Jean True had been married for 38 years in 2008 when her husband announced he was leaving her. “He said he wanted to be on his own,” she recalls. She was 61, with three grown sons and four granddaughters.

True knew she’d have to be “a lot more savvy about spending and saving” after the divorce. Her ex-husband, a retired schoolteacher, had always taken care of their finances. So True had to learn quickly how to manage accounts and handle bills and taxes along with selling the Wisconsin house where the couple had planned to retire. “It was wearing and stressful,” says True, who now lives near her sons in a condo in Winfield, Ill.

True and her ex are part of a striking trend in America: the stunning rise in divorces among people 50 and older. Between 1990 and 2009, the divorce rate nearly doubled for this group, even as the overall divorce rate dropped, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University. In 1990, just 1 in 10 people who got divorced was over 50; today, it’s 1 in 4. With people living longer, healthier lives and the stigma of divorce easing, a growing number of men and women are bailing out of marriages their parents’ generation might have reluctantly clung to.

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The decision to end a relationship can be traumatic, chaotic, and filled with contradictory emotions. There are also specific feelings, attitudes, and dynamics associated with whether one is in the role of the initiator or the receiver of the decision to breakup. For example, it is not unusual for the initiator to experience fear, relief, distance, impatience, resentment, doubt, and guilt. Likewise, when a party has not initiated the divorce, they may feel shock, betrayal, loss of control, victimization, decreased self esteem, insecurity, anger, a desire to “get even,” and wishes to reconcile.

To normalize experiences during this time, it may be helpful to know that typical emotional stages have been identified with ending a relationship. It may also be helpful to understand that marriages do not breakdown overnight; the breakup is not the result of one incident; nor is the breakup the entire fault of one party. The emotional breaking up process typically extends over several years and is confounded by each party being at different stages in the emotional process while in the same stage of the physical (or legal) process.

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Emotional Stages of Divorce. Mediate.com. Retrieved on October 16, 2013, from http://www.mediate.com/divorce/pg62.cfm.

1. Over 95% of all divorce cases settle before they go to trial, so try mediation rather than taking an adversarial position. To find out if the Divorce Without War® process is right for you, click here.

2. Before you file for divorce, think about your goals for the ultimate outcome of your case. You can only make good decisions in choosing how to file, whether or not to try mediation or collaborative law, how to select an attorney, and how to proceed if you know where you want to end up when it’s all over.

3. Set your intentions with a Divorce Mission Statement. Know who you want to be when your divorce is over. If your top priority is your children, make sure that your decisions and actions are really in their best interests, not just yours.

4. If you choose to represent yourself, get enough information about how to behave in court and what forms you need in order to do it well.

5. Only you can make the best decisions that will determine your future. Do your homework, get information, speak to level-headed friends and qualified professionals (we find accountants and financial planners, and even therapists, are often as much or more helpful than a lawyer), and use self-reflection to decide what’s best for you. Don’t jump to conclusions or rush to a decision. You took years getting to this place, so don’t expect to solve everything in 2 minutes.

6. If the amount of money you’re fighting about won’t matter in 5 years, it probably doesn’t matter now, so let go of it. Sure, it’s more money than you’d leave for a tip, but will it really change your life?

7. Be organized. Use your professional fees wisely. Address your legal questions to your lawyer, and your psychological questions to a counselor or therapist. You may want to keep a notebook so your papers stay organized and in one place.

8. If your goal is “justice” or to “tell the judge my story”, keep in mind that no-fault laws, court over-crowding and pressure on judges to move cases through the system quickly means you’ll get very little time or opportunity to testify. In fact, you may not get the opportunity to testify at all. If you do get a chance to testify, the judge will make a decision that affects the rest of your life after hearing 5 minutes to a few hours of your story. Do you really want a stranger to make your decisions for you? Especially that quickly?

9. Take time to reassess your actions and goals and whether your path is taking you where you want to go. It’s easy to get caught up in the stress of court procedures, or to become entrenched in a specific position.

10. Your divorce will not go on forever (and you don’t want it to). There is an end. Things will get better. And no matter how hard it is to believe, when one door closes, another door opens. You really will move on, even if that’s tough to picture at the moment.

Adapted from “10 Things to Know Before Filing for Divorce” by Diana Mercer.

Warring couples are only half as likely to cite adultery as the cause of a marriage breakdown than they were 40 years ago, but claims of unreasonable behaviour have rocketed, analysis of more than 5m divorce cases has shown.

Co-operative Legal Services compared the grounds for divorce in the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s as well as the present day.

It found that while in the 70s, 29% of marriages ended because of adultery, the latest figures show only 15% of divorces were down to infidelity. In the 70s unreasonable behaviour was cited in 28% of cases but it now accounts for almost half of all divorces (47%).

Examples of unreasonable behaviour given to lawyers for divorce include an unsociable husband making his wife feel guilty when she wanted to go out with her friends; a cross-dressing husband who decided to have a sex change; and a spouse withdrawing all the family savings – £40,000 – and burning it in the bedroom.

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