Tag Archives: fear

Escaping Fear. Going Through It, and Not Around.

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Stacy D. Phillips ●

The Fall season is upon us, and October, in particular, can be quite beautiful. Perhaps not as much in Los Angeles, where I live. My neighbors and I are not always as fortunate to see all the fall foliage beauty. All the same, the scorching hot summer is behind us, and the trees are shedding their leaves, creating a new array of colors in the landscape (at least in many parts of the country), and letting us know that our seasons always change. October is also associated with fear. Halloween is the holiday where we celebrate scary things, adorning our walls with skeletons and ghosts and the like, even dressing up in monster costumes and having fun with all the things that can be frightening and go bump in the night. There is also the fear of the unknown and handling what’s next in life, and that is why going through a divorce can itself be scary. This is the type of fear that can be real.

The entertainingly macabre holiday of Halloween actually has many roots in ancient Celtic culture. Halloween’s origins lie in the pagan festival of Samhain (pronounced Sow-win). That festival, meaning “summer’s end,” ushered in the Celtic new year and welcomed a time of death and rebirth. It signaled the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the cold and dark winter months that would present many challenges and tribulations for the people living in the ancient world. During the festival of Samhain, to appease the various deities during this time, sacrifices (most often of animals and crops) were burned in large bonfires, not only to appease the gods worshiped at the time but also to ward off other visiting or more mischievous spirits that could come haunting. Though theatrical in ceremony, people knew it was time for the past to die and time to survive the bitter winter ahead.

Be they in ancient times or today, if dark emotions are about us in our personal lives, if a divorce is making one shiver from both the cold and the fear, then the decision is ours to either cower before all the scares or celebrate the death of the old and rebirth of the new.

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“Salt and Pepper” Divorces: The Fight for Control When Long-Term Couples Split (Part II)

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Stacy D. Phillips 

This is the second in a two-part series examining how older couples experience divorce and separation differently through the prism of the six big issues that I identified in my book, Divorce: It’s All About Control—How to Win the Emotional, Psychological, and Legal Wars, as the main causes of divorce. 

As previously mentioned, I have seen much interest in so-called “gray” divorces, or marriages that end after 25 to 35 years. I personally prefer the term “salt and pepper” divorce because most often these couples are not considered elderly. With the COVID-19 delta variant causing renewed uncertainty, many older couples are once again facing exacerbated tensions. In Part I of this series, I discussed how “salt and pepper” couples approach three of the main causes of divorce—money, property, and wealth; children; and health. In Part II, I focus on loss of love/intimacy; growth; and fear. 

Loss of Love/Intimacy 

A common cause of salt and pepper divorces is a waning desire for intimacy after many years together. Midlife crises and health issues are often at the root of these break-ups. A common divorce stereotype is that older men will ask for a divorce when they already have someone else who is more exciting and willing to take care of them. For women, the divorce stereotype is that their husbands have grown older faster than they have, and they have more energy later in life. For both men and women, there could be affairs that their spouses have suspected or known about for years, but have put off confronting or seeking divorce until they have built the confidence to do so. As the COVID-19 pandemic has lasted longer than anyone anticipated, many people in marriages where one spouse is satisfied with a more celibate relationship and the other is not, may have realized that life is too short to live this way. They are propelled and compelled to seek a divorce in order to spend their remaining years either contently alone or in an intimate relationship with someone new. 

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