Edith Heyck didn’t expect she’d be 72 years old and living alone. “I always thought I’d be married,” she says. “I was definitely raised to be a wife, and I never imagined I’d be on my own.” Heyck, an artist and part time park manager in Newburyport, Massachusetts, is one of nearly 38 million adults living alone in the United States, where the share of single person households has reached a record high, according to Census data. She’s also part of a population that experts say is likely to climb dramatically in the coming decades. The number of older Americans living alone is on the rise. Nearly 16 million people aged 65 and older in the US lived solo in 2022, three times as many who lived alone in that age group in the 1960s. And as Baby Boomers age, that number is expected to grow even more, raising big questions about the country’s future. There are many reasons behind this shift in our society, including the economic gains women made when they entered the workforce and changing attitudes toward marriage. One factor fueling the rising number of seniors in solo households caught experts by surprise when they first stumbled upon the trend: a rise in divorce rates among adults over 50. “We were just floored by our findings,” says Susan L. Brown, co director of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University. It’s been about a decade since Brown’s research popularized the term “gray divorce” to describe this phenomenon � something that used to be a rarity, but now has become much more common. “Well over a third of people who are getting divorced now are over the age of 50,” Brown says. “We just can’t ignore that group anymore.”

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Edith Heyck didn’t expect she’d be 72 years old and living alone. “I always thought I’d be married,” she says. “I was definitely raised to be a wife, and I never imagined I’d be on my own.” Heyck, an artist and part time park manager in Newburyport, Massachusetts, is one of nearly 38 million adults living alone in the United States, where the share of single person households has reached a record high, according to Census data. She’s also part of a population that experts say is likely to climb dramatically in the coming decades. The number of older Americans living alone is on the rise. Nearly 16 million people aged 65 and older in the US lived solo in 2022, three times as many who lived alone in that age group in the 1960s. And as Baby Boomers age, that number is expected to grow even more, raising big questions about the country’s future. There are many reasons behind this shift in our society, including the economic gains women made when they entered the workforce and changing attitudes toward marriage. One factor fueling the rising number of seniors in solo households caught experts by surprise when they first stumbled upon the trend: a rise in divorce rates among adults over 50. “We were just floored by our findings,” says Susan L. Brown, co director of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University. It’s been about a decade since Brown’s research popularized the term “gray divorce” to describe this phenomenon � something that used to be a rarity, but now has become much more common. “Well over a third of people who are getting divorced now are over the age of 50,” Brown says. “We just can’t ignore that group anymore.”