In an opinion piece I wrote recently for Guardian Australia, I reflected on my midlife relationship which is very different from previous relationships that I have had. I think as we age, we can become completely different people with different needs, and for the last five years my partner and I have lived separately.
A quote that I reflect on regularly from philosopher Soren Kierkegaard is: “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived going forwards”.
When I was younger there seemed to be clear societal expectations, especially if you were a woman, about becoming engaged soon after a relationship appeared to become ‘serious’. Unconsciously wanting to meet expectations, at 24, I tied the knot with someone whom I had dated for a while in high school and into my college years. However, by 25, I found myself separating and getting a divorce.
Three years later, at 28 I was married to my second husband and by 30 I gave birth to the first of our two children.
These stages of my life were no doubt brought about by a whole range of converging factors: a desire to find a life partner, meet societal and family expectations, and, of course, the powerful but less talked about evolutionary pressures of our biological drive towards procreation.
Today, younger generations are putting off marriage, or committed relationships until they are almost thirty. Indeed, the shape of ‘coupledom’ for different generations has changed over the last few decades with less people marrying or engaging in committed relationships than ever.
Although divorce rates are apparently at an all-time low for the under forty-five year olds, people over fifty are divorcing at a higher rate than ever – a phenomenon known as ‘gray divorce’.
My relationship upheavals occurred between my twenties and thirties and long before I had much self-insight or knew anything about attachment theory or personality and individual differences in relationships – hence my reference to Kierkegaard.
In addition, there’s a paradox of aging where you internally feel like the same version of yourself, only you develop layers of experience that begin to frame your outlook more positively in spite of the inevitable physical changes that occur as we age.
With age comes a generous amount of self-forgiveness for past versions of yourself and there’s a cultivation of affordance towards others. Most importantly, you develop a positivity bias that kicks in around midlife, when you begin giving fewer f*cks about many things – including what other people might think of your relationship.
I think what makes my ‘midlife situationship’ work is that, with age, I know myself better. This is largely due to past relationship failures, some inner work, and becoming awake to some of my habitual patterns.
My younger self would not have been able to cope with a relationship that could go for weeks without seeing each other, or too many days without speaking. It’s not an arrangement that works for everyone, however, the tradeoff for me and my partner at this stage of our lives is that we get large amounts of time to ourselves.
For me, the time is needed for creative pursuits like blog-writing and weekend markets. For him, it’s just time for thinking, figuring out gadgets, writing for work, and coding in his downtime. In 2020, I could not have predicted that we would be going for this long in this type of ‘arrangement’, but here we still are in 2026, and despite the outside world growing more chaotic – this midlife situationship is a peaceful place to be.
-Natasha
Natasha Ginnivan is an Australia-based researcher, founder of Edgy Elders and a blog-writer of lived experience, aging and transformation stories. She’s an MEA Online alum and here’s her blog: mobilisingwisdom.com