The 'grey divorce' phenomenon that no one's talking about.

There's a moment I see often. A woman in her 50s or 60s sits in front of me and says in a voice that's barely there, "I don't think I can do this anymore."

She's talking about her marriage. She's talking about disappearing inside her own life.

Grey divorce — also known as separation later in life — is having a moment. But not in the glossy, inspirational way the internet packages it up as. Not in the "silver foxes rediscovering themselves" montage that gets floated around every January.

Behind the trend pieces and the Oprah conversations is something far more human, far more complex, and far more honest: women waking up in midlife and quietly refusing to shrink any further.

Watch: On Mamamia Out Loud, they talked about Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban's grey divorce. Post continues after video.

The midlife rebellion.

I don't think we've fully grasped what's happening yet. We're so used to seeing divorce as a collapse; a failure, an unraveling where we've missed the fact that, for a lot of women, it has become a form of midlife rebellion. A reclamation.

A line drawn gently but firmly after decades of emotional labour, caregiving, and being the scaffolding of a life that rarely supported them.

And here's what I want to say right at the top: Women are not leaving because they've "suddenly changed." They're leaving because they're already alone.

I'll never forget a woman who told me, "I've been lonely in my marriage for 22 years. Leaving won't make me lonelier, it'll just make the loneliness honest."

I hear stories like this every day as a Divorce Doula, where I deliver adults through one of the most identity-shattering transitions of their lives.

My clients are men and women across all stages of relationship breakdown — but the rise in midlife women in the past five years has become impossible to ignore.

They tell me things they've never allowed themselves to say out loud:

"I'm not scared of being alone. I'm scared that my whole life has been about everyone else."

"I woke up one day and realised no one had asked me what I wanted in years."

"I don't want to leave but I don't want to disappear."

"If not now, when?"

One woman told me she realised she hadn't had a birthday acknowledged in seven years.

Another said she couldn't remember the last time her husband asked how she was — not about the kids, not about the house, her.

These sentences aren't dramatic. They're quiet, controlled, and decades in the making, the kinds of truths that lodge in your chest until the day you can no longer contain them.

The stats are confirming what women already knew in their bones.

Almost a third of Australian divorces now involve people aged over 50. It's not a spike.

It's a shift. It's women looking at the next 20–30 years of their life and thinking, "If not now, when?"

And the demographic numbers make the trend impossible to ignore. Australians are divorcing later than ever before — the median age now sits at 47.1 for men and 44.1 for women.

Divorce among over-50s has nearly doubled over the last three decades, rising from around 13 per cent in 1990 to close to 27 per cent today.

NSW, one of the fastest-ageing states in the country, is already feeling this change more sharply than most. Research from Australian Seniors and CoreData reflects the same pattern: later-life separation is growing, and fast.

Globally, it's the same story. Oprah devoted a full episode of her podcast to this, calling it "a redefinition of midlife freedom." But here's what I know from my work: the real conversations were happening long before Oprah said it out loud.

Women didn't suddenly wake up with a new set of problems. They woke up with permission.

Permission to want joy. Permission to want peace. Permission to no longer carry what has been quietly breaking them for years.

The reinvention.

But lets tell the truth about what comes next because it is not a breezy, boho-linen, second-act makeover montage. It is not "just book a retreat to find yourself." And it's certainly not a trip to Italy followed by a soft-focus rebirth.

Midlife divorce is more like a psychological renovation and you don't realise how many internal walls need knocking down until you begin.

When a long marriage ends, even an amicable one, something inside you fractures: You lose your automatic place in a family system.

Friendships shift in ways you could never have predicted. Your finances stretch in ways that don't care how competent you are. Adult children who everyone assumes are "fine" often struggle the most.

The silence of an empty house feels different at 56 than it ever did at 26.

And perhaps most confronting of all: You realise how much of your identity was wrapped around being someone's wife, someone's mother, someone's emotional stabiliser. Who are you when those roles fall away?

I've watched women fall apart quietly and not with drama, but with exhaustion. Then they rebuild in slow, powerful, deeply personal ways that do not fit neatly into an Instagram tile. No hashtag captures the depth of this transition.

Grey divorce isn't just a legal restructure. It's an emotional unravelling.

And yet… something extraordinary keeps happening. It's subtle at first, almost imperceptible.

After the grief, the shock, the paperwork, the late-night panics about superannuation and whether they'll need to sell the house... there comes a moment.

Sometimes it's tiny:

The first time you sleep through the night.

The first time you buy something without justifying it. Hello, Prada loafers!

The first time you notice the knot in your stomach has loosened.

Sometimes it's much bigger:

You reconnect with friendships you thought you'd lost.

You start dating cautiously, nervously, tenderly after decades.

You rediscover a part of yourself that went missing somewhere between raising kids and holding a marriage together.

There's one common thread:

She starts to take up space in her own life again. Not recklessly. Not selfishly. Not impulsively. Deliberately.

We've been framing grey divorce entirely wrong.

We talk about marriage as the anchor of a life, a human success story that does not support the prospect of failing. But for many women, this anchor has quietly become a weight. The noise to stay is deafening.

We tell women to stay "for the children," long after the children are adults.

We celebrate loyalty, but not the personal cost of it.

We talk about fear but not about the fear of wasting the years you have left.

The women I work with are not flippantly tossing their marriages aside. They are stepping toward something self-respect, autonomy, joy, authenticity that they've never felt allowed to claim.

And this nuance is missing from the public conversation. I know this intimately because I've lived it too I divorced in midlife. I know the strange, disorienting in-between where you're no longer who you were, but not yet who you're becoming. I know the liminal, I know the whispering, the assumptions and the judgement. I know the quiet liberation that follows once you step into your own life again.

My own separation was messy, heartbreaking, and eventually, freeing. This is why I now support others with honesty, calmness and zero interest in stirring up unnecessary conflict. Divorce is hard enough without adding fuel.

When I speak to women in their 50s and 60s, I don't see endings. I see beginnings disguised as endings.

So what is the 'grey divorce' boom really about?

Grey divorce is so often misunderstood. From the outside, people assume it must be a crisis or an explosion or a bout of selfishness. They imagine chaos, drama, or impulsive decisions. But the reality, the real, lived experience of the women I work with couldn't be further from that narrative.

What I see is women refusing to dilute themselves any further. Women who have spent decades being the emotional centre of their families, the organisers, the stabilisers, the ones who absorb tension, carry the invisible load, and smooth everything over.

Somewhere along the way, they stopped being treated as equal partners, their needs and inner worlds slowly pushed to the edges of the family system.

One woman told me she hadn't had access to online banking in two decades. Another realised she was still doing her adult son's admin long after he moved out because no one else had ever taken it on.

For many women, it's also about choosing truth over endurance. They've tried. They've compromised. They've bent, softened, stretched, and stayed silent. Not because they were passive, but because they were hopeful, hopeful that things would shift, that their partner might meet them halfway, that the emotional weight would lighten. But when the hope collapses, something else rises: clarity. The clarity that a life lived half-invisible is no longer survivable.

And so they begin a different kind of journey. Not a frantic escape, not a reckless reinvention, but a quiet, almost sacred walk back toward themselves. Often, it's the first time in their adult lives that they've been allowed to ask: What do I want, separate from what everyone else needs from me? That walk is slow. It's uncomfortable. It's layered with grief and self-doubt. But it's also the most profound act of self-respect many of these women have ever taken.

That's why I say grey divorce doesn't have to equal a crisis; it can be a correction. A cultural correction, yes, but also a psychological one: women finally naming what has been unspoken for decades. An emotional correction, because years of unmet needs and quiet loneliness eventually demand to be acknowledged. And a generational correction, because for the first time, midlife women are saying what their mothers and grandmothers were never allowed to confess: "I deserve a life that includes me."

Women are no longer staying in marriages that cost them themselves. They're no longer willing to shrink, quieten, tolerate or contort. And that, to me, is not a tragedy.

It's a powerful, long-overdue rebalancing. A reorientation toward self-worth. A reminder that midlife isn't the end, it's the permission to begin again.

Nikki Parkinson is a Divorce Doula, Coach, Strategist, and TEDx Speaker.

Read more stories about grey divorce:

• HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: The details that make Nicole and Keith's split kind of about us.

• 'My husband left me when I was in my 60s. The divorce left me with absolutely nothing.'

• 'He is refusing to grow.' I'm worried about what retirement will do to my marriage.

Feature image: Getty.