Elderly Not Wary of Calling off Marriage 

By Sunil Nair & Hemali Chhapia, The Times of India

India

September 5, 2007

Uma Sardesai is in the winter of her career. After years of teaching at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and consulting stints in Mumbai, Ethiopia and Nigeria, the professor of literature winged her way back home, hoping to pass the rest of her days in peaceful retirement with her 80-year-old spouse. 

It came as a terrible shock when her husband made plain that he had different plans. One evening, he popped a question that cleverly disguised his real intent, "Will you stay with our children?" After 40 years of marriage he wanted a divorce. "He is in love, all over again," said Uma, the hurt brimming over in her blue eyes. She now stays up nights fretting about how to manage without her husband's support. 

During the day, she is in the hallway of a family court in Bandra, sitting across from him, awaiting their turn before the judge. 

Call it the geriatric itch: while most senior citizens meet lawyers to draft their wills, a small but growing section among the elderly are looking to extricate themselves from the ties of matrimony. Of course, the young and restless still constitute the bulk of the divorce petitions, but increasingly pensioners too are signing up for the singles club. 

Cutting across income groups, a random TOI survey of about 2,000 cases filed in the last one year before the Bandra family court (one of two in Mumbai) revealed that the maximum divorce cases were of those in the 30-40 age group, followed by those in the 20-30 age bracket. However, more than 10% of the cases were from the 40-50 age group. There are also more than 10 cases every month filed by petitioners in the 50-60 and 60-70 age groups. 

Mrinalini Deshmukh, a lawyer who has been practising at the Bandra family court, said that in the last seven or eight years, she has been approached by at least one litigant a month who is over 50 years and seeking a divorce. 

"Older couples are walking out of marriage because they want to live in their own way," she said. And the legal records are just the tip of the iceberg. Many couples simply dispense with court procedures and come to an informal agreement to avoid social criticism and embarrassment to their children. 

"Many old people just split, they don't need a system to stamp the separation," says Justice A V Nirgude, principal judge at the family court. There are distinct patterns to divorce cases among older couples: a considerable age disparity of, say, more than 10 years, begins to tell on the relationship as the partners grow older; or women who have been trapped for years in an abusive marriage finally muster the courage to call it quits. 

In most cases, says Flavia Agnes of Majlis, the woman stays in the marriage until the children have grown up so that there is no messy custody battle. 

That's what Pushpa Shergaonkar did. Once her daughter was educated and married, Pushpa filed for divorce. "I had had enough of his eccentricities," said the 64-year-old Dadar resident, who works as a horticulturist. 

"I would have divorced him earlier, but then it would have been difficult getting a good husband for my daughter." At the family court, minutes after getting her divorce, Pushpa told TOI, "I ran away from home to marry him about 35 years ago... I never thought it would end like this." 

Copyright © Global Action on Aging
Terms of Use  |  Privacy Policy  |  Contact Us