about being on to learn something. And it's allowing you some time to get there too. That's true. So if they're always going off to I'm just bringing the hunt.
If your partner's always going off the hunt and you've never ever been back in pressure partner. If you're like, I'm going to go up with you. Even if it's not hunting, maybe they like going to museums and you bring it up and say, you know, you've been wanting to go to go to that museum or go here and go, you know, let's go this weekend. You're going to do this weekend.
You're going to do this. You're going to do this. Yeah. Yeah.
Help you understand why it's important to them. Yeah. Why are they even doing it? And sometimes you see the joy on their face because they're having so much fun.
It's going to make you laugh. And also sit in like they care about what I care about. Yeah. So that's a really good one.
Yes. Well, I think one that kind of feeds into the whole retirement aspect that you brought up earlier. So you need to talk about your money situation with your spouse, you know, especially if you're approaching retirement. Because oftentimes we marry people that aren't like us, right?
We do. You may be a super shopper and they are a super, super saver. Yes. Yes.
So you've got to be able to have some common ground on money decisions. Yeah. We got to talk about it. Because money issues are a top reason for divorce at any age.
At any age. Yes. Because, you know, we're sharing finances with somebody and I've got this philosophy and you've got this philosophy. We've got to find a way to come together and have some common ground, but it's going to take some give and take.
Absolutely. Because, you know, we're entering, you know, income tax, refund season, and there are going to be couples that are saying, okay, what do we do with this windfall that we've just gotten? Well, one of them saying we need to put it in savings. Because we don't know what that happened this year.
We need to save this money. That's what's going on. No, we haven't been able to afford to do anything. We need to take this money and do something.
Right. What do we do? Yeah. You've got to talk through it.
And these are good conversations that have at any point in your marriage. You know, don't wait until a while I'm retiring next year. Let's check out this. Let's talk about money.
I'm not going to have as much next year. No. No, you need to talk about this. Yeah, I agree with that.
And, you know, we talk about the health issues being something. Think about those in advance. We need to contemplate what might come. And it's hard to think about it when we're 35, we feel good.
We don't have any chronic conditions. But it is something we need to think about because spouses often become caretakers. And that might put them in a bad mental space or physical space themselves. And so, you know, working with the doctor to follow the doctors advice about illnesses and to practice preventative methods as much as we can.
Right. The things that we can do to keep from becoming where we are ill enough to affect our marriage. You know, that's the things. Well, and some of those things you can do together, you know, like you can start walking together.
You're cooking together. Yeah. You know, that feeds back into the dating kind of things. It does.
Even go get our annual chance. I mean, I don't think that's a romantic. But you know, encouraging each other to get checkups and when something does pop up, trying to get it addressed early, don't let it, you know, get out of hand. We're not saying we're never going to get to that point, but the laying getting to that point, as long as we possibly can, illnesses still make home.
But not as, you know, it will have as much regret. It's not like, oh, I should have done this. Yeah. You know, it's been paying more attention this years ago.
Yeah. Yes. Well, and I think another tip is something that we can all learn from is to don't take those daily moments for granted, you know, appreciate each other compliment each other. And then really emphasize the small moments that your spouse maybe does something for you.
You know, daily gratitude when we're younger makes it natural part of our relationship as we grow, you know, but don't, don't take for granted those things. You know, if your spouse is fixing dinner and makes you, you know, an extra one for lunch, and we're like, thank you. You know, you did that. I appreciate why you did that.
You're like, you noticed that, um, my husband, if he takes my car somewhere, he always feels it the gas though. Oh, wow. You need to say thank you. You need to say thank you.
You know, just small things like that. Like that means something. It does. And I mean, I'd love to be around couples that are polite to one another.
Not that we're not. Let me rephrase that. But being around you and Josh, you're very polite to each other. And I really like that.
And when I've been around you guys for hours and you're still, you know, please and thank you go a long ways in a marriage. And I really love the way that you all interact. And so I think that just being, you know, grateful and speaking well to each other, that is very important because nothing is too small to thank somebody for. You know, if your spouse changes the light bulb and you know, you hadn't even said anything about it.
And you go in there and the light bulbs already changed. There's nothing wrong with saying thank you for changing that light bulb. I can hardly see myself in the mirror. Thank you.
Or whatever the case is. They just noticed something needed to be done and did it. Yeah. Because as we get older, the little things become the big things.
Yeah. And like you said, just practicing that gratitude, Jerry, I mean, you threw out your whole relationship. We'll just become who we all are. Yeah.
Yeah. Because the little things become extremely important for a couple, not just the great couples for all the couples. And so, yeah, you want to strengthen these relationships so that great divorce doesn't happen to us. And then you're like, oh, I'm going to be over 50 getting divorced.
I'm going to be like, oh, I'm going to be divorced. Just don't say that. No, no, no, we are going to thank it. But thank you all for joining us for this episode.
We appreciate you. So in the words of Bob Marley, great divorce, Bob Marley's day. I don't know that they talked about that back then really, not as much. No, but anyway, he would want us to live the life we love.
And love the life we love. Happy Valentine's Day to everybody out there.