It’s not too late to save our marriage - Hope Springs, the new film starring Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones, highlights a growing trend among 'silver wedding’ couples to turn to relationship counsellors
For Corinne, 63, the final straw, after 35 years of marriage, was the golf. “We’d been invited to my best friend’s grandchild’s christening, but my husband, John, refused to come because he wanted to watch the US Open,” she says.
Sleep on it: in 'Hope Springs’, Meryl Streep and her grumpy husband Tommy Lee Jones try to save their relationship with a course of intensive marriage therapy
“I couldn’t believe it! Since retirement, he never went out as it was. He sat in his armchair all day watching telly or surfing the internet. Now he was snubbing our friends. I decided I’d had enough of his laziness, of being so anti-social. I told him I was leaving.”
But John, 71, wasn’t letting his wife – and mother of his two children – go so easily. “He was totally shocked, he begged me to stay,” Corinne continues. “Eventually, after many tears, and him actually turning off the computer, he persuaded me to at least have counselling, to see if there was any way we could salvage things.”
Corinne is far from alone. We idealise the image of Darby and Joan, two sweethearts growing old together, but the truth is that while British divorce rates are falling in every other age group, among the over sixties, they are rising year-on-year. In 2009, 11,507 couples aged over 60 divorced, a four per cent increase over the past two years.
But the prospect of joining online dating sites at the same time as you first draw a pension is daunting. So, before they start dividing the furniture, more and more long-term couples are turning to counselling in an attempt to make it to the finishing line.
This month, a new film, Hope Springs, throws a spotlight on the issue. It tells the story of a meek empty-nester, Kay (played by Meryl Streep), and her curmudgeonly husband, Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones), embarking on a week’s intensive marriage therapy.
Paula Hall, a counsellor for Relate, who has seen and enjoyed the film, says it is an uncannily accurate reflection of the boredom of many long-term marriages and the indifference couples develop towards each other.
“There’s a very moving scene in which Meryl Streep dresses up seductively but her husband doesn’t notice,” says Hall. “It’s a moment many of my clients have had, realising they have become invisible to their partners. I see so many couples who are best friends and run a very efficient home, but they no longer see each other in a sexual way.
“For many long-term couples, it’s really hard to define what’s wrong,” Hall continues. “Everything is very practical; for example, Streep and her husband sleep in separate beds because he snores, but they just don’t connect any more. Marriages have always been like this, but it didn’t used to matter so much, because after 30 years, you’d be ready for your pipe and slippers. But now we live so much longer, you might be married for another 30 years and you can’t tolerate such a passion-free existence.”
Relationship counsellor Andrew G Marshall, author of I Love You, But I’m Not in Love With You, confirms that an increasing number of his clients are “silver-wedding couples”. “I used to very seldom see anyone over the age of 45, but now it’s perfectly common to see couples in their late fifties or early sixties,” he says.
One reason for this is that therapy is no longer regarded as suspicious. “People now understand that therapists don’t all come from Germany and speak in a strange accent and ask clients to talk about their mothers. They have also realised that talking to each other might not be so terrible.”
Late middle-age is also the time when people can no longer escape their mortality. “There’s nothing that so forcefully brings home to you that life’s not forever as sitting at the bedside of a very elderly parent,” says Marshall. “Couples of this age find themselves in that situation and it forces them to address issues they’ve put off tackling for five, 10 years, thinking there would always be time later. Now they think: 'This is later, and I can’t put up with this any more.’”
Geraldine Bedell, editor of the online site Gransnet, says that a proportion of the site’s members have found it a therapeutic place to vent about long-term relationships. “It has given many the courage to leave partners whom in hindsight they wished they’d left much sooner,” she says.
According to Bedell, retirement can be a make-or-break time for many relationships. “We see a lot of posts about husbands being at home all day and not giving their wives enough space and autonomy. Men develop theories about household management, what the wife should buy, how she should cook, which can make their partners furious.
“There are also a lot of tales about formerly very happy sexual relationships, where the man has suddenly stopped having sex without explanation, and that makes the woman very unhappy.”
But can counselling help? A study by Northwestern University in Illinois found that 70 per cent of couples felt happier with their marriages post-therapy, citing lower levels of conflict and improved communication, although the researchers warned that “improvement often doesn’t catapult couples into the realm of the genuinely happily married”.
For Maurice, 68, retirement brought the realisation that he had nothing in common with Anne, his wife of 33 years. “When I tried to talk about it, she flew off the handle. It was impossible to have a rational dialogue,” he says. “She kept shouting: 'I’ve given you three children,’ and I kept trying to explain the children had gone and we needed to move on.”
The couple saw a counsellor, but Maurice says the sessions were unbearably painful. “It wasn’t that we laid into each other, quite the opposite – we were very polite. I said what I had to say unemotionally, but she just cried all the time. It was like having your fingernails slowly extracted, as it was brought home that there really was nothing left to save.”
Although they divorced, Maurice is glad they had counselling. “It showed that we really had done everything in our power to rescue things, but it was too late.”
Anne, however, has a different tack. “Maurice had already decided it was over, and the counselling wasn’t an attempt to rectify things but just to prove to me there was really no hope.”
For Corinne, counselling initially only seemed to make her marriage worse. “Before a session we’d be bumbling on as normal, but we would return furious with each other, having been asked to dredge up every ancient grudge we’d ever held. I found myself bringing up a bad patch when we were engaged – around the time man first walked on the moon – when I found a list John made of the pros and cons of marrying me.
“He got upset about a silly flirtation I’d had with a neighbour in the Eighties. It became tit-for-tat: he’d bring up one thing and I’d retort with another. The marriage had been ho-hum, but now it was a war zone.”
However, five years on, the couple are still together and, Corinne says, much happier. “Therapy helped us realise how much we’d been stuck in a rut. Circumstances had changed with John’s retirement. There was no buffer zone of work to dilute stresses, and without the structure of his nine-to-five existence, he’d become depressed. “After counselling, he worked on carving a new identity. I made more effort to pursue my own interests and friendships and to not be hurt when he didn’t want to join in.”
Marshall agrees that counselling can be painful. “It’s like Pandora’s Box, all the bad stuff comes out first, but once it is released you can rebuild communication in a positive way.”
Paula Hall insists that long-term relationships can be saved. “As in the film, most marriages don’t end in drama, the connection just dies as you both change. You do change over time, but counselling gives you the chance to rediscover each other, to rejuvenate things.
“The vital thing is to tackle problems when they arise, not when you’re already exchanging solicitors’ letters,” Hall adds. “If you think, 'Things could be better than this,’ then do something about it.” ( telegraph.co.uk )
For Corinne, 63, the final straw, after 35 years of marriage, was the golf. “We’d been invited to my best friend’s grandchild’s christening, but my husband, John, refused to come because he wanted to watch the US Open,” she says.
Sleep on it: in 'Hope Springs’, Meryl Streep and her grumpy husband Tommy Lee Jones try to save their relationship with a course of intensive marriage therapy
“I couldn’t believe it! Since retirement, he never went out as it was. He sat in his armchair all day watching telly or surfing the internet. Now he was snubbing our friends. I decided I’d had enough of his laziness, of being so anti-social. I told him I was leaving.”
But John, 71, wasn’t letting his wife – and mother of his two children – go so easily. “He was totally shocked, he begged me to stay,” Corinne continues. “Eventually, after many tears, and him actually turning off the computer, he persuaded me to at least have counselling, to see if there was any way we could salvage things.”
Corinne is far from alone. We idealise the image of Darby and Joan, two sweethearts growing old together, but the truth is that while British divorce rates are falling in every other age group, among the over sixties, they are rising year-on-year. In 2009, 11,507 couples aged over 60 divorced, a four per cent increase over the past two years.
But the prospect of joining online dating sites at the same time as you first draw a pension is daunting. So, before they start dividing the furniture, more and more long-term couples are turning to counselling in an attempt to make it to the finishing line.
This month, a new film, Hope Springs, throws a spotlight on the issue. It tells the story of a meek empty-nester, Kay (played by Meryl Streep), and her curmudgeonly husband, Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones), embarking on a week’s intensive marriage therapy.
Paula Hall, a counsellor for Relate, who has seen and enjoyed the film, says it is an uncannily accurate reflection of the boredom of many long-term marriages and the indifference couples develop towards each other.
“There’s a very moving scene in which Meryl Streep dresses up seductively but her husband doesn’t notice,” says Hall. “It’s a moment many of my clients have had, realising they have become invisible to their partners. I see so many couples who are best friends and run a very efficient home, but they no longer see each other in a sexual way.
“For many long-term couples, it’s really hard to define what’s wrong,” Hall continues. “Everything is very practical; for example, Streep and her husband sleep in separate beds because he snores, but they just don’t connect any more. Marriages have always been like this, but it didn’t used to matter so much, because after 30 years, you’d be ready for your pipe and slippers. But now we live so much longer, you might be married for another 30 years and you can’t tolerate such a passion-free existence.”
Relationship counsellor Andrew G Marshall, author of I Love You, But I’m Not in Love With You, confirms that an increasing number of his clients are “silver-wedding couples”. “I used to very seldom see anyone over the age of 45, but now it’s perfectly common to see couples in their late fifties or early sixties,” he says.
One reason for this is that therapy is no longer regarded as suspicious. “People now understand that therapists don’t all come from Germany and speak in a strange accent and ask clients to talk about their mothers. They have also realised that talking to each other might not be so terrible.”
Late middle-age is also the time when people can no longer escape their mortality. “There’s nothing that so forcefully brings home to you that life’s not forever as sitting at the bedside of a very elderly parent,” says Marshall. “Couples of this age find themselves in that situation and it forces them to address issues they’ve put off tackling for five, 10 years, thinking there would always be time later. Now they think: 'This is later, and I can’t put up with this any more.’”
Geraldine Bedell, editor of the online site Gransnet, says that a proportion of the site’s members have found it a therapeutic place to vent about long-term relationships. “It has given many the courage to leave partners whom in hindsight they wished they’d left much sooner,” she says.
According to Bedell, retirement can be a make-or-break time for many relationships. “We see a lot of posts about husbands being at home all day and not giving their wives enough space and autonomy. Men develop theories about household management, what the wife should buy, how she should cook, which can make their partners furious.
“There are also a lot of tales about formerly very happy sexual relationships, where the man has suddenly stopped having sex without explanation, and that makes the woman very unhappy.”
But can counselling help? A study by Northwestern University in Illinois found that 70 per cent of couples felt happier with their marriages post-therapy, citing lower levels of conflict and improved communication, although the researchers warned that “improvement often doesn’t catapult couples into the realm of the genuinely happily married”.
For Maurice, 68, retirement brought the realisation that he had nothing in common with Anne, his wife of 33 years. “When I tried to talk about it, she flew off the handle. It was impossible to have a rational dialogue,” he says. “She kept shouting: 'I’ve given you three children,’ and I kept trying to explain the children had gone and we needed to move on.”
The couple saw a counsellor, but Maurice says the sessions were unbearably painful. “It wasn’t that we laid into each other, quite the opposite – we were very polite. I said what I had to say unemotionally, but she just cried all the time. It was like having your fingernails slowly extracted, as it was brought home that there really was nothing left to save.”
Although they divorced, Maurice is glad they had counselling. “It showed that we really had done everything in our power to rescue things, but it was too late.”
Anne, however, has a different tack. “Maurice had already decided it was over, and the counselling wasn’t an attempt to rectify things but just to prove to me there was really no hope.”
For Corinne, counselling initially only seemed to make her marriage worse. “Before a session we’d be bumbling on as normal, but we would return furious with each other, having been asked to dredge up every ancient grudge we’d ever held. I found myself bringing up a bad patch when we were engaged – around the time man first walked on the moon – when I found a list John made of the pros and cons of marrying me.
“He got upset about a silly flirtation I’d had with a neighbour in the Eighties. It became tit-for-tat: he’d bring up one thing and I’d retort with another. The marriage had been ho-hum, but now it was a war zone.”
However, five years on, the couple are still together and, Corinne says, much happier. “Therapy helped us realise how much we’d been stuck in a rut. Circumstances had changed with John’s retirement. There was no buffer zone of work to dilute stresses, and without the structure of his nine-to-five existence, he’d become depressed. “After counselling, he worked on carving a new identity. I made more effort to pursue my own interests and friendships and to not be hurt when he didn’t want to join in.”
Marshall agrees that counselling can be painful. “It’s like Pandora’s Box, all the bad stuff comes out first, but once it is released you can rebuild communication in a positive way.”
Paula Hall insists that long-term relationships can be saved. “As in the film, most marriages don’t end in drama, the connection just dies as you both change. You do change over time, but counselling gives you the chance to rediscover each other, to rejuvenate things.
“The vital thing is to tackle problems when they arise, not when you’re already exchanging solicitors’ letters,” Hall adds. “If you think, 'Things could be better than this,’ then do something about it.” ( telegraph.co.uk )
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