Older couples finding comfort in shacking up
IN MANY ways, the life Karen Kanter and Stan Tobin share in Philadelphia sounds typical. Both 75, they see movies together, visit children and grandchildren, try new restaurants.
Tobin, an accountant who maintains a small tax practice, makes time for a monthly men’s group. A retired middleschool teacher, Kanter hustles between book and art appreciation groups while volunteering and writing a novel.
He supported her through breast cancer treatment years ago. She has been prodding him about putting on weight, so he has returned to Weight Watchers. They co-own their condo near the Museum of Art and a cottage in upstate New York. She has his power of attorney and health care proxy, and vice versa.
“We love each other and want to be together, and we’ve made the commitment to stay together until death parts us,” Kanter said.
But although they have been a couple since 2002 and have shared a home since 2004, they are not married. And among older adults, they have a lot of company.
The number of people over 50 who cohabit with an unmarried partner jumped 75 percent from 2007 to 2016, the Pew Research Center reported last month – the highest increase in any age group.
“It was a striking finding,” said Renee Stepler, a Pew research analyst. “We often think of cohabiters as being young.”
Most still are. But the number of cohabiters over age 50 rose to 4 million from 2.3 million over the decade, Stepler found, and the number over age 65 doubled to about 900,000.
“It used to be called shacking up, and it was not approved of,” said Kelly Raley, a sociologist at the University of Texas, Austin, and former editor of the Journal of Marriage and Family. Families and religious groups often condemned living together outside marriage. But Americans are far more accepting now, she said, and the people turning 60 “are very different from the people who were 60 twenty years ago”.
Kanter, for instance, had divorced twice after long marriages – 38 years, in total – when she met Tobin on Match.com. “Getting divorced gives you so much to untangle,” she said. “Our life is good together, so why disturb it? I just don’t see the importance of that piece of paper.”
In later life, cohabitation – like remarriage – brings companionship and wider social circles, not to mention sexual intimacy, at ages when people might otherwise face isolation. Financially, pooling resources often improves elders’ economic stability.
It also offers certain economic protections. Older adults have more debt than previous generations, Rutgers University sociologist Deborah Carr pointed out, including mortgages and children’s college loans. “You become responsible for your legal spouse’s debt, but not for your cohabiting partner’s debt,” she said.